Paper presented at Sub-theme 22: Tradition, Revision, Critique, the 8th CMS in Manchester, July 10-12, 2013. Please do not cite or quote without the authors' permission. 1 Materiality and Subjectivity of Modern Tradition - A critical analysis of the transformation of modern food tradition - Takaya KAWAMURA Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business, Osaka City University, JAPAN Sugimoto 3-3-138, Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka, 558-8585, Japan E-mail: kawamura@bus.osaka-cu.ac.jp Chisako TAKASHIMA Lecturer, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies 6 Kasame-cho, Saiin, Ukyo-ku, Kyoto, 615-8588 Japan E-mail: t.chisako@gmail.com Introduction This paper analyses the transformation of Japanese food tradition in the 1960s and 1970s as the interactive processes of citizens, food-related organizations, nutrition/health professionals, and the nation-state government. 1 It explores how the “disembedding” (Giddens, 1990) of material activities of food-related organizations concerning raw food producing, processing, distribution, and consumption (cooking and dining), on the one hand, and the transformation of subjectivity and identity of citizens, on the other hand, proceeded in a mutually constitutive relationship, and resulted in (un-intended) drastic changes in the food tradition in a rapidly developing economy. The objective of this historical study is to obtain theoretical and practical implications for critically examining the contemporary “invention” and “re-embedding” of modern food traditions, which needs to be understood both as “rationalization”, “systematization”, and “commodification” of food-related activities that are often proposed and driven by food-related organizations and as the citizens’ subjective processes of “appropriation” (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, and Negus, 1997) of the materiality that those organizations provide. While we see a recent growing interest among Western societies in “Japanese food” as a healthier, and often alleged as a more sophisticated and thus finer, alternative to Western food, Japanese government and food authorities have found it extremely difficult to define “Japanese food tradition” in its attempts to apply for UNESCO World Cultural Heritage. One of difficulties in the attempts of “definition” is that ordinary foods in contemporary Japan are so diverse and “seemingly so different” from what Japanese people used to eat until the 1950s and from “de-facto standard of Japanese food” widely appropriated by Western societies such as Sushi, Sashimi and Tempura. Another difficulty is that if the government and authorities define Japanese food tradition in terms of domestic agricultural produce and sea food to protect domestic agriculture and fishery and to safeguard against cheap foreign (and sometimes genetically modified) produce, it might accelerate the tendency of genuine traditional Japanese food to become finer and more expensive dining. The historical origin of these difficulties, in our understanding, can be found in the 1960s and 1970s of the rapid economic growth. From the perspectives of the institutional approaches to organization studies (Seo and Creed, 2002; Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006; Scott, 2008) and the cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström, 1987), we analyze statistics of food producing, processing, distribution, and consumption in this period as well as extant studies on food tradition and culture in Japan. We especially focus on the changes in vegetable consumption in relation to changes in vegetable producing, processing, and 1 Preliminary findings on the effects of changing culinary practices of Japanese licensed cooks on the transformation of Japanese dietary culture in the 1960s and 1970s are discussed in Kawamura, Takashima, Inoue, Togo, Bitoh, and Yamada (2008) and Kawamura, Takashima, and Inoue (2009).