At first glance, tea, beer, and ramen seem linked only by the act of consumption. They did not develop at the same time or in the same specific region, are not consumed at the same times (one can sometimes purchase beer at a ramen-ya, but when associated with beer, ramen is usually consumed after drinking), and satisfy different emotional and physical needs. Yet these three edibles have more in common than they are different. Nationalism, acculturation, identity, and modernity link these stories in unexpected ways. Each of these concepts is a complex idea with contested meanings. It therefore is not surprising that these constructs generate the diverse variety of approaches represented in these three books.

Beer is such an essential part of social interaction in Japan that one cannot imagine any sort of celebratory gathering without it. Although there is certainly a vague awareness of the Western origins of beer, the way it is consumed and its role in social situations are much more akin to the traditional consumption of sake, adapted to new drinking situations as an outcome of modernity. The first breweries were in the treaty ports run by Westerners, primarily for Westerners. Like beef, its consumption first spread gradually to Japanese elites, then to common consumption, and ultimately became naturalized. This is the story outlined by Jeffrey Alexander in Brewed in Japan.

The book is organized chronologically, spanning the years from 1868 until today in order to, as the title of the brief introduction states, examine “Beer's Evolution into a Japanese Commodity.” As Alexander himself points out, he is “primarily a business historian, and this book is chiefly an industry and product history” (p. 5). Within this narrow confine, Alexander has provided a detailed and thorough accounting of the beer industry in Japan. Alexander also touches lightly on relevant corollaries such as the growth of advertising, women and drinking, leisure, and other social movements. It is important for a writer, especially one tackling such a broad topic, to maintain focus or risk losing one's way in a mass of information. Indeed, non-expert readers will find the clearly written, straightforward presentation easy to navigate and understand. Nevertheless, an occasional foray into the extraneous would have made a more compelling presentation. For example, many references were made to the need to adapt, improve, or update technology, but details about the kinds of technologies needed or the difficulties in acquiring them were rarely provided. Similarly, people get only passing treatment and exist merely as names. Perhaps biographical material is not available or necessary for all figures in the beer business, but the colorful life of Thomas Glover (1818–1911), for example, involved far more than merely being an advisor to Mitsubishi. Providing some pertinent biographical information might have made for a livelier narrative better connected to larger historical trends.

After the brief introduction, chapter 1 looks at the origins of beer brewing in Japan, covering the years from 1868 to 1906. In addition to documenting the first Western brewers, it details Japanese drinking customs and the main players in future chapters, Kirin and Sapporo. It also explores the important connection with Meidiya as a distributor and Kirin, the linkage of German beer with quality, and the tariffs and price wars that led to industry consolidation and import substitution. This chapter makes clear that Alexander's comfort level as a historian lies in the twentieth century, as there is a heavier reliance on shashi (vanity press company histories) and a variety of small missteps. For example, there is a discussion of amazake as a drinking custom. Although this does translate literally as “sweet sake,” amazake is a fermented rice drink of very low or no alcoholic content drunk even by children (especially on Girls Day), much like ginger beer. Other lapses include the citation of an article as the work of the editor of the volume in which it appeared.Footnote ¹⁰ Chapter 2 covers the years from 1906 to 1936, when the effects of World War II began to impact beer production. This chapter shows the increase in consumption, the struggles to create an effective business model for a new industry and rapidly changing environment, the rapacious practices that were employed, and the formation of a beer cartel to halt competition that ultimately resulted in the downfall of smaller companies. It is in the third chapter on the wartime beer economy (1937–45) in which Alexander really hits his stride. This chapter covers the fascinating story of beer in a time of severe deprivation. He examines the growth of self-sufficiency in hops, forced consolidation and production, beer in Japan's colonies, and the importance of beer tax revenues that allowed beer production to continue even through the darkest days of the war. According to Alexander, it was this wartime forced self-sufficiency in the production of the raw ingredients of beer that brought about the evolution of beer into “a thoroughly domestic consumer product” (p. 238). Chapter 4 investigates the rapid recovery of the beer industry even as starvation was endemic. It was raw material shortages that led to the separation from German influence and new, lighter recipes. Chapter 5 offers a parallel case study of Orion Beer of Okinawa, where US occupation lasted until 1972. Alexander notes the parallels but does not explore them. Chapter 6 surveys recent innovations in the beer industry, such as Asahi Super Dry and the new craft brew trend. A short conclusion provides a bulleted list of the arguments found within the book.

The appendix of Japanese beer brands from 1869 to 1949 will be invaluable for future research on beer, as will the rather misnamed “glossary.” This latter section contains a list of weights and measures, the major Japanese breweries, lists of various manufacturers and distributors, lists of other relevant private associations and government offices, and a chronological list of laws and prohibitions related to beer.

Alexander privileges acculturation over other themes latent in the discussion, such as nationalism and identity. He does not draw greater comparisons, either within Japan or other regions. Moreover, he rarely steps beyond empirical bounds to draw larger conclusions. He has, however, provided a solid, well-documented foundation for those who wish to make comparisons, given insight into the workings of monopolies, and elucidated how beer became such an important component of Japanese social consumption.

The history of tea in Japan is substantially longer than that of beer or ramen. Indeed, so thoroughly incorporated into Japanese culture has it become that it is easy to forget that it is not indigenous. Its first importation is often attributed either to the monk Saichō (767–822, founder of Tendai Buddhism) or Kūkai (774–835, founder of Shingon Buddhism), but the first documentary reference is to their contemporary, Eichū (743–816), who served tea he had grown from Chinese seeds to Emperor Saga in 815. More relevant to the study of tea ceremony is Eisai (1141–1215, founder of Rinzai Zen), who actually brought back the powdered tea product, known in Japanese as matcha, that is most commonly used in tea ceremony and was instrumental in its diffusion. Even though tea drinking did not spread to common consumption for around another half a millennium, tea had a long time to take root in Japan.

In Making Tea, Making Japan, Kristin Surak combines sociological and anthropological methodologies to understand the place of tea ceremony in the Japanese, and by cognizant design, Western consciousness. She seeks to explore the acculturation of tea practice as an expression of nationalism. Surak has the most fully articulated definition of nationalism of these three books. In her densely theoretical introduction, she acknowledges that tea is a part of a “cultural matrix” (p. 18) that includes other arts like ikebana, but nevertheless emphasizes tea to the exclusion of other potential parallels such as martial arts and Noh theater. She distinguishes between “nationalism” and “nation-work,” the latter defined as “the labor of identifying the nation,” and that distinction provides a bridge between ideology and process (p. 3). It is in the utilization of these terms that Surak seeks to make a case for the study of tea ceremony as a specific example of nation-work with international comparative potential. Surak's is an interdisciplinary approach, combining sociology and anthropology, much like that of Pierre Bourdieu. This methodology is a strength, yet is uncomfortable at times, as the book veers between the theoretic to extremely finite descriptions of architecture, or from institution to individual performance.

After this introductory theoretical framework, chapter 1 covers the topics traditionally associated with tea ceremony, including a detailed description of a tea space in Tokyo and other locations, the conventions involved, how the objects play into the performance, and the importance of connoisseurship as part of this process. Surak concludes that tea ceremony is “a pediment of Japanese culture, a rope tying the present to the past” that “secures its position as a part of national identity” (p. 55). Chapter 2 provides a brief and admittedly incomplete historical overview from its origins in China to its connections with political power, its adoption by the state, and its incorporation into women's education. Surak notes tea's “associations not just with beauty, but with power” (p. 68). There is an interesting distinction between “warrior tea” and “merchant tea” that warrants further exploration as a modern as well as a historical distinction because it impacted the adoption of tea as a national symbol. This section supplies an evolutionary diagram to how tea was acculturated to represent “Japaneseness,” including the nationalism of Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō), transmitter of the tea ceremony to the West with The Book of Tea (1906). Chapter 3 is a sociological examination of the iemoto, literally “head of house” system of genealogy and hierarchy used in the arts. Although one of the shorter chapters, this section is nevertheless significant because the secretive nature of iemoto means that little academic work about them exists. It is also this chapter that fully links the study of the institution of tea ceremony to Surak's definition of nation-work. Chapter 4 is more anthropological, describing the performative nature of contemporary practice and the people who practice the ceremony today. It is sprinkled with descriptions and quotes from tea practitioners. The final chapter offers a comparative perspective, examining modern Japanese views of tea ceremony as an outcome of nationalism. Surak sees parallels in German music and gymnastics movements. These comparisons seem a little off-key, however, because neither are they new in the literature of nationalism, nor do they integrate well with the rest of the book.

Few primary sources are to be found in the extensive bibliography. Surak balances this to some extent with her own experiences of more than ten years as a practitioner, a primary source of a sort. This access into the world of tea also gives her great insight into the actions and motivations of practitioners. The central argument of Making Tea may not in and of itself be surprising to experts on Japan, but it is an argument that has not been explicitly made, and this makes it a valuable contribution not just to the vast literature on tea, but to the larger literature on modernity in Japan and nationalism in general. Most of the book is written in clear language suitable for a variety of expert and non-expert audiences.

If tea ceremony became a nationalistic symbol of Japan, ramen, with similarly Chinese origins, became a national food of the people (kokuminshoku). Like tea ceremony, ramen has ties to China but has taken on a completely Japanese persona. Ramen is also significantly different from either beer or tea in that its consumption did not spread from the elites to the masses but rather it was a filling cheap food that has been taken over by gourmets in a way that involves almost as much connoisseurship as tea ceremony. In The Untold History of Ramen, George Solt does not explicitly claim to write a social history, but it is implicit in his focus on labor. As Solt concludes, “Ramen is … a proxy for important aspects of social change in modern Japan” (p. 186). Nevertheless, Solt also occasionally adopts a top-down approach, examining, for example, US government records and Nissin Foods. To accomplish this, he uses a wide variety of source material, from films and literature to new media. Like the authors of the other books discussed in this review, Solt has made his topic approachable for the non-expert, but maintained academic standards. However, it is unfortunate that Solt nor, for that matter, Alexander or Surak (or perhaps it was their publishers) has seen fit to include a character glossary, an important academic research tool.

In the short introduction to The Untold History of Ramen, Solt defines ramen as a wheat noodle cooked in kansui (sodium bicarbonate) served in a broth (shiru) with a “seasoning sauce” (tare) like soy sauce or miso (p. 3). Important to future researchers is his categorization of the extensive literature on ramen into eight different types, as it provides a sensible way to approach what otherwise might be an overwhelming amount of material. Chapter 1 begins with the questions: What is ramen? Where did it come from? Like beer in Japan, the origins of ramen are in the treaty ports. Solt points out that the history of ramen is “messy” (p. 5), and that there are a number of origin stories that suggest earlier or later introduction. Determining origin also depends on how ramen is defined, because it presents a great variety of forms. Nevertheless, the proliferation of Chinese cooks in the treaty ports seems a solid point of antecedent. Solt traces the rise of shina soba (Chinese noodles) as a fast, cheap, and nutritious food for the new proletariat (not a word Solt uses but nevertheless describes), made possible by those very factories that created a proletariat through cheaper mass-produced noodles. Solt uses a variety of sources, including literature, to grasp the history of the ephemera of a food that was too low-class and too common to be taken note of in contemporary government documents or newspapers. Chapter 2 makes clear that the real birth of ramen, one that transcended social class, was during the US occupation from 1945 to 1952. The combination of limited food production, American regional and domestic politics, and American agricultural policy led a starving populace to shift fundamental dietary practices, greatly increasing wheat consumption. Chapter 4 links the postwar economic boom and the rapid growth of the construction industry, especially in public works projects, with the need for a quick, calorie-rich lunch for the builders. At the same time, Solt discusses the rise of convenience food and instant ramen that modern office workers and students demanded. Chapter 5 looks at the nostalgia associated with ramen and how this led to its championing by celebrity chefs and local tourism campaigns. Chapter 5, appropriately titled “Flavor of the Month,” explains the globalization of ramen and its popularity in the West. In the conclusion, Solt places ramen within business history, explaining that one strength of the ramen shop in Japan is the large number of independent owners, which has kept it from being taken over by iemoto like tea or cartels like beer.

The acculturation of foods is not new; look at the capsicum chili in Asia, or the potato in Europe. However, the question of Japanese identity (called Nihonjinron) is one that many Japanese grapple with in a much more widespread and immediate way than is the case for most North Americans. Neither tea, nor beer, nor ramen are originally indigenous to Japan, but they have each been inculcated into Japanese life in a way that offers insight into this phenomenon of identity. The histories of beer and ramen tell of how dramatically the Second World War affected consumption habits, while tea ceremony took on much of its contemporary character as an indirect result of the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Thus, tea ceremony and ramen, with roots in China, and beer, molded by German brewers, are now deeply ingrained in Japanese culture. These cases studies make one aware of the politics of food and the profound influence they can have on the culture of consuming.