%0 Journal Article
%T The Japanese Restaurant as an Exotic Genre: A Study of Culinary Providers¡¯ Practices and Dialogues in Melbourne
%A Iori Hamada
%J New Voices : A Journal for Emerging Scholars of Japanese Studies in Australia and New Zealand
%D 2011
%I The Japan Foundation, Sydney
%X This article examines a new mode of ¡®Japaneseness¡¯ emerging through increasing cross-cultural exchanges and interactions since the late twentieth century. Based upon ethnographic data and fieldwork, it demonstrates how Japaneseness is reconfigured through contact with other forms such as ¡®whiteness¡¯ within popular commodity culture. The article analyses the Japanese restaurant in Melbourne as an ¡®exotic genre¡¯ within which the new mode of Japaneseness is informed and constructed. It argues that this mode of the exotic can be distinguished from earlier formations of exoticism that unproblematically locate a subject monolithically within narrow stereotypes, although the old exoticism has not entirely disappeared. Rather than viewing the Japanese restaurant as a cohesive category, this study conceives of it as a cross-culturally implicated formation that challenges a fixed representation of Japaneseness constructed from a single point of view.
%K Japanese restaurants
%K Australia
%K cross-cultural representation
%K Japaneseness
%K exoticism
%U http://pdf.jpf-sydney.org/newvoices/5/chapter4.pdf