Webinar 3: Pro. Daisuke Yasui: Washoku as Heritage and National Identity

This lecture discusses the importance and problems of promoting Japanese food as a Japanese tradition and identity, using Japanese food as a UNESCO cultural heritage. In the 1980s, Japanese food was considered to have an excellent nutritional balance and boomed in developed countries. However, this was a transitional phenomenon as the Japanese diet shifted from a rice-based diet to a meat-based diet, and the current Japanese diet is high in meat and fat. Japanese food has come to be spoken of as a healthy 'traditional' culture, even though the actual Japanese diet has been westernized and is not necessarily healthy. Japanese food consumed abroad is sometimes the subject of debates over cultural authenticity. On the other hand, Japanese food culture is sometimes promoted as a soft power strategy to promote the export of Japanese foodstuffs overseas and to increase domestic food self-sufficiency. In order to examine food as a national identity, we need to look at the political and economic aspects of building a food culture.
Daisuke Yasui was born in Osaka, Japan, and grew up in Mie Prefecture. He graduated from the Faculty of Economics, Kyoto University, and studied sociology and cultural anthropology at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University. After working as a JSPS Research Fellow PD and Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Meiji Gakuin University, he has been working as an associate professor in the College of Gastronomy Management at Ritsumeikan University since 2020. Dr. Yesui’s research focuses on social issues related to food and agriculture, mainly in accordance with sociology, but also with the help of cultural anthropology and economics. His specific research interests include the food culture of transnational migrants, cultural heritage of food and nationalism, based on cultural theory and social research. He is currently working on multifaceted approaches to food and social issues, including multivariate analysis of quantitative data, such as the relationship between food choices and income and education, and food policy research through the political economy of food and agriculture.
Moderator: Dr. Aya Fujiwara