[LINK] "The Great Sushi Craze of 1905"

[rfmcdonald]

My thanks go out to Jason from Facebook who shared a link to a two part essay by one H.D. Miller, at the Eccentric Culinary website, looking at the forgotten history of Japanese cuisine. Until 20th century racism kicked it, sushi and Japanese cuisine generally were popular among Americans. There is a whole history of restaurants lost, recovered in this well-sourced essay.

Missionary publications, like the Baptist Missionary Magazine, regularly printed stories about everyday life in Japan, along with accounts of the missionary efforts. Likewise, missionaries who returned from Japan were frequent speakers in churches, lecture halls and on the Chautauqua circuit. This is how the majority of Americans became acquainted with Japanese culture in the 19th century, through the missionaries.

In addition to the experts and the missionaries, American artists flocked to the country starting in the 1870’s. Japanese handcrafts and art, especially ceramics, silk and woodblock prints, were the primary exports that funded the modernization efforts of the Meiji Emperor. Japonisme, caused by the arrival of these goods in the West, blew a giant hole in the European art world, and Impressionism burst out of it. Everyone from Monet to Van Gogh was captivated by Japan, and American painters were no exception. Some of them, such Henry Humphrey Moore, Winckworth Gay, and William Heine moved to Japan to live and work for a few years. The Japanese aesthetic even extended beyond the purely visual, influencing poets like Ezra Pound, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright.

Finally, for rich Americans, Japan had even become the final stop of an outsized version of the Grand Tour. Ulysses S. Grant led the way. Two months after he quitted the presidency, Grant embarked on a two-and-a-half year tour of the world, with long stops in London, Paris, Berlin, Cairo, Bombay, Beijing and Tokyo. Enthusiastic crowds turned out to greet the ex-president nearly everywhere — 50,000 people in London, 10,000 in Norway. But no one seemed more enthusiastic than the Meiji Emperor, who broke imperial protocol by stepping forward and shaking Grant’s hand, something never before done or imagined by a Japanese emperor.

For his part, Grant reciprocated the affection.

[. . .]

Simply put, Grant, like every other 19th century American was besotted with Japan.

It’s from Grant’s trip around the world that Americans got one of their earliest accounts of Japanese high dining, given to them in James Dabney McCabe’s 1879 bestseller, A Tour Around the World by General Grant: Being a Narrative of the Incidents and Events of his Journey. McCabe described for his readers an elaborate multi-course state dinner, including a flight of dishes he identified as “shashimi”, perhaps the first time the word appeared in English.