Washoku

The classic home meal follows the pattern ichijū sansai: a bowl of rice, one soup and three side dishes, with pickles on the side. Rice is the centre; the word gohan means both cooked rice and 'meal'. The side dishes are chosen to vary ingredient and technique, so that something raw or vinegared sits beside something simmered and something grilled.

Each person has their own rice and soup bowl, and dishes are served in individual portions rather than on one shared platter. Rice is placed on the diner's left, soup on the right, and chopsticks lie horizontally in front, tips to the left.

Washoku is organised around shun, the moment when an ingredient is at its best. Cooks distinguish the first appearance of a food (hashiri), its peak (sakari) and its last days (nagori), and a menu may play on all three. Bamboo shoots and sea bream mark spring, eel and summer vegetables the hot months, matsutake mushrooms and Pacific saury the autumn, and yellowtail and root vegetables the winter.

The season also shapes the table: glass and pale ceramics in summer, heavier lacquer and earthenware in winter, and garnishes of leaves or flowers that echo the time of year. Food is arranged with empty space around it and served in many small vessels of different shapes, so that the eye is part of the meal.

Traditional Japanese cooking relies on few fats and on the savoury depth of umami. Dashi, a broth of kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (dried bonito), is the base of soups and simmered dishes. Soybeans appear in many forms: soy sauce, miso, tofu, deep-fried tofu and natto. Fish and seaweed are central in a country with a long coastline, while meat was little eaten for over a thousand years under Buddhist influence and only became common after the Meiji Restoration.

Seasoning is restrained so that the ingredient itself leads. Typical techniques are simmering (nimono), grilling (yakimono), steaming (mushimono), deep-frying (agemono) and serving raw (sashimi) or dressed with vinegar (sunomono) or sesame (aemono).

Several formal styles grew out of court, temple and warrior culture. Honzen ryōri, the banquet cuisine of the samurai elite in the Muromachi period, served food on several individual trays in strict order. Shōjin ryōri, the vegetarian cooking of Buddhist temples, developed with Zen and uses tofu, wheat gluten, vegetables and seaweed instead of meat or fish. Kaiseki began as the simple meal before a tea ceremony and became the most refined form of Japanese dining.

The UNESCO listing highlights the New Year, when families eat osechi ryōri, an assortment of symbolic dishes packed in stacked lacquer boxes, and zōni, a soup with rice cake. Zōni shows how regional washoku is: in the Kanto region it usually has square, grilled mochi in a clear broth, while in the Kyoto area round mochi are simmered in white miso.

Every region has its own dishes and preserved foods, from the salmon and kelp of Hokkaido to the refined Kyō-ryōri of Kyoto. Okinawa, once the Ryukyu Kingdom, has a distinct cuisine with more pork and Chinese and Southeast Asian influence.