FYS Sushi is not raw fish: Japanese culinary art, philosophy, and national identity

This book offers insights into many different aspects of Japanese culinary history and practice, from the evolution and characteristics of particular foodstuffs, to their representation in literature and film, to the role of foods in individual, regional, and national identity.

Japan's Cuisines reveals the great diversity of Japanese cuisine and explains how Japan's modern food culture arose through the direction of private and public institutions. Readers discover how tea came to be portrayed as the origin of Japanese cuisine, how lunch became a gourmet meal, and how regions on Japan's periphery are reasserting their distinct food cultures.

Aoyama analyses a range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialisation, urbanisation, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people's relationships to food, nature, and culture, and to each other.