Japan's Breakfast & Morning Food Culture

About this book

Japan begins its day at the table, and the first meal is a whole civilisation: the home tray of rice, soup, grilled fish and pickles; the baker's dawn of shokupan and melon pan; the ryokan's dozen small bowls carried to the room; the Nagoya morning service, where coffee arrives with a meal attached as a gift; the standing soba eaten in four minutes at the station; the convenience-store onigiri that fuels the commute; the regional dawns from Hokkaido's salmon and ikura to Okinawa's pork and island tofu; and the ritual mornings of the year, from the New Year's first soup to the seven-herb porridge of January 7. This guide covers the whole morning in 200 entries: the home table and its grammar, bread mornings and the bakeries that make them, the inn and hotel breakfast at its full ceremonial height, the coffee houses and diners of the eaten-out dawn, twenty-five regions at breakfast, the working morning of stations, canteens and desks, the ceremonies and seasons of the first meal, and the hands and machines that make it — from the dawn shift of the farmhouse kitchen to the rice cooker's timer and the delivered dawn. Every entry follows the same four fields — the plate and its ground, the making and the craft, the taste and the table, and where you meet it today closing with the one official check to make — so any two mornings can be compared in seconds. This book claims no health effects, ranks no restaurant or inn, and repeats no origin legend as fact; it documents the dishes, the techniques, the rooms and the culture exactly. Written and produced in Japan by a Japanese author and publisher.