The Empress of Japan notices that Montivallan horses eat not only grass and hay but also grain that could have been eaten by human beings. The ability to feed animals well must be one measure of wealth.
Japan now has enough food that no one starves to death although:
"Even at a feast for the wealthy and powerful there was more emphasis on quality and arrangement than lavish quantity."
"Feast" usually means both quality and quantity but the meanings of words change after the Change.
Since Japan is surrounded by sea and therefore also by fish, and since the Japanese sometimes even eat raw fish, it is to be hoped that their years of either good or poor harvests are supplemented by a revived and thriving fishing industry. To be surrounded by sea might be like being surrounded by beef.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And of course there were other things delaying or hindering the post-Change recovery of Japan. Some of them obvious, others not so plain to see.
Sean
"Classic" Japanese cuisine dates from the late Edo period, when Japan usually had enough food... but only just. (It's not an accident that Japanese were, until very recently, extremely short.)
There was a strong ethic/aesthetic of deliberate austerity and simplicity, "wabi-saba", increasingly from Kamakura times on, and via the tea ceremony (and accompanying meals) it became the foundation of "high" Japanese dining.
A kaiseki-ryōri is elaborate, but the materials are simple and the art is as much in the arrangements as anything else; it's a form of luxury based on understatement, restraint, and the contrasts of extremely fresh seasonal ingredients with a minimum of manipulation with various forms of fermented or pickled substances.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
That makes sense, that it wasn't until Meiji times that Japan had MORE than just "enough" food. I remember seeing in some accounts of WW II about Americans being surprised at seeing Japanese taller and bigger than they had expected. Because of increased prosperity during and after the Meiji Restoration.
Sean
The real break was in the post-WWII period, though meat-eating gradually began to take hold in the Meiji era, when the de-facto vegetarianism of the earlier periods ended.
Traditionally, Japanese men were mostly around 5ft to 5ft 2inches, and Japanese women around 4ft10. This gradually crept up an inch or two, then started to really shoot up in the generations born in the 1960's and later.
It's not uncommon to see families in Japan (or here) where the children are a full foot taller than the parents and fifteen inches or so taller than their grandparents. It's one of the most abrupt changes anywhere.
It's causing real problems in Japan, where the whole infrastructure was built for people whose physical proportions were radically different.
The same thing happened in Europe, but not to nearly the same extent -- and in Europe the upper classes had always been much taller (a 6-inch difference in Britain in 1914), which wasn't the case in Japan.
In Japan, everyone ate a cereals-based diet, with some fish, lots of seaweed (which itself can stunt growth) and after Meiji a little meat now and then.
The main difference between the poor and the affluent, from Sengoku times on, was that the upper classes ate white rice by itself with every meal, whereas the peasantry often had to eat gruels based wholly or partly on other grains.
By way of contrast, white Americans were about as tall in the Revolutionary era as they are now. (There was a dip in the 19th century due to massive immigration and urbanization.) Even American slaves in the 18th century were three or four inches taller than Europeans.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I sit corrected, it was during the post WW II era that Japanese began to include meats in their diet to a LARGE extent.
A bit amusing, about how building designed for smaller people are increasingly inconvenient to the taller, larger Japanese of our times.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Not always! I remember visiting a Colonial era house in MA where the rooms and furniture were obviously designed for SMALLER people. And I noticed the same thing with 19th century furniture displayed at the Gardner Museum in Boston. That is, they looked strangely small to me!
Sean
People who emigrated to America as adults were of course smaller, but the statistics (enlistment records, etc.) indicate most American males in the 1770's were in the 5ft6-5ft10 range.
But Southerners were taller than people from the MIddle Colonies and they in turn were taller than New Englanders.
This was probably a matter of caloric intake; that was the personal-income gradient too.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Aha, so New England colonists tended to be shorter than the people in the Middle and Southern colonies. And, naturally, wealthier people tended to eat better than the not so wealthy.
Sean
Yes. Basically it was a function of regional agricultural productivity and population density. Low population density allowed focusing on the best soils, and also the use of "extensive" methods that focused on higher productivity per man-hour of labor rather than on maximizing productivity per acre. Yields were lower in America than England, usually, but labor inputs per acre were -much- lower, so food was cheap. Also, low population density reduced the incidence of disease, and disease load was a strong secondary factor in biological outcomes like height and longevity.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I can tell you are a natural born researcher! Thanks for this explanation, which makes sense.
Also, American did not yet have the kind of large cities where disease would take a heavy toll of the population.
Sean
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