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Paper short abstract

What is Japanese food？Why do people eat it? Across restaurants in London and Cairo, we explore the experiences of producing and consuming Japanese food. We explore how cuisines are constructed and contested through questions of morality, class, and global power relations in postcolonial contexts.

Paper long abstract

This paired ethnography explores how Japanese cuisine becomes a ‘consumed belonging’ through which questions of morality, class, and global power relations are contested across classed postcolonial contexts. Drawing on comparative ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London and Cairo, alongside analyses of menus, restaurant design, table interactions, and online reviews, we trace how authenticity, purity, and cultural authority are produced before, during, and after the meal. In London, diners frequently ask staff, “Is this real Japanese food?” signalling their pursuit of an “authentic” experience of Japan. The fact that the restaurant is vegan also means that this pursuit is entangled with other forms of ethical consumption. We examine how Japan becomes staged as a heritage object that must be authenticated, with staff serving as gatekeepers of this imagined essence. Drawing on Said’s Orientalism, we explore how this desire for a pure Japan reflects a classed form of cultural authority, through which the Global North produces Japan as a coherent and morally legible object of consumption. In an upscale Japanese restaurant in Cairo, Japanese cuisine becomes a marker of elite distinction and cosmopolitan aspiration, where authenticity is defined by curated ingredients, refined service, and high prices. Ethical claims are less explicitly articulated, and access to “real” Japanese food serves as a status symbol. Across both sites, purity and authenticity are not inherent but performed, classed practices embedded in the afterlives of colonial domination. Food becomes a contested heritage object through which consumers ingest and reproduce global inequalities, even under ethical and cosmopolitan frameworks.