Savor Slowly: Ekiben: The Fast Food of High-Speed Japan

Abstract

How food is linked to other dimensions of culture has drawn considerable anthropological interest during recent years (Arnott 1975; Farb and Armalegos 1980;, Harris 1985; Kuper 1977; MacClancy 1992). While Levi-Strauss (1969) seeks universal food meanings and a panhuman message in the language of food, Harris and Ross (1987) emphasize an evolutionary approach to the study of human foodways. Douglas (1972) has convincingly argued that food acts as a message system in which codes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed, these include statements about hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion, boundaries, and transactions. In an anthropological study of Japanese food, Ohnuki-Tierney (1993) reveals that rice becomes a dominant metaphor in the expression of the Japanese self. The present study also takes as a basic premise that food conveys meaning as well as nourishment. This article investigates the cultural context of a particular kind of Japenese fast food, called ekibento (station box lunch), or ekiben for short. The association of ekiben with trains extends over a hundred years. In no other modem society does a particular type of cuisine so intimately associate with trains. Ekiben are marked with a significance beyond the pragmatic. They help lend order to the lives of Japanese people and help identify who they are. Ekiben have the capacity to unite disparate phenomena and to condense objects (trains and train stations with boxed containers), relationships (people with each other and with regions), and ideas (people with time and nature). They are utterances about the presentation of people, technology, time, place, and nature emanating from a portable container. In a larger sense, popular cultural artifacts in two totally modem cultures, while seemingly similar, upon closer examination, may be quite different. Culinary convenience is a necessary but not sufficient condition to explain the popularity of ekiben, cultural consonance also underlies its wide acceptance. Like fast food everywhere, ekiben provides easy accessibility, quick service, relief from having to cook at home, reliability, and low cost (Farb and Armalegos 1980:216). However, in contrast with modem Western versions of fast food, Japanese ekiben never could be characterized as a gastronomic atrocity of empty calories, provided in antiseptic settings by depersonalized service (Farb and Armalegos 1980:215). There are other differences. American fast-food franchises offer uniformity and consistency covering the setting, architecture, food, ambiance, acts, and utterances. At any McDonald's, anywhere, Americans know how to behave, what to expect, what is on the menu, and what they will pay (Kottak 1978:77). What American fast foods provide the traveler is convenience. Ekiben, on the other hand are tasty as weh as nutritious. The regional varieties invite the enjoyment of local topography and culinary art via travel by train, offering the opportunity to enjoin the sensory appreciation of eye and palate with place. Food is multivocal (Turner 1967:50) and says things about things. Several authors have interpreted Japanese box lunches. For Lee the box lunch is one of six examples of the Japanese propensity to utilize the principle of reductionism. It is the contents of a food tray reduced to fit in a box, made possible in Japan because Japanese food lends itself to being tightly packed. Using a semiotic approach, Barthes (1982:22) emphasizes the lack of a center to Japanese food and that the disparate contents are ornaments of other ornaments; i.e., they are but a collection of fragments. Tobin (1992:27) identifies a process called domestication whereby Western goods, practices, and ideas are culturally reinterpreted to create hamburgers without buns in the okosama teishoku (special children's lunch) or riceburgers made of kimpira (burdock root), bacon, and seaweed served on grilled rice pressed into the shape of a bun. …