{Inter} Cultural Japan

Eating Japanese food outside Japan can be quite a disaster. In my home country, the Netherlands, Japanese food all too often means teppanyaki and in most such restaurants the food is prepared by Chinese cooks. They can be quite creative and perform great shows with their knives on the metal hot plate (one cook was even reported to throw pieces of meat into the air so that the guests had to catch them in their mouths), but it has sadly little to do with Japanese cuisine.

(I have to admit that even Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands in most cases have very little to do with the cuisine of their country of origin - besides being inspired by Indonesian-Chinese cooking, the cooks are often not licensed or trained at all and the food is a far cry from the delicious dishes you are served in China).

So I wholly applaud the fact that the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries now plans to launch a system to certify overseas restaurants that serve authentic Japanese cuisine in fiscal 2007.

As reported by the Mainichi Daily News, the Ministry will make a selection of restaurants faithful to traditional Japanese recipes and ingredients and so hopes to promote authentic Japanese food culture (and en passant also exports of Japanese agricultural and marine products).

A panel of experts will be established to decide on the certification standards. Although the plans are still scarce on details, I hope they will be realized and lead to more authentic Japanese restaurants overseas!

Update 29/11/06: Japanjin has this humorous article about the subject called “Sushi Police.” Also the Korean Chosunilbo has commented on the subject. It makes one point: Japan also “Japanizes” foreign foods: take pizza with squid, or pasta with cod eggs. Or are that already 100% Japanese dishes?

Also see this lively discussion on Japundit.