Nearly everything about South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s first summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo will be scrutinized for signs of warmer bilateral ties, including a shared meal of a Tokyo classic called omurice.
The dish, whose name is a mash-up of omelet and rice, has become the talk of the town since Japan’s Fuji TV reported on Monday of a hushed plan for Kishida to treat Yoon at Rengatei, the storied but no-frills restaurant that invented it.
Yoon, a self-described foodie and avid cook, reportedly had “unforgettable” memories of the omurice he ate in his youth at the 128-year-old establishment in Tokyo’s Ginza district. He made frequent trips to the Japanese capital in 1966 while his father, a university professor, spent a year there, he told the Yomiuri daily.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Japanese and South Korean officials have declined to confirm the plan or venue, while Rengatei, famed as the birthplace of omurice in 1900, declined to comment.
Although many foreigners might associate Japanese cuisine with sushi or tempura, yoshoku, or Western-influenced dishes such as omurice and tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet), are more common fare on Japanese dinner tables.
Yoshoku is a genre of Japanese cuisine established more than a century ago, and some made its way to South Korea in the 1960s as ethnic Koreans traveled between the two countries, said Motoo Kawabata, a professor at Kwansei Gakuin University who specializes in Japanese restaurants’ global strategy.
Kishida and Yoon will reportedly share a more formal dinner of sukiyaki beforehand, but the real ice-breaker could be when they sit down for omurice, Kawabata said. Japan and South Korea are holding a summit for the first time in 12 years, seeking to mend relations that had deteriorated severely.
“It could be an effort to foster a laid-back mood, through a casual dish that both Japanese and Koreans consider comfort food,” he said.
Rengatei’s price for its omurice: 2,600 yen (US$19.57).
Kawabata said the omurice in South Korea typically has a thinner and firmer layer of eggs, while the image of a perfectly crafted one in Japan has a fluffy, runny, almond-shaped covering of eggs that blanket the ketchup-fried rice.
“Yoon may have been impressed with the softness of Japanese-style omurice,” Kawabata said.
Although Rengatei’s original dish mixed the egg batter in with the rice, the omurice as Japanese people know it today was conceived for and popularized in the 1985 Juzo Itami film Tampopo, a critically acclaimed meditation on food and one of Japan’s best known movies.
Hiroshi Modegi, the third-generation owner chef of Taimeiken, which appears in the film, said he was disappointed that his restaurant was not the president’s choice, but welcomed the renewed attention on omurice.
“I hope the world discovers that Japanese food culture also has a dish like this,” he said.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS