Japanese Mothers & Obentos

1. Codes in Japanese Food

1.1. Code of smallness

1.1.1. fragmentation

1.1.2. seperation

1.1.3. bite-sized

1.1.4. multiplicity of de-centered parts

1.2. Oppositional ccde

1.2.1. food is meant to clash!

1.2.2. pink against green

1.2.3. round against angular

1.2.4. smooth next to rough

1.3. Stylizing of Nature Code

1.3.1. recreating the promise ion naturalness

1.3.2. seasonal reminders

1.3.2.1. maple leaf in fall

1.3.2.2. flower in spring

1.3.2.3. glassware in summer

1.3.2.4. pottery in winter

1.3.3. nature made artificial

1.3.4. nearly more perfect than nature

1.4. Pragmatic Code

1.4.1. food is just food in Japan

1.4.2. food is NOT just food in Japan

1.4.3. food --> appropriated as a sign of the culture

1.4.4. rice as symbolically central

2. Ideological State Apparatus

2.1. exert power through ideology

2.2. (ex.) mass media, education, health and welfare

2.3. more influential (in capitalist societies)

2.4. concealing coercion and making routines of everyday familiar, desirable, and simply our own ("our own...?")

3. Education

3.1. knowledge and ideology become fused

3.2. education emerges as the apparatus for pedagogical and ideological indoctrination

3.3. knowledge as socially constructed '

3.4. knowledge as differentially acquired

3.5. state wields enormous control over the systematization of education

3.6. social order

3.7. system of routine

3.8. compulsory education

3.9. rigors of public education

3.10. Post World War II

3.10.1. egalitarian

3.10.2. democratic

3.10.3. no agenda of or for gender differentiation

4. Mother-ing

4.1. preparation

4.2. making food in such a way as to facilitate the child's duty to eat it

4.3. remove fussiness in food habits

4.4. you are what you produce

5. Gendered Division of Labor

5.1. Males

5.1.1. compliant

5.1.2. hard working

5.2. Females

5.2.1. source of cheap labor

5.2.2. forced to pay domestic costs

5.2.3. constrained to low paying pastime jobs

6. What is an Obento?

6.1. "boxed lunch"

6.2. highly crafted elaborations of food

6.2.1. miniature portions

6.2.2. artistically designed

6.2.3. precisely arranged

6.2.4. in cute and sturdy container

6.3. affirmation of "good mother"

6.4. routine, task, and art form of nursery school

6.5. symbolically constructed

6.6. visually attractive

6.7. situates the producer as a woman and mother, and the consume as a child of a mother and student of a school

6.8. Food may not be casual!

6.9. "the one who prepares the food takes on the responsibility of producing food to the standards of perfection and exactness that Japanese cuisine demands" (333).

6.10. eases a chid's discomfiture and allows a child's mother to manufacture something of herself

6.11. attention

6.12. energy

6.13. representation of what the mother is and what the child should become

6.14. MUST BE EATEN!

6.15. Stops once child enters first grade

7. State Apparatus

7.1. power that the state manages and yields through the threat of force

7.2. power of coercion

8. Power

8.1. ideology vs. coercion

9. Manipulation

9.1. using a currency already established

9.2. "food feeds hunger"

9.3. socializing children and mothers into gendered roles and subjectivities

9.4. working and reworking nature

9.5. using a trope of realism

9.6. lines put into mashed potatoes, carrots are flaked, wieners are twisted and sliced.