Japanese Bakery Culture: How Shokupan, Melon Pan, and a Nation of Rice Eaters Fell in Love with Bread

Product Description

Japan is famous for rice. So how did it become a country obsessed with bread?From fluffy shokupan and sweet anpan to melon pan, curry pan, convenience-store sandwiches, and premium bakery loaves, Japan has transformed bread into something unmistakably its own.Japanese Bakery Culture tells the surprising story of how a once-foreign food became part of everyday life.Beginning with Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, the story moves through military ration bread, the invention of anpan, postwar school lunches, American wheat imports, the rise of Japan's industrial baking giants, convenience-store bakeries, regional specialties, bread festivals, home bread machines, disaster-relief bread, and the modern shokupan boom.Along the way, discover:• Why the Japanese word pan comes from Portuguese• How anpan helped make bread appealing to Japanese tastes• Why bread became a fixture of postwar school lunches• The stories behind melon pan, curry pan, yakisoba pan, and fruit sandwiches• How convenience stores became serious competitors to traditional bakeries• Why Kyoto, Kobe, and other cities compete over their bread culture• How Japan turned imported wheat and Western baking techniques into an industry and culture of its ownDrawing on Japanese government statistics, company histories, historical records, and Japanese-language sources, Japanese Bakery Culture separates well-documented history from the legends that have grown around some of Japan's most famous breads.This is not a cookbook. It is a cultural and business history of what happened when a nation built around rice fell in love with bread and then reinvented it.