"Devouring Japan offers radical new insights into the complex and fascinating world of Japanese food. It is a timely reminder of how important the paradoxical Japanese model of simplicity along with media celebrity has become to the new post-Francophone gastronomy. It is peppered with insightful chapters on the propaganda value of umami and washoku that allowed Japanese cuisine to enter the great council of good taste in a new global hierarchy. A muchneeded intervention in the politics and poetics of good taste in the 21st century."--Krishnendu Ray, author of The Ethnic Restaurateur"This volume contains a world of wisdom about Japanese food from scholars of literature, history, and social sciences. Its strength lies in the geographical and cultural diversity of its writers and themes and its importance is in setting Japanese food in multiple frames of meaning--not only as it has been 'inscribed' with national, spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic value but also as it has been, more importantly for its global audiences, given worth and valuein food trucks, in street stalls, and in outlier interpreters of its essences. Far from the sanctity of culinary gods and 'authenticity' altars, the book encourages us to slurp and chew--andlearn."--Merry White, author of Coffee Life in Japan"A lavish panoply of predominantly modern Japanese food culture. Interdisciplinary in approach, it is a quick read for a volume of its size...and the chapters are uniformly well-written...A valuable resource to foodways scholars. As the subtitle suggests, the book speaks to greater issues of Japanese identity, nationalism, and globalization."--Choice
