Home-cuisine as learning and self-expression: An analysis of the contributions to the “Shufu-no-Tomo”

Abstract

This study aims to examine the changing meaning of Home Cuisine for the Japanese women from the Taisho period to the post-war economic miracle. Analyzing the contributions to the magazine “Shufu-no-Tomo” on the subject of cuisine, this study seeks to interpret the act of cooking at home from the emic point of view. Cooking at home has been discussed mainly in the sociology of family and Marxist feminism. However, the discussion that the act of cooking is unpaid domestic work based on love relations is one-sided. The author investigates how women interpreted the meaning of cooking and the changes of it underwent historically. Drawing on the textual analysis of the magazine’s contributions, this study reveals that women gathered the information on the cuisine from the magazine and expressed themselves through it. By incorporating both learning as well as expression of the self, the act of ordinary cooking became more conscious. In this study, the author discusses the agency of women who composed and renewed themselves dynamically with regard to the roles that they played in their family and the society, thereby emphasizing the act of cooking as a conscious and reflexive practice. In addition, by considering the housewife (shufu) to have become the normative model for Japanese women, this paper also indicates how the housewife norm is related to the image of home cuisine.