Oishinbo, rice and vegetables

I had previously blogged about Oishinbo, fish adn the Izakaya pub food book. When I went to the library with Jonah a few days ago I saw the vegetables and rice books. One interesting, confusing, and cool thing about the series is the relationship between Yamaoka and Kurita. I think the books are organized by food type and not by chronological order, so you will read one strip where the two are already married and have kids and then read another strip after that where it appears that they have just started maybe dating. Also you never get to know these characters beyond a professional setting, as if you were their co-workers. You go into their house and see the kids at the hospital but that is conceivable with a co-worker. But you never go beyond that. The focus is really on the food. I think that's cool.
It's also nice that even though this as written in the 80's there is all this stuff about the importance of organic food as a national pride to Japan. Since I live near a Whole Foods in JP I find the books relevant to my time and place too. I have to say when I lived in Chinatown, I didn't give a crap about organic or anything like that. I rarely heard the words. I still prefer the vegetables sold in Chinatown to anywhere else, organic or not, because the consumers there know what the hell they are buying. After all a lot of the elderly people who are newer immigrants walking around Chinatown may have even done some small farming in their village. They might not know the fancy words, but they know what a good vegetable is and what is crap. And actually I think of all the things that Chinese spend money on, quality vegetables is probably up there when compared to say clothes, or other things. Anyway, food takes a high priority.

Oishinbo, is a Japanese manga, but they seem to agree with this statement. There is constant nods to Chinese cuisine all over the place. But it is still simultaneously nationalistic (in terms of being strongly prideful of Japanese culture) but also criticizes a lot of the stereotypical aspects of Japanese society that we tend to focus on as people outside Japan. I say that instead of just saying Thew West, because Chinese people have a lot of stereotypes about how Japan or the Japanese are. There is no denying stuff that happened in the past. But of course that doesn't mean that those things happened with everybody agreeing that they were right. And of course just because as in any society, there is a right wing war hawk part of society, that doesn't mean there isn't another strong aspect of society that disagrees with that right wing.

In one article supposed to be written by Yamaoka or maybe the author himself (I was confused about this) he claims to perhaps "unravel some of the complicated relationship between China and Japan by (talking about rice." A nice idea.