Walk down any commercial street in any major city in the West and you are sure to run into a sushi place. Over the past decades, the popularity of Japanese food has exploded, diversifying not only Western diets but Japanese cuisine itself. In this book, Katarzyna J. Cwiertka explores the origins of modern Japanese cuisine, investigating the transformation and developments that food culture in Japan has undergone since the late nineteenth century.

Cwiertka examines Japanese cuisine as it has developed in response to a variety of forces, including imperialism, changes in home cooking, wartime food management and military catering, and the rise of urban gastronomy. She shows that Japan’s patchwork of diverse regional cuisines was increasingly homogenized into the common set of foods and techniques with which the majority of Japanese identify today. As such, she argues, Japanese cuisine is very much a product of modernity, transformed amidst the turbulent events of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The result is a fascinating culinary history that casts the relationship between culture, politics, and appetite in stark relief.