Japanese Cuisine Diplomacy: NHK World "Let's Cook Japanese"

     As I mentioned to “culinary diplomacy” in previous blog post discussing about Korean Diplomacy, cultural diplomacy about cultural food has been effective these days. Japanese food has been popular since there are a lot of Japanese restaurants that offer typical popular Japanese food such as Sushi and Ramen in the United States.

     However, there are few American people who know “real” “homemade” Japanese cuisine from my experience of living in the Untied States. As I mentioned just before, Ramen, Sushi, Teriyaki have been quite popular; however, Most Sushi offered in the Japanese restaurants in the United States are rolled-sushi, which is different from Sushi offered in Japan. Furthermore, Teriyaki foods are provided at not only Japanese restaurants but also non-Japanese restaurants such as Subway (there is teriyaki-chicken as your choice of meet), but these actually do not taste as teriyaki, and it is not easy to find real teriyaki, from my experience as one of Japanese people. Therefore, I would say real Japanese cuisine has not been popular yet, even though Japanese-like food have been very popular in the United States.

     NHK world, Japanese television station in the United States, launched radio program “Let’s cook Japanese” on its website. NHK world launches one recipe per week through radio, and audience can check archives of recipe in the past whenever you want. I was very surprised that there are recipes of many kinds of real homemade Japanese dishes such as Okonomi-yaki (Savoury pancake), Roll Kyabetsu (stuffed cabbage leaves) and Tori no kara-age (Japanese style fried chicken). Furthermore, a web page of each recipe put the explanation about the dish by describing why this dish is popular in Japan and origin and history of the dish. This radio project can significantly affects Japanese Cultural Diplomacy toward the world by allowing the world to know about real Japanese cultural food and its history.

     However, for a start, it is necessary that the public become interested in Japanese cuisine in order to use Japanese cuisine for effective cultural diplomacy. To make it successful, Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. can be medium of Japanese cuisine. Not only many kinds of events showing Japanese culture but also many stalls that sell Japanese food are at festival. People can get these foods at good price, so food stalls can be effective to make American people interested in Japanese cuisine. Then people can move on to the next stage to deeply understand Japanese food culture through NHK World “Let’s Cook Japanese.”

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/cooking/english/20120203.html