ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how and why Western-style wine became incorporated into the Japanese culinary system. It studies how tastes and notions of taste pairing are used by culinary producers to reconstruct elements of Japanese cuisine. After washoku gained recognition as the world’s intangible cultural heritage, Japanese cuisine was deployed as a way of enhancing national prestige. This chapter illustrates how cuisine has become a kind of state-led national politics. This analysis of wine and Japanese foods (washoku) provides insights into a type of non-state culinary politics while also telling the story of how wine is paired with Japanese foods. Western wine is chosen and used to frame Japanese foods in very specific ways to say something about the distinctive and fine qualities of Japanese foods.
