Obento

As with may other prosaic activities, Japanese have made an art form out of the lunch box. Obento is the term for the ubiquitous little wooden box lunches seen all over Japan. Making the contents visually interesting and harmonious in multiple facets is an art form practiced by a growing number of people around the world.

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First there are the containers and dividers taking a variety of shapes from traditional wood and lacquer to animal shapes and complex designs. Next comes the food, which traditionally contains the five basic colors and five basic tastes. In addition the textures should vary as should the type of food.

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In many instances these requirements fit in with modern ideas of nutrition encouraging the use of colorful green vegetables and antioxidant rich fruits, along with limited portions of the food.

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Now comes the interesting aspects of sculpting the items in the food with a common theme such as bunnies or sumo wrestlers or famous cartoon characters. Its amazing to me how much effort people go to to create such edible art that lasts only for a morning before being consumed. This fits a theme in Japanese culture of the fragility of beauty in the world though I liken it more to the art of Christo who creates temporary tableau with material giving some added form to nature.

Naturally some housewives in Japan have gone overboard with their designs to make the most interesting lunch box for their children, as will no doubt occur in the US. On the whole however, as believer in the Bauhaus ethic I see this as another reflection of the innate desire in humans to create art in every day activities, regardless of background or training.

Architecture of old Edo

There was an article in the Times this week about a town just North of Tokyo that maintains the old architecture of Edo, as Tokyo used to be called in the era of the Shogun.

Kawagoe is a city that invested in the past by refusing to allow train service to come  to the city in the Meiji era.  This retarded the growth of modern commerce in the intervening years but also made the city an unattractive target for American bombers in WWII, since there were no factories in the town.

The town has many examples of the old storefront homes called kura that used to be prevalent across Japan.  According to this beautifully illustrated work, the kura has been a fundamental pattern in Japanese architecture from prehistoric times and evolved through the design of treasure houses in Buddhist temples.

Though I haven’t had a chance to visit Kagaoe, I did have lunch in Nara at a restaurant called Ragamala that fits the pattern of a kura, housed in an old storefront house off the main arcade.

The integrated nature of the kura, functioning as a warehouse, storefront and home was what traditionalists had in mind for the redesign of Kyoto Station in 1997. 

In Tokyo itself there’s an old neighborhood I’ve visited that retains a lot of this ambiance just behind busy Ueno Park. Yanaka is an area that’s managed to survive both the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and the bombings in WWII to maintain it’s characteristic feudal era charm. The small streets house craft stores selling the traditional mulberry bark  paper called Washi. Here’s a store in Osaka that uses the appropriately named website kura.com to sell Washi.

Yanaka is also home to a cemetery famous for its beautiful flowering trees that people visit every spring during cherry blossom time. Both Natsume Soseki, the great Meiji era author and the last Tokugawa Shogun, Yoshinobu are buried here.

Another historical association with shogunal times in the neighborhood is Kannon-ji where two of the members of the 47 Ronin were students. The group met here sometimes to plan their revenge according to a sign in front of the temple.

Politics in Japan

This past Sunday Japan held nationwide elections with the upstart Democratic Party of Japan winning as expected. This is somewhat of an anomaly in that the rival Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has held power continuously since WWII excepting for a brief period in the 1990s.

Much as Europeans have difficulty understanding America’s two party system, the LDP’s dominance in Japanese politics is hard to fathom for foreigners. The party contains a spectrum political opinions excluding only the extremes of the left and right and from the early days of post war occupation has maintained its goals of stability and prosperity. As the rebuilding of the country from the devastation of war coincided with the desires of the populace, the party consistently won at the polls.

Its success is also due to the LDPs operation as a political machine, much like the old Tammany Hall in New York, though on a nationwide scale. Rather than simply seeking the support of urban dwellers, the LDP has focused on the rural constituency, providing generous support for farmers and villages across the country.

One aspect of this spending, obvious when traversing the countryside, is the ocean of concrete visible as roads, bridges and other public works projects ensuring the financial support of construction companies for the LDP.

Like Tammany Hall, the LDP has been good at providing services to it supporters but bad at evolving to meet new environments due to its opaque decision making and investment in the status quo.

Since the bursting of the financial bubble in the early 90’s Japan has gone through an unremitting period of economic stagnation which the LDP has been unable to address, much to the increasingly anxiety of the citizenry. Meanwhile the ongoing depopulation of rural Japan has reduced the effectiveness of its strategy of patronizing the countryside with public spending in exchange for votes.

Diplomatically the end of the Cold War and the rise of China have created new realities that cast doubt on the usefulness of the American alliance. Analysis of the elections in the US media seems to focus on this issue and social causes of interest in America such as the role of women in politics.

My perspective is somewhat different as I believe that intrinsic social dynamics are behind this rebellion against the LDP’s rule. The goals of stability and prosperity that generations of LDP politicians have espoused have now devolved into stagnation and a sense futility in the country.

Young people are increasingly residing in a marginalized world of part time labor and undefined national purpose. According to a recent study, Japanese teenagers have significantly lower expectations for the future than those in Western countries. As discussed in a previous post the artist Takashi Murakami believes that Japanese Post Modernism is a reflection of this malaise.

The challenge of the new government will be to address these issues while dismantling the beauraucratic and mechanistic approach the government has taken under the LDP. This is complicated by the pervasiveness of the party, as can be seen by the fact that reformist Junichi Koizumi, the first non-LDP Prime Minister and Yukio Hatoyama, the current incoming Prime Minister are both former long time members of the LDP. Hatoyama’s grandfather was actually one of the founding members of the LDP and he like Koizumi, are second generation politicians looking to reform the system while a part of it.