Names in Japanese cuisine

Kwanto cuisine, Kwansai cuisine, Kyoto cuisine, Nagoya cuisine

Apart from this world-wide influence on the Japanese food, there have been numerous local factors to give variety to it. Thus there are such names in Japanese cuisine as Kwanto cuisine, Kwansai cuisine, Kyoto cuisine, Nagoya cuisine, etc., just as in Chinese they speak of the Peking, Shanghai, Canton, Szechwan, Yunnan cuisines.

Besides, there were numerous provincial factors to influence the Japanese cuisine, contributed by the three hundred daimyo domains. These were attributable to their peculiar local products as well as to their respective native geniuses.

There can be no cooking without food materials to be cooked. Thus the Tokyo cuisine means largely the food made of products of Tokyo and adjacent districts. As the culinary art improved the food materials, so did the materials fashion this art. In these years of improved transportation facilities, when the products of one prefecture are almost the same as the products of the whole nation, the demarcation between this and that cuisine has become very thin and fugitive, although one may still point out the superior or inferior points in the culinary products of diverse cities. Foreign visitors to Japan will not find it easy to distinguish between the Kwanto and Kwansai cuisines, nor will even the ordinary Japanese eaters, because of the growing similarity just mentioned. We may mention, however, the typical characteristics of some districts. As Kwanto abounds in the best kind of maguro and bonito fish, more of them are used in the preparation of everyday meals than any other kind of fish, especially the dried bonito, as in imparting flavor to soups and in cooking vegetables. But Kwansai, deficient in these two types of fish, at least in the good variety which Kwanto has, makes use of other fish, and in flavoring the soup, vegetables, etc., has recourse to the seaweed, directly imported from Hokkaido. Kyoto, which was surrounded by mountains, and had no direct access to the sea, was poor in sea fish but had good freshwater fish, and also a large variety of exquisite vegetables, especially bamboo-shoots and mushrooms, than which no other city could show better. The conditions have changed, of course, but anyone with the least educated taste in Japanese food, can recognize both the fortes and weaknesses of Kyoto, something along these traditional lines. Nagasaki is still noted for its turtle dishes, chicken, beef and pork dishes, owing to the exotic influences already referred to, all of which, now spread throughout Japan, had been unknown in other parts of Japan up to the Restoration.