ABSTRACT
No cuisine or food culture can be understood unless the historical, geographical, social, and intellectual bases are understood as well. This does not deny the importance of symbolic and cognitive issues. To the contrary, we want to show here how concrete situations affect and interact with symbolic ones. Not only is a brief historical overview necessary, but socio-historical aspects of Japan are an important element in understanding how cultural change – in food as well as other aspects of Japan – is generated and maintained. We have restricted the discussion in this chapter to issues that have direct bearing on the main theme. This includes not only historical issues, but some discussion of prominent institutions in Japanese society: the matrix, as it were, within which Japanese cuisine exists.
