Written by Kaho Miyata
- Japanese
- currently living in Tokyo, Japan
Dining table
Sitting at table, cutting a homemade cake, having a pleasant chat, opening gift boxes ― whenever I look back on my childhood, it is a scene of my birthday that gives me a little happiness. A dining table is the only place in the house where all family members face each other. Each member has a fixed place, not strictly inviolable, but if I sit at my fatherʼs place, I feel something special. It is not clear when and how the seat was determined but Iʼm sure precedence was not concerned because because it was I who sit in the seat of honor, kamiza . I was always at a special seat , the best place to watch a television and my motherʼs cooking. The family rules become implied consent and daily necessities without realizing. Now then, such a symbolic memory of close-knit family is an individual one, but similar image can be observed in society where people share experiences that form their memory. A historical survey of Japanese family leads me to believe family is vague concept, sometimes only an illusion, but that is all the more reason to make home sweet home.
When you search by image with ikka-danran (happy family get-together) as a key, the term gets many pictures of 4 to 7 family members sitting around one dining table. For the Japanese people growing up after World War II, Sazae-san (a serial comics started at 1946, a TV animation started at 1969) is a familiar symbol of family. However, such an impression about family was molded by government and people after the Meiji era, and continues to undergo a change.
To begin with, the words family or home were introduced to Japan by theelites in Meiji and new words ie (house) and katei (home) were coined. And katei which is originally a translated word from home attracted considerable attention and got a new meaning after the war. Iʼd like to define family as modern family in this essay: a family put emphasis on autonomy and rapport in modern society. This modern family appeared on the partial high social class since the latter half of the 19th century, Taisho Democracy made it widely known among new middle class, and in a postwar period, people at large longed for it thanks to admiration for the lifestyle of American occupation army.
When Japan was a closed country, people traditionally had meals separately using a serving tray with legs, zen , but liberal bureaucratic elites focused on the Western dining; family members get together and have meals at the same place. The elites took up a dining table as a place for family training and claimed its importance on newspapers and magazines in the waves of modernization. Japanese family started to change from vertical organization putting a father at the top into a horizontal one. Most importantly, clear meal location awoke people to the mothersʼ role of preparing meals and then the patriarchal social system began to collapse.
Living on my own, I really miss my momʼs cooking although not particularly deluxe cuisine. My family ancestrally lives in a small nameless country town and we assume that we follow a Japanese precedent, but our Japanese tradition may be a hybrid of European and American views on the family. I wonder if everyone has a memorable nostalgic taste regardless of nationality. My stomach starts to rumble.
（Kaho Miyata / 宮田佳歩）
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