Over the last forty years, Japanese cuisine has had an oversized influence on fine dining in the United States. Chefs cooking at celebrated American restaurants are now freely using Japanese ingredients, condiments, culinary techniques, and concepts, and the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, the leading culinary school in the country, now offers a concentration in Japanese cuisine. This lecture will describe in some detail this “Japanese turn” and argue that this contemporary culinary movement toward Japan is comparable to the Japanese influence on European and American art and architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and may be another important Japanese moment in American cultural history.

Samuel Yamashita is the Henry E. Sheffield Professor at Pomona College, where he has taught Asian history since 1983. He began his scholarly career as a Confucian specialist and published Master Sorai’s Responsals, an English translation of a political treatise written for an eighteenth-century shogun, in 1995. In the 1990s he turned to the Asia Pacific War, and the result was Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese and Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. Turning to food in 2009, he published Hawai’i Regional Cuisine: The Food Movement That Changed the Way Hawai’i Eats in 2019. He is currently finishing three book projects on food: an anthology of the writings of kaiseki chefs in Japan, a study of the new hyperlocal cuisines that appeared along the Pacific Rim in this century, and a history of Japanese food.