朝日新聞からの記事だと思うが、IHTを読んでいたら、日本食の話題が出ていて興味深く読んだ。
それによると、映画字幕翻訳者の戸田奈津子さんによれば、ハリウッドスターたちは、みなsushiが好きだという。もちろん、中にはコーラでsushiを洗う人もいますけどと、付け加えているけれど。
とりわけリチャード・ギアは日本食に詳しいという。
1970年代後半にバーバラ・ストライサンドや他の有名人たちがスシブームの火付け役らしい。ロバート・デニーロの日本食レストランのシェフがトークショーに出演したりすることもあったという。
Weekend Beatに面白い記事が載っていたので、以下に引用する。
Weekend Beat: Overseas, it's cool to eat Japanese
02/02/2008
BY SONOKO YOSHINO THE ASAHI SHIMBUN
Japanese food and Japanese cooking ingredients are rapidly becoming worldwide staples. The Japanese food boom that started in Europe is spreading through Asia, Russia, the Middle East--just about everywhere, in fact, where economic growth is accompanied by a rising preoccupation with healthy dining.
A worldwide demand for low-fat, low-calorie cuisine has propelled Japanese cooking into the sort of global prominence long enjoyed by French and Chinese food.
Japanese food culture has cachet. "Cool Japan" is not just manga and anime. Even more than those, perhaps, it is food.
Manga art decorates the ceiling and walls of the "Tokyo Bar" that opened last September in New York. Anime music sets the mood. On the menu are omuraisu (rice omelet) and mentaiko (spiced fish roe) pasta. Japan-style Western food, in the West, passes for Japanese cuisine. "Cool," says America.
There are more than 20,000 Japanese restaurants overseas, according to Japan's agriculture ministry. About 10,000 of them are in North America, where the range extends from first-class cuisine to the more workaday tonkatsu pork cutlets and takoyaki fried octopus dumplings. This is more than a boom. Japanese cooking has at this point become part of the American lifestyle.
This is the same United States where, two decades ago, trade friction fueled by Japanese corporate purchases of U.S. movie companies and New York skyscrapers generated a degree of resentment against Japan. That seems safely in the past for now. Certainly Americans are showing no allergic reactions to Japanese food. On the contrary, its popularity is spawning business opportunities left and right.
Expanding exports represent salvation for domestic makers of sake, soy sauce and other Japanese food products facing slumping sales at home amid an aging and declining population.
Saori Kawano is president of the New York firm Korin, purveyor of Japan-made dishes, kitchen equipment and so on. Kawano, 54, emigrated to the United States in 1978. Working at a Japanese restaurant, she managed to save $2,000--with which, in 1982, she started her business. Her stock ranges from kitchen knives to sushi-making robots. Her current annual turnover, she says, is 1.2 billion yen.
Harry Cheng, a 36-year-old third-generation Chinese born in Japan, set his sights on India, with its rapidly developing economy. Last September, he set up a company in Mumbai selling Japanese food ingredients and condiments. Then he opened an upscale cooking school. He hopes his efforts will help create an Indian demand for Japanese food.
Skilled personnel--sushi chefs are a good example--are another growing export, as Japan's culinary culture spreads abroad.
The Tokyo Sushi Academy in Toshima Ward, Tokyo, offers three-week courses aimed at turning out qualified sushi makers. The course costs more than 430,000 yen.
About 500 aspiring chefs have completed the course since its inauguration in 2002, with 300 of them heading abroad.
One graduate is Hiroki Honda, a 32-year-old former technology firm employee. His plan now is to open a sushi restaurant in Germany. Fellow-graduate Marignac Benoit, a 47-year-old Frenchman, intends to open one in Paris.
Kazuhiro Marumo, 58, runs a London publishing firm specializing in books on Japanese cuisine. "In England, there were maybe 100 Japanese restaurants in 2001," he says. "Now there are at least six times that."
Marumo has published a book featuring Japanese food ingredients. It lists about 100 companies that produce the items. He hands out free samples at local trade fairs.
With local entrepreneurs developing kaitenzushi conveyor-belt sushi chains and similar enterprises, the Japanese food industry is becoming a player in the economic revival of numerous countries and regions.
Healthy eating
What accounts for the worldwide surge in demand for Japanese food? The key factor would seem to be a growing sense, particularly among well-fed Westerners, of the importance of healthy eating habits.
The healthy image of Japanese cuisine dates back to a 1977 U.S. report identifying excessive meat-eating as a prime cause of cancer and heart disease.
In 2005, a U.S. government publication recommended consumption of low-calorie cereals, with fish and vegetable oil cited as the healthiest fat sources.
That was as good as a seal of approval on the rice-, miso soup- and fish-based Japanese diet.
Overseas, Japanese restaurants initially catered to a mostly Japanese clientele. Then, in the late 1970s, came the California roll--a West Coast sushi spin-off consisting of crabmeat and avocado in a roll of rice. It caught on instantly. Even Americans who quailed at the thought of raw fish could warm to this. It yielded a high profit margin besides--and you don't have to be a top sushi chef to prepare it adequately.
It was the beginning of a sushi boom that swept the United States and Europe and produced a spate of Japanese restaurants run by, and appealing to, non-Japanese, with menus striving more to incorporate Japanese culinary themes than to be authentically Japanese in all the details.
In England, stars like singer Madonna and soccer player David Beckham fed the boom after being spotted at top Japanese restaurants. Meanwhile, television began playing up the Japanese diet as a sound defense against obesity.
Meanwhile, what passes abroad for Japanese food might surprise some Japanese. "Until around 1965," notes Japan Women's University professor Chizuko Maruyama, 54, "the meals Japanese people ate at home--main dish, side dishes, miso soup--provided a good nutritional balance that tended to prevent lifestyle diseases. Now, though ..."
Her implication is that the Japanese food boom has stressed image at the expense of content, with health consequences that may be less than salutary.
As you like it
Not only in the West is Japanese cuisine cool. It's no less trendy in Asia and the Middle East.
In 2006, cultural anthropology students at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Hayama, Kanagawa Prefecture, published on the Internet a study titled "Japanese dining goes international, international dining goes Japanese."
Mariko Arata, 44, continuing the study after publication, found in Jakarta a ramen restaurant offering sushi on an all-you-can-eat basis. One of the items was fried prawn wrapped in rice.
Sayaka Naganuma, 31, recalls a meal of salmon sashimi when she lived in Guangzhou, China, where kaitenzushi restaurants typically offer sushi rice topped with fish eggs dyed green, among other colors. One popular item was a Valentine's Day special--a heart-shaped bed of rice topped with orange fish roe and a strawberry. Patrons dipped their sushi in a condiment compounded of soy sauce, salad oil and vast quantities of wasabi.
"Wasabi symbolizes Japanese food. The wasabi in Guangzhou is stronger than ours. If you eat it without flinching, that shows you're cool," Naganuma says.
Big in Israel
Aiko Nishikida, 30, returned from Israel with photographs of a concoction called inari gunkan (flavored boiled rice wrapped in fried bean curd topped with fish roe). "There was this restaurant in Tel Aviv where I found agemakizushi sushi roll fried in sweet-and-sour batter. It's delicious," she says.
In Lebanon, there are more Japanese restaurants than Chinese. In Jordan, Japanese dining is becoming a regular indulgence among the well-to-do.
"In Thailand, Japanese food is considered healthy--you see plates piled high with wasabi," Hisashi Ogawa, 32, says.
Shabu-shabu sauce and ramen soup are flavored with sugar, vinegar and pepper. Of Vietnam, Mariko Sato, 32, says, "The Japanese restaurants in Hanoi hotels used to be mostly for Japanese parties. Now they're full of Vietnamese businessmen."
In Taiwan, it was the leading Japanese convenience store, Family Mart, that paved the way. It began its expansion into Asia there in 1988, helping to accustom local palates to Japanese food. Since then many Japanese restaurants have opened.
In South Korea, you'll find tuna wrapped in rice and nori (dried seaweed), flavored with kimchi and mayonnaise. In Shanghai a Japanese food hit is large onigiri (rice balls) filled with peppered pork. In Guangdong, taste buds are set aflutter by curry-flavored oden hot pot.
In Thailand, oden is served in one of two kinds of soup--one seasoned with a local fish sauce and katsuobushi (dried bonito shavings), the other with a special sour and spicy condiment called tom yam kung. And naruto and crab kamaboko (fish paste) is served on a spit.
TINSEL TOWN GOES GAGA FOR SUSHI
"Hollywood stars all love sushi," declares Natsuko Toda, the well-known writer of Japanese subtitles for English-language movies. "Of course," she adds wryly, "some of them wash it down with cola."
And not only sushi. Soba and udon noodles also claim their Hollywood aficionados.
Toda singles out actor Richard Gere as being particularly knowledgeable when it comes to Japanese food.
Among the prime movers of the Japanese cuisine boom have been U.S. singers and actors. According to conventional wisdom, what the stars eat the rest of us want to eat, and the stars discovered Japanese food a long time ago.
"In the late 1970s, Barbra Streisand and other celebrities began frequenting sushi restaurants," says Yasushi Ikezawa, 72, publisher from 1991 to 2006 of the U.S. trade publication Japanese Restaurant News. "That's when sushi became fashionable and trendy."
"Popular TV talk show hosts started talking up sushi on their programs," Tomiko Hirose, 80, a New York resident since 1958, says. "When the chef at Robert De Niro's Japanese restaurant makes an appearance on a show like that, it has an enormous impact."(IHT/Asahi: February 2,2008)
