Specialty Food, Market Culture, and Daily Life in Early Modern Japan

Download or read book Specialty Food, Market Culture, and Daily Life in Early Modern Japan written by Akira Shimizu and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study is an unique approach to social and cultural history of Japan through the scope of food and food ways. In this book-length study of food markets in the early modern Japanese capital of Edo, Akira Shimizu draws a fascinating picture of early modern Japanese society where specialty foods—seasonal, regional, and hard-to-find delicacies that satisfied the palate of nation’s highest political authority, the shogun—served as a powerful nexus that connected different social groups. In the course of their daily lives, peasants, fisherfolks, and merchants, who made specialty food available at the market, were in constant negotiation with powerful wholesalers and government authorities in charge of procuring specialty foods of the highest qualities for the shogun’s Edo Castle. Utilizing a number of previously unused archival materials that reveals the lives of those at the bottom of the society, the book traces the production, supply, and handling of specialty foods and shows how ordinary people were empowered to assume control over the distribution of specialty food, eventually affecting their procurement for the shogunal kitchen. In doing so, they disrupted the existing market order on the shogunal requisition, and led to the reconfiguration of market relations.