The emergence of western culture throughout the world has had longstanding effects on non-western communities. More specifically, the impacts of the vast spreading western culture has been reflected in Japanese culture since the early 1950s. From Yasujiro Ozu films to the development of fast-paced cities, westernized modernity has had implicit effects on Japan’s native culture with negative and positive impacts being difficult to distinguish. These effects, however, are clearly portrayed as good or bad in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats. In her novel, Ozeki utilizes a nonlinear storyline to depict the attitudes of three intertwining women characters who are all products of the relationship between Japanese and American culture. These characters are comprised of an American woman, a Japanese woman, and a Japanese American woman. Ozeki deploys meat as a commonality between these women and displays the hardships that accompany a culture when it is involuntarily imposed on one’s life. Even more so, Ozeki reveals an added layer of pressure that modernization has on women.
The beginning of the novel introduces Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese American gender non-conformist woman that works on My American Wife, a show aired in Japan. Its purpose is to represent American families in a positive light that will encourage Japanese families to eat meat. While the show’s layout is meant to portray the honest, everyday routine of an American wife, Jane becomes uncomfortable when she knows the producers ultimately prioritize what will sell over truth. Jane is a clear indicator of the issues that are entailed with involuntarily modernizing a person or culture. Her thoughts and actions reflect guilt and remorse, which derive from her feeling responsible for exploiting American women in addition to knowing that the show spreads a fictionalized image of American families to an eager Japanese audience. Akiko Ueno, a Japanese woman whose husband forces her to watch My American Wife, sees Suzie Flowers, a woman on the show. By seeing how “perfect” the characters on My American Wife seem to be, Akiko’s husband (who goes by “John” because of its western nature) yearns for he and Akiko to become increasingly like them. If only he knew that Suzie Flowers’ smile covered a life filled with a condescending husband that cheated on her, he might have reconsidered pressuring Akiko to conform to the ideology and symbolism of an American wife. By creating a fake depiction of all-American families who love meat, modernity is unnaturally imposed on the Japanese culture.
Ozeki’s novel successfully unveils the adversities that modernity has on a traditional culture. She juxtaposes the lives of the dominant culture with the lives of the inferior culture. With this juxtaposition comes the realization that women in both cultures fill a subordinate role in their homes to their husbands. Ozeki exhibits the hardships that Akiko faces for not fulfilling her husband’s desire for her to adapt as an “American wife.” Suzie Flowers severely lacks content for her life and marriage, yet the artificial portrayal of her on My American Wife conceals that. With backgrounds in both heritages, Jane Takagi-Little symbolizes the issues of modernity and the awkward position it has placed women into. The false illustration of American families instills an untrue message of how Japanese families should behave. This manipulates the process of modernization and ultimately reveals the dysfunctional aspects of both cultures.
Close Reading Paper #1, By Jack Harrison
food and foodies in japan 