![]() And the rival tries to make trouble by convincing that family to sell all their produce to his restaurant instead. ![]() She falls in love with Eisuke's cooking first and then, as a sort of side effect, with him. One character's family runs a small market garden nearby where the restaurant buys vegetables. (A relevant side note is that this bad guy is played by Goro Inagaki, a member of SMAP, which is a band that has its own line of food products at Japanese 7-11s, something else we'd never see in the US.)Īlong with that business rivalry, which turns very personal, there are romantic complications, fights with his friends – but even the interpersonal drama usually turns on the food. Unfortunately this touching reunion is marred by the fact that his mother has a heart attack and drops dead.įurther complications ensue when he declares he's going to take over the restaurant: his father has already sold it to a rival restauranteur, who in the course of the series becomes obsessed with Eisuke, going back and forth between wanting to ruin him and trying to hire him. He goes to his mother and tells her that he wants to return to her restaurant and study to be a chef again. Instead, he forms a rock band with three friends, but as the series opens, he's nearly 30 and they haven't broken through to the big time. As a child, the main character, Yamate Eisuke, wanted to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a French chef with her own restaurant. Start with a drama where the title fits this theme perfectly: Hungry! (Hanguri!). Yes, the story of "becoming a chef" seems to come up so often that I'm giving it its own category. Let's start by looking at a particular sub-genre of the food genre in Japanese television shows. Japanese dramas reflect an obsession with the quality of food that isn't seen on American TV – reflecting the fact that it's also not, I'm sad to say, part of American culture. The focus on culinary detail in Tampopo is far from unique. We see her slaving over variations of broth and getting the advice of experts who make comments on her noodles like "They have sincerity, but lack substance." Compare this to the most famous soup-maker on American TV – the character on Seinfeld who's famous for yelling at people, not for obsessing about the details of his cooking. You may have seen the Japanese movie Tampopo, where (in between other odd unrelated food-centric vignettes) the plot follows a woman who owns a ramen shop and is working to come up with the perfect recipe. Take two tales that involve a soup-maker. Numbers aren't the most important difference, though, because comparing those few shows to Japanese food drama is like comparing apples and oranges, or sushi and a Maine lobster roll. Contrast this handful of shows with the fact that on a fansub site like, there are enough shows with food that you can actually search for it as a separate genre, and that isn't all of them. There was one old show, Alice, about a waitress in a diner, and historical shows like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey may have a shot of the staff working on dinner while they're talking about something else. Sure, in the US we have shows where the characters gather to eat in a certain restaurant or bar. In these series, chefs are main characters, average people are obsessed with a certain dish, and even the plot may turn on a particular detail of a special recipe or ingredient. And for better or worse, there's been cross-fertilization: the US now owns the TV cooking competition, a genre we borrowed from Japan after the successful importing of Iron Chef (a show that I loved, but that I think now has a lot to answer for).īut in Japan there are also many series where cooking and food are a central element of fiction. Japan has this type of show too, so in both countries we can watch how-tos that teach us to cook elaborate dishes from scratch, whether we set foot in the kitchen ourselves or not. Comparing American and Japanese TV, one subject where there's a big cultural difference is in shows about food.Ĭooking on American TV is basically always nonfiction. TV reflects the obsessions of a culture, so there are interesting differences in the TV shows of different countries.
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