What is Japanese food? WASHOKU explained and its evolution 〜和食〜 | easy Japanese home cooking

Welcome to Taicho's Kitchen. Today I'm going to explain you about different aspects of Japanese food. So in the last video of Japanese geography I got a lot of good feedbacks so I decided to go further and make more of these videos and since this is a cooking channel I thought it was fair to make a video on Japanese food because there are so many dishes and so many aspects and so many different types of Japanese food and nowadays almost everybody knows sushi as a Japanese food or like miso soup and perhaps ramen noodle or or gyoza or onigiri or some sort but there are a lot more than that and also because in this channel I've been cooking a lot of Chinese-influenced dishes, Korean-style dishes and also a lot of Western-style dishes. I even made Japanese-style pasta so you might be a bit confused what really is Japanese food or like what really entitles Japanese food and so in this video I'll be talking about three main topics. First I'm going to talk about Japanese food in general but also what makes a dish Japanese food and secondly I'll be talking about different categories of Japanese food primarily in accordance with the history of And third, why is Japanese food considered healthy or is it really healthy? So I hope this video helps you to understand Japanese food and maybe get more appreciation for the Japanese food. So without further ado, let's get started. So the first topic is what entitles a dish as a Japanese food. Japanese food or in Japanese washoku which is literally translated as Japanese food was acknowledged by UNESCO in 2013 as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity and as the Japanese government was applying for this they picked four aspects that makes up washoku. One is a respect for variety and fresh ingredients. Two, the nutritional balance. Three, expression of the nature and the four seasons. And four, close tie with the seasonal celebrations. So first aspect of respect to the variety of fresh ingredients. So as you may have already saw in the last video of Japanese geography, Japan holds variety of geographical features as well as different climates. This allows the country Japan even though the soil is not as rich as many other countries in the world to hold a variety of different ingredients. We also have a lot of mountains, fields, and also ocean so we are able to gather different ingredients from different parts of Japan and because of the harsh geographical features we have a big respect towards nature and thus big respect for the food that we are able to receive from the nature and therefore within washoku or Japanese food it's very very important that we do and this is also connected with the Buddhist philosophy and seeing not only the animals but also plants as lives and therefore we try to bring out as much of the ingredients as possible and we also try to throw away as little ingredients as possible and therefore in compared to like French or Chinese cuisine where they use a lot of spices or sauces Japanese food try to keep it simple. This is really to enjoy the fine flavor of each specific ingredients and within the Japanese culture and Japanese cuisine eating or cooking is considered one of the most important aspects of life because we see eating as an exchange of lives. We are receiving a life from the nature so that we can live further in order to make the world a little bit better place and that's also why we hold our hands like this and say itadakimasu in the beginning and also gochisousama deshita at the end as a small prayer to saying thank you for all the lives and all the work that is put into for the food. So the second aspect of washoku is the nutrition balance. Now with the scientific advancement we know that our body needs different nutrients, vitamins, proteins, fat and carbohydrates and whatnot and for the longest time people didn't know that consciously about the nutrients but probably through experience people kind of knew that eating different types of food helps you stay healthy and also because in Japan there are a lot of different ingredients it was very important in Japanese cuisine that you have a variety of ingredients. So in Japanese cuisine you try to have inside one meal some from the mountains, something from the sea, some leaves, some root vegetable, fruit vegetable and of course always rice maybe some kind of pickles and so even without the science difficult backgrounds Japanese people somehow knew that it's very important for your body to stay healthy that you pick up different nutrients and thus for the different ingredients and in Japanese cuisine there's a phrase called ichiju sansai meaning one soup and three dishes. So if you go to a restaurant in Japan and when you order a meal you always have a rice and then to that you almost always have some kind of soup and then the main dish and to that at least two kind of side dishes mostly vegetable side dishes so in washoku it is very important to have variety of ingredients and thus several dishes on one meal. So the third aspect is expression of nature and the four seasons so in Japanese culture cooking was considered as an art form and chef was considered as an artist where in many cultures chef were considered as merely a servant. So in washoku it is very important that the dishes are presented with aesthetic not just any pretty beautiful way but instead it should be a representative of the nature and also the season. As you may saw in the video of Japanese geography Japan has four distinct seasons and each of these seasons are divided into six small seasons and so through one year you have 24 seasons actually in Japan and therefore when you go to more high-end restaurants which I'll explain later you have a really beautiful presentation of the nature of the season of that time and that's also another reason why we have different kind of plates in western restaurants the plates are usually quite simple just white and round but in Japan we have different shapes different form and also often with different material you have porcelain you have glass you may use some wood or bamboo or sometimes even just some kind of leaf as a plate and we also do a lot of foraging like I show in the video of horsetail on the firm we also have a lot of ingredients that is only available in certain seasons and so if you go to Japanese supermarket there's always a section where they sell some seasonal food yes of course with technology you can grow pretty much everything throughout the whole year but the Japanese people prefer more seasonal ingredients because ingredients that is in the season taste the best and also has the most nutrients and so a lot of Japanese people are keen on what vegetable and what fish are in season so the fourth and the last aspect of washoku is the strong connection with seasonal festivals in Japanese culture pretty much every month we have some kind of seasonal festival and most of those festival would have some special dish that we pretty much only eat in that festival starting with the new years which is one of the most important festival in Japan I made a vlog on that so you should check that out there I'm showing different cultural things that we do in the new year and also as a preparation for the new year and the special dish of osechi ryouri which over 99% of Japanese people eat as we come in in the new years and most of these dishes are only served in the new years and in March we have girls day in May we have boys day on July we have so-called tanabata in September we have otsukimi this is also connected with the third aspect but washoku is also very important for the seasonal celebrations so these four aspects are the reason why Japanese food is special and why Japanese food is considered as a intangible heritage of humanity and not just now let's go into the second topic which is a different category of Japanese food so the three categories are the traditional Japanese food semi-modern Japanese food and the modern Japanese food so this is a categorization that I made up according to the history of Japan but I think this just really represents how Japanese food was developed and also evolved throughout I think it helps you to understand the Japanese food more so the first category of traditional Japanese food includes all the food before the year 1868 when the Japanese government opened the country to outside world so until that point Japan was under a policy of so-called sakoku which means locking of the country restricting all the imports and exports with the outside world except for China Portugal and Holland and only in one port in Nagasaki which is all the way southwest of Japan during this time of sakoku Japan were able to appreciate over 250 years of peace where there were no wars no conflicts which is known as Pax Tokugawana because during that time the government was called Tokugawa Bakufu and during this time with very little contact with outside world happened very similar to the Galapagos effect where a lot of Japanese culture boomed so a lot of Japanese culture you may know were actually developed in this period of Pax Tokugawana so like kimono, kabuki, no theater, sumo, ukiyo-e, sado or tea ceremony, ikebana or flower arrangement and also a lot of Japanese dishes were invented for example the sushi that you know in the form like nigiri sushi or makizushi was invented during this period in Edo or Tokyo because it was very close to the sea and was where the government was was the capital of Japan at the time was a lot of wealth were also there so people were able to get the fresh fish and also another category tempura which actually originally came from Portugal the name tempura come from temperar it means like to mix or to cook until that point Japanese people didn't know about deep frying but the people saw the Portuguese people we took that culture and invented tempura out of that and also key aspect is traditional food is the lack of animal meat except for chicken because the Buddhist tradition prohibited people to eat four-legged animals and so until that point Japanese people didn't eat any pork and beef and so if it has pork or beef then it's not traditional Japanese food so other food that are included in this category are like udon or soba noodles, natto, a lot of pickles, sushi and tempura of course, because chicken was two-legged animal so it was okay to eat that, and a lot of the fish dishes and also within this traditional Japanese food there are also some subcategories one is called shojin ryori which was actually invented by the Buddhist monks. Buddhist monks were following the strict rules of Buddhism so they were not allowed to eat animals or fish and so shojin ryori is a strict vegan diet and so if you're vegan then you should go try to find some shojin ryori restaurants if you go to Japan because finding vegan dishes in Japan is quite difficult and the second sub category is called kaiseki ryori so kaiseki ryori is a high-end course meal and so it starts with an appetizer and they have first dish, second dish, third dish, it usually have like five to ten dishes it usually costs about 50 dollars or 50 euro for lunch and for dinner it's usually above 100 to could go up to like 500 dollars or euro per person so it is very pricey but if you happen to go to Japan I think you should definitely try this because the experience is definitely worth it and then another subcategory is wagashi which literally means Japanese snack or Japanese sweets these are like daifuku mochi, dango, oshiruko, senbei or rice crackers, manjuu and variety of so-called nerikiri which is primarily made with anko but representing different assets of nature or like fruits and it's quite very beautiful and these are usually served on the side of a tea ceremony now let's go into a second category of semi-modern Japanese food so these are dishes that were so after opening the country a lot of western culture came in the main thing that influenced Japanese food was the habit of eating meat so the dish of sukiyaki or shabu-shabu was invented this time and also a lot of nabe or hotpot dishes and within this semi-traditional Japanese food there's a subcategory of so-called youshoku which means western style Japanese food so these are invented by the chefs who are working at the western style restaurants so those includes like tonkatsu from cutlet, korokke or the original name is croquette, omuraisu so combining rice in the omelette, a Japanese style hamburg or like the curry rice so even though curry is originally from India because at that time curry were introduced to Japan through the British people so we kind of consider curry as a more the western food and therefore is in the category of western Japanese food and the last category is the modern Japanese food and this is all the food that were As World War II happened and we were in war with primarily against America, China and Britain so a lot of the outside ingredients were banned but after we lost the war at the year 1945 the United States came in and occupied Japan for actually seven years and during that time Japan was very very poor and America at that time helped us redevelop our country. The United States brought us a lot of wheat and also milk products. Half of that was trying to help us but half of that is so that America has more export and through this imported wheat flour we embedded a subcategory of this konamon which means powder or flour products so this includes okonomiyaki, takoyaki, yakisoba which is all primarily made from flour and there's also another subcategory called chuka which means Chinese food because before the war we occupied quite a large part of China and as we lost the war a lot of people came back from there and brought the culture from there and that's why we have ramen noodle and gyoza as a Japanese food even though they were originally from China this culture of Chinese food evolved in Japan further and came out to ramen noodle so hopefully this categorization of Japanese food helped you understand different aspects different historical backgrounds of Japanese food and maybe next time you cook Japanese food or when you go to Japanese restaurant you can kind of think of from which era or which category these dishes are from and then you may be able to have a little trivial conversation with your friends and now let's go to or is it really healthy so compared to many western countries and especially the US the obesity rate in Japan is very very low so you may have seen like a street of Japan in like video and some tv or something most people you see are very slim and Japan still holds the high life expectancy of 84 years old here I'm going to talk about different aspects and different arguments of why Japanese food is healthy and I'll let you be the judge of it the first aspect is very little or no fat in so there are actually three ways to make something savory one is using fat or oil two is using sugar and the third is use of umami in Japanese food we try to avoid the first one so think of some dish that you really crave for maybe that is hamburger or like fries or potato chips pizza or like donuts and you realize a lot of them contain a lot of fat and they are very delicious savory and it's not to say that you shouldn't eat any of those but in traditional Japanese food except for tempura we use barely any fat and instead we are conscious about umami which is acknowledged recently as the fifth flavor we incorporate this umami aspect in our cooking to do that in Japanese cooking we use a lot of dashi which is a combination of seaweed and fish broth if you want to know more in detail of umami or dashi please go watch this I'm explaining in detail of what is really umami and how these are incorporated in Japanese food so the second aspect is rice over wheat so in Japan a lot of people eat rice pretty much every day there are also even a lot of people who eat rice pretty much every meal I love rice and I eat more rice than wheat products there are some studies that shows that rice is easier to be digested but also raise the blood sugar not as much compared to wheat products and I don't think rice over wheat is not necessarily the rice and the wheat themselves but rather what you eat them with so the wheat product like bread or pasta you almost always have some fat content in them and you also never ever eat wheat product as it is without any sauce or additive to it but rice like a really good rice you could really eat it without any additive without any topping to it and a lot of the side dish for the rice they don't necessarily have to be that fatty a lot of them are quite very simple like pickles natto like miso soup none of them have fat in them think of eating bread or pasta just with pickles or like some vegetable somehow that doesn't work and the third aspect is fish over meat a lot of people may know that fish is more healthy than meat and the main reason why is because of the melting temperature of the meat fat and the fish fat beef fat has the melting point above 40 degrees pork fat between 30 and 40 and chicken fat between 30 and 35 so that means beef fat is always as a solid form in your body and therefore this can be cause of your blood system to be clotted whereas the melting point of the fish fat is between 10 to 20 degrees and also the animal fat is high in saturated fatty acid high consumption of the saturated fatty acid raise the risk of high cholesterol and cardiovascular diseases and the fish acid is unsaturated fat and therefore fish fat do not have any of these risks and also a lot of the fish is also high in dha blueback fish like sardines mackerel herring and tuna are also very high in this and this dha is said to help to make your brain more active and the seafood is also high and epa which actually decrease the cholesterol in your bloodstream so eating fish is actually much more healthy than meat but this information will never go into the mainstream media especially in the western cultures because those media are usually funded by the meat industries and they don't want people to know that the fish is healthier than meat which will decrease the consumption of meat so fourth aspect is the fermented food so japanese food contain a lot of the fermented food of course that doesn't mean that other countries don't have fermented food like a lot of cheese or pickle are also fermented food but japanese cuisine contain a lot more of those fermented ingredients especially if you look at the seasoning so soy sauce miso mirin sake pretty much all the japanese seasonings are made through fermentation nowadays these fermented food are considered healthy because they contain a lot of probiotics small microorganisms to keep your digestive system healthy and to help you digest as well and also this process of fermentation helps some ingredients enrich the flavor and also this helps also use less fat in your food and the fifth aspect is drinking tea over soda and juice so in japanese household we would pretty much always have some kind of tea in the fridge nowadays it may be a bit changing most families will never drink soda or juice during a meal there's sometimes green tea or roasted green tea but often is a roasted barley tea this contains no sugar no caffeine this also doesn't kill the flavor of the food and as we know from many studies that a lot of sugar intake is unhealthy so in japan is quite uncommon to drink juice or soda with your meal and instead we pretty much drink a lot of tea the last aspect is a balanced meal when you see a japanese meal you would see that you don't have just like one or two dish but instead you have a main dish rice and soup and then to that you have at least like two or three more vegetable side dishes and i don't know how it is in other countries but in japan every school would have a subject called kateika which means household subject inside kateika we learn to sew or like use the sewing machine we learned how to clean the house or like how to clean the toilet sometimes how we manage the money but a lot of time is spent for learning about cooking and also for this each school would have like a cooking room and there we learn different basic japanese dishes and to that we also learn the nutritional values of different ingredients how it is important to take in different variation of ingredients and this idea kind of comes back to the first aspect of washoku that's also another reason why japanese food is considered healthy so this is the end of this video hope you enjoyed it i hope this kind of helped you understand the japanese food different aspects of japanese food and historical background to that and also help you to appreciate japanese food a little bit more if you enjoyed this video i'd love it if you could hit the like button for me so that this video can be spread out to more people and if you have any feedbacks or if you have any question or any requests for these kind of informational video please feel free to write anything in the comments below and in the next presentation video i'm thinking of seasonal festival in japan and food connecting to that so please subscribe so that when that comes out it gets 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