by Fumihito Yamamoto

Today, Japanese cuisine is extremely popular and is eaten all over the world, to the point perhaps that most people believe that Japanese eat Sushi, Sashimi and Tempura everyday and that these are traditional Japanese cuisines. But this is a misconception. While it is true that Japanese do eat such foods, most of us do not eat Sushi and Sashimi every day. The more popular daily foods in Japan are actually curry and Ramen.

Almost all foods that people around the world considered as Japanese foods can trace their origins in foreign countries. Both curry and Ramen have their origins outside of Japan,likewise Sushi, Sashimi and Tempura. It has been said that custom to eat salted fish and rice coming from South-East Asia and South China had gradually changed to a cuisine nowadays known as Sushi and Sashimi for a long period of time and finally became Edo-Mae Sushi (Edo Style Sushi) in early nineteenth century. Tempura is also a cuisine with external origins in Portuguese fried food. The only food that has a Japanese origin is Katsuodashi (bonito soup stock), which is necessary for Japanese cuisine. Perhaps the special feature of Japanese food (amongst other products thought of as Japanese), is not just invention but rather arrangement and sophistication.

Japanese curry is different from Indian and British curries. Japanese curry is stickier, less spicy and possess an interesting historical origin. In the late nineteenth century, the Japanese Navy and Army faced a grave nutrition problem amongst its sailors and soldiers – the lack of vitamin B1 which leads to beriberi. For a long time in Japanese history, the only meal in rural areas was a mixture of rice and other cereals. Fishes and vegetables were foods for the city-dwelling middle-class and the rich elites. Traditionally (at least until the Meiji Restoration) Japanese did not eat meat for religious reasons.

For soldiers and sailors coming from peasant families, to eat plain rice was a dream. They had heard in their poor villages that they could eat as much rice as they could in the Army or the Navy. It definitely tasted much better than a mixture of rice and cereals! However, once in the military service, they usually ate plain rice without other nutritious supplements, resulting in cases of beriberi.

In the Army, Mori Rintarō, an army surgeon, considered that beriberi was an infectious disease. But in the Navy, Takagi Kanehiro, a navy surgeon, found out that the cause of beriberi was lack of vitamin B1. He recommended the Navy introduce foods containing vitamin B1, such as meat, bread, and a mixture of rice with barley. The problem, however, was that mixing rice with barley was unpopular among sailors, as such a meal would remind them of the hard life back in the poor villages.

The Japanese Navy learned how to make curry from the British Navy. After the signing of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, interactions between the two navies led the Japanese to discover that that the Royal Navy served curry aboard their ships. Initially, Japanese sailors and officers ate curry with bread, but the sailors had joined up to eat rice, not bread. Even by the early twentieth century, Japanese living in rural areas were not really in the habit of eating bread for meals. Sailors coming from rural areas recognised bread really as a snack, not as a meal.

Plain rice, however, still did not contain the crucial vitamin B1 to prevent beriberi. During the Russo-Japanese War, in a bid to get their sailors to eat with the right nutrition, the Navy began serving curry with plain rice, cooking the curry with wheat, which contains vitamin B1. This new arrangement became popular among sailors. Sticky curry suited very well with Japanese rice. Curry was also served with fresh salad and milk, both full of necessary vitamins and minerals, such as calcium.

The curry meal quickly became popular for other reasons too. Eating curry was cost-effective in many ways. Being a basic one-plate meal made it easy to wash up. During weekends, when there were fewer people in the naval bases, the curry meal is perhaps the simplest to prepare for any skeleton staff remaining in the base. Every ship and naval base moreover would have its own unique recipe for making curry and regularly compete with one another.

In 1908, the curry was officially acknowledged when the curry meal recipe was published in Kaigun Kappō Jutu Sankōsho (The Naval Cooking Guide). Every Friday, sailors and officers in every ship and naval base in the Japanese Marine Self Defense Force would eat curry. This is a tradition inherited from the Imperial Japanese Navy. When sailing in the oceans and seas, sailors tended to lose their sense of time. Eating curry every Friday reminded sailors which day of the week it was.

The new-style Japanese curry had spread from the Navy and the naval bases - Yokosuka Naval Base is usually recognised as the birthplace of Japanese-style curry - initially for very practical reasons, i.e. nutrition. But after a while, with the sailors introducing the curry to their families when they went home, the curry meal slowly started to take off within Japanese society, becoming one of the more popular daily meals in Japan today.

The author is presently a Ph.D. candidate at the Dept. of History in NUS.

Tags: food and nutrition, Japanese curry, Japanese Navy

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