culture report.doc

Siliang Di Japanese 1Fumiko IshiiDue Date: 10/15/2012Culture ReportTalking about Japan, we will associate many things such as manga, karate, or Shinto. What attracts me most in all of these is the culture of Japanese food. As majority of people know, Japanese food is famous for their healthy and delicate, which are contained by these elegant vessels. In this report, I will introduce these aspects, which are the origin, the development and the ways of cooking, about Japanese. Moreover, I will explain some typical Japanese foods, in which there maybe are your favorite things.Firstly, lets look at the origin of Japanese food. Japanese food is originate from Japan archipelago, and evolves into a kind of characteristic food. Because different places have different objective factors, there are various distinctions from place to place in Japan. Furthermore, some foods of Japanese are from another Country like China and Spain. Many people have a question why Japanese like rice and vegetable so much? Of cause you can order meat or seafood at Japanese restaurant now. But an authentic Japanese food must be used by vegetable rice even wheat as majority. One of answer is Japan is a not huge island country, so they raise cattle will occupy so much spare place and more hard then planting. This is correct. Actually, there were some vital reasons. It is that Japanese have had a law that they can not eat meat. When Buddhism spared into Japan first time, the Mikado, the king of the Japan, issued the “Meat Ban” , because their religion think meat is dirty and filth. This ban lasted almost 1000 years. It is greatly influence Japaneses dietary habit. Therefore, the wheaten foods or the foods made by rice of Japanese always have more long history.When we talk about wheaten food, noodles are the first thing should be referred. In Japan, noodles mainly divide tow kind, according to different degree of thickness. One of them is “Udon”. Udon in Japanese is “”. In kanji is 饂饨. Its original meaning is a kind of Chinese food named wonton, which looks like dumplings. But in middle Age, Japanese people understand it for wheaten cutting. If the cross section of noodles is greater then 1.7 mm , it will be named Undon. If not, then it will be another kind, which is “(ramen)” . What is flour is stretched by cook, and then put them in big bowl with soup. The soup decides the testy of the ramen. As a famous comment for ramen, “The heart of the ramen is the noodle, and the broth is its soul.” A pot of good soup sometimes cost a cook many hours. One of important way to make soup is using bone to boil, because bone has the delicious essence of a food ingredient. There also is clean soup that is just made by water and salt. Expect soup, side dishes is also needful. But what dish is up to the man who eats it. Some people like me prefer pork as dish on noodles, others people maybe like fried rape (it is vegetable, not crime). For some region tradition, you can eat noodles with a cup of sauce. In this case, you can choose a light testy or not. As another popular food in Japan, sushi has plenty of interesting points too. Sushi is thought a kind few healthy food which let everyone feel desirable. Not only because it is made by various food with balance nutrition, but also it adopts most reasonable way to cook, steaming, which can keep nourishment maximize. To surprise, the history of sushi is not very long. In the Edo age, a doctor living in Kyoto found that it is a perfect method that using vinegar to mix into rice for keeping and improving testy. After that about 150 years, a businessman in Edo city (now it is Tokyo) start to sale vinegar rice, with vegetable, fish, and eggs on it. This is the rudiment of sushi. With the development of sushi, almost kind of food are using on it gradually. Because of the different ingredients, the price of sushi has very huge gaps. Some of them just put egg omelet or radish on the rice, and poll these foods. Some another just use superlative seafood or expensive costly Kobe beef to make them. Therefore it is a kind of food which is suitable to all of classes people. There are many American can distinguish sushi（鮓）and sashimi(刺身). Actually, sashimi means raw fish (now it includes more kind of meat). You can put sashimi on rice as sushi, but they are totally different food. Because the continuous war and casino popular, a lot of convenient food like sushi become more and more prevalent. At the same time, these convenient foods grew up to one part of Japanese food culture inch and inch. Nigiri-zushi now is a kind of sushi, which use sea sedge roll the rice. Generally, it is thought gamblers invented it for solving hunger problem. With a similar situation, a soldier can eat elaborate food on war ground, they put Miso() in boil water with rice. Then a not complex but delicious dish will be well done. Now, Miso is the most popular seasoning in Japan. We can not say it is unrelated with the social environment at that time.To sum of, Japanese food culture establish on the history of Japan. When we know different age people have what kind of lives, we can understand why it will product this kind of food. According to the fitness of Japanese food we can read Japanese peoples creative. Even though Japan not too big to get various ingredients, they create so many ways to make foods. Just talking about seasonings, they have at least 70 k