Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue

the japanese lessons we refuse to learn

food

by FRANÇOIS SIMON

 

The French traveler, food critic, and author François Simon has been writing about every aspect of food for decades. His instagram account is a reference for any foodie.

 

It’s worth pausing to reflect on our relationship with Japan. If ever there were shifting sands, these are they. Anyone who approaches Japan and attempts to describe it often ends up buried under a layer of ash and criticism. Even Roland Barthes, in his remarkable Empire of Signs (1970), drew disdain from certain specialists in Japanese culture. The brilliant Nicolas Bouvier, with his empathetic, almost dolorous lens (The Japanese Chronicles, 1967, initially titled Japan), faced similar reproach. It seems that Westerners, perhaps wisely, prefer to confine Japan within a sublime no comprendo, perpetuating misunderstandings and half-truths with tireless enthusiasm. After all, the idea of never fully grasping the “real” Japan is oddly reassuring, allowing us to remain in a romanticized periphery. “French people,” observes Chihiro Masui, writer and culinary author, “are fascinated by what they don’t understand. They deliberately maintain distance to construct their admiration — or their incomprehension. Take haikus, for example. In translation, we appreciate their compact and profoundly poetic form. Yet, we avoid engaging with the Japanese version. What we love about haikus in Japan is their musicality, the play of phonemes, the 5/7/5 rhythm…”

What about Japanese cuisine? The omakase menu has become a bane of French restaurants. Broadly speaking, omakase means “I leave it to you” or “I trust you.” In Japan, this grants the chef the freedom to craft a bespoke menu. The problem in France, however, is that the chef often takes this as a license to retreat into a narcissistic bubble. Safely ensconced in the kitchen, away from the diners’ gaze, the chef plows ahead, cleaning out the fridge with furrowed brows, having all but forgotten the customer.

In Japan, the customer is in front of the chef. Right away, the chef can gauge the diner’s nature and expectations. Each person has a different appetite, with a unique rhythm to their meal. In France, when the chef takes charge, they let go of your hand entirely, asserting control over you with their own pace and ceremonial style — often a glacial, regal one, as though embodying their undeniable talent and near-divine inspiration. And then, like a tropical downpour, a flurry of tiny dishes might suddenly rain down upon you.

The same goes for the approach to raw fish. Often, in France, we don’t want to step outside our own language and certainties: fish are thought to have little flavor; they are considered “bland” unless paired with béarnaise sauce, gravlax, white butter, tarragon, olive oil, or lemon. And yet, raw fish with its subtle murmurs should carry us on an astonishing journey — one of nuance and delicacy, where we learn to discern the differences between a sole and a dab (so slight), a scallop and a squid, a sea bass and a loup (there is none!), and so on. We enter a delightful world full of marvels. Escaping the notion of blandness pulls us out of our natural laziness and refusal to understand. It broadens our palette of flavors, just as Japanese music does. When blandness becomes a new companion, as it does in Japan, we’ve crossed a frontier.

Another universe is the world of sound in Japan. Western restaurants have a vehement relationship with sound. Speech is thrown about loudly, as though to establish territory, with its encroachments and reclaiming. It feels like a kind of existential jolt, something vital. Talking a lot and talking loudly, as though taking revenge for the days where one must stay silent, hold one’s tongue, obey. Restaurants then become this recess, joined even by servers, who overplay their haste with hurried movements and shouted orders. It creates the din we love so much, that massages our backs even as it knots them. Noise becomes an accelerator, inviting wine, a slap on the shoulder. Voices overlap, feeding on their own amplitude.

Japanese restaurants offer a different experience. Some may smile, recalling epic late-night escapades over there where distortion and abandon sweep away the senses. But let us, if you will, return to the early hours of the evening. Already, the street, the door, the brush of the noren at the entrance — these are signals of calm, of deceleration. You’ll notice that the ear finally awakens. It unfurls its antennae. Having been prudently folded away throughout the day, only to stretch out by nightfall, it now blooms. The gliding footsteps on wood, the sliding partitions, the whispered conversations. It is a moment of clarity and purity. The body feels in communion; touch becomes its faith. The softness of the wood, the chopsticks, the lighting. The precision of materials. Without realizing it, we enter the cosmic dimension of sustenance. For a moment, one might even sense the gentle friction of the Earth moving through the Milky Way.

When the dishes arrive and are set down, there emerges a strong perception, one that converses with emotion. The softened gaze, the civilized fluttering of eyelashes. Hands rediscovering their shyness, their tentative suspension. And the ear, too, begins seeking its nourishment, its sustenance. It might even catch the murmur of the rice, the final song of the fish, the glissando of the sake. Some Buddhist cuisine restaurants, like Daiko, near the legendary Okura Tokyo hotel, serve dishes that not only are visually stunning — such as sesame tofu, a pea consommé with lily root, or a mountain mushroom porridge — but also adhere to the canons of the genre: grace and softness, specifically to avoid making noise. During their stays at the Okura, Yoko Ono and John Lennon adored this restaurant.

The “verbal spinning top” stops, as Roland Barthes once put it: “Japan is not so much a mysterious country as a mystifying one. The imagination unfolds in circles, through detours, and returns along an empty subject. It’s not about crushing language under the mystical silence of the ineffable, but about measuring it, about halting this verbal spinning top, which, in its whirl, pulls along the obsessive play of symbolic substitutions.”

This “fascination with strangeness” (Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia, 1933) that we feel for Japan seems like a journey within a journey. We travel to this country to find within ourselves a kind of autofiction, to discover unknown lands within. In a place that lets us glide across its surface, we find ourselves in a temple with one of the keys to inner exploration, standing before Buddha. Nicolas Bouvier describes it as a “face glowing with mischief and radiating compassion.” In Japan, one must relinquish everything, rediscover a childlike innocence, forget one’s tastes and bearings, and embark weightlessly. It becomes an opportunity to reconnect with oneself.

But what, then, of Japan — of the real Japan? “I wonder if this narrative constructed by the West isn’t counterproductive,” Chihiro Masui reflects. “We often attribute profound depth to the Japanese, which isn’t entirely wrong, but their lives are much more grounded. People in the West admire their sense of cleanliness with boundless reverence. Certainly, that exists — but visit certain subway stations in Shinjuku, step into certain diners,
or simply enter some private homes, and you’ll be surprised. In summer, Japan is hot and humid, and people sweat — far from the pristine image we like to maintain here in Europe.”

END

[Table of contents]

Purple #43 S/S 2025 The Tokyo Diary Issue

Table of contents

© Purple Institute

Subscribe to our newsletter