Excerpt: Irrelevant perhaps, but food reveals much about a country and its people and there is no better way to gauge Japan’s socioeconomic body temperature than by taking a snapshot of the lunch scene amid the global financial turmoil.
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Japanese business lunch
By Kimiko Barber
Published: November 8 2008 00:35 | Last updated: November 8 2008 00:35
Gahhh ... this is terrible, really awful. I don’t feel like lunch anymore,” gasped one. “Yah, I’ve lost my appetite too,” agreed another. “Oh, come on guys, you can’t fight a battle on an empty stomach,” said a third man. Yet, like bystanders at a gruesome accident scene, the grimfaced trio were unable to tear themselves away from a giant electronic share price screen posted a stone’s-throw from the Tokyo Stock Exchange. It had been a pretty grisly week in Tokyo, but the morning of Friday 10 October 2008 will go down as one of the worst in memory. On the eve of the G7 meeting in Washington, morning trading at the Tokyo Stock Exchange had been suspended and the key Nikkei 225 Average had nosedived by nearly 10 per cent.
Until as recently as the beginning of October, Japan seemed to stand a safe distance away from the epicentre of the financial earthquake shaking the US and Europe. In fact two of the country’s largest financial institutions – Nomura and Mitsubishi UFJ – were showing a healthy appetite for corporate acquisitions. But before my very eyes the world’s second largest stock market tumbled out of its futon. It was surreal and I felt like an ambulance chaser bothering those Japanese businessmen and women around me about what they eat for lunch. Irrelevant perhaps, but food reveals much about a country and its people and there is no better way to gauge Japan’s socioeconomic body temperature than by taking a snapshot of the lunch scene amid the global financial turmoil.
Japanese workers get a strict one-hour lunch break, normally between noon and 1pm. But for those working in Marunouchi, the central Tokyo district and home to many headquarters of Japanese financial institutions, the lunch break starts earlier – shortly after the morning trading session on the Tokyo Stock Exchange ends at 11am. A Japanese business lunch takes place on two different levels – high above the ground overlooking the metropolis, or underground, depending on one’s purpose and the size of one’s wallet. My English banker husband had a business lunch earlier in the week in a smart French restaurant on the 43rd floor of one of a cluster of newly-built Marunouchi skyscrapers. He raved about the delicious food, excellent service and value for money: a three-course set lunch for Y3,000 or £20 a head, even with the strong yen. I thought to myself how things had changed – for the better. Back in the bubble era of the late 1980s, a lunch expense claim of Y30,000 for two would have passed without raising an eyebrow.
In 2008, the year of the credit crunch, office workers in Tokyo looking for lunch have more underground choice than ever. Beneath Tokyo Station and the new Marunouchi skyscrapers spreads a vast, interlinked low-ceilinged underground town. Brightly-lit Yaesu Chikagai is one of Japan’s largest underground areas, with fashionable boutiques, bookshops, food shops and restaurants. Long queues were forming inside a tiny konbini convenience store in one of the corners of the labyrinthine passages.
Almost everyone in the queues at the tills is holding their choice of bento box, plus small bowls of seaweed or green salad. A man in his early forties in a dark grey suit, queuing with a bento box of grilled fish, quietly tells me that he is trying to limit his calories, as well as the amount spent on daily lunch to no more than about Y600 (£4). This was indeed Mister Average Japan. A recent survey shows that the typical Japanese businessman’s monthly pocket money fell to Y46,300 and his daily lunch money also dipped by Y20 to Y570. This Mister Average felt resigned to even further belt-tightening measures in both his health and his personal finance – even cutting back on his weekly after-work drinking with his office friends.
By 11.30am, long lines were spreading out from the food hall of Daimaru department store, which adjoins Tokyo station. Most Japanese department stores have not just one basement floor dedicated to food and drinks but two, offering a vast cornucopia of everyday foods to gourmet delights, from fresh sashimi cuts to French baguettes.
As both married women with jobs and singletons grow in numbers, department store food halls play an increasingly prominent role in the nation’s eating habits. I followed Miss Okayasu on her lunch break. She is a softly spoken, educated, thirtysomething, single woman working as an analyst at an American investment bank. She had a list of lunch orders to pick up. She coyly protested that she didn’t usually pick up others’ lunch but was willing to pitch in for her colleagues this time. “The market’s almost out of control. Nobody knows what will happen next.”
After getting four “energy boosting” smoothies she walks across to the food hall to select bento boxes. After a few minutes she settles for a bento of mountain vegetables for herself and a chicken teriyaki bento for her desk-bound colleagues, costing about Y800 each. While in the queue Miss Okayasu confesses that she doesn’t cook in the evening during the week, so as well as buying lunch she also shops for ready-made dishes in the food hall. She has kept her lunch below Y1,000 in recent years but her shop-bought supper depends on bargains she can find after 6pm when the prices of perishables are reduced.
In sharp contrast to the convenience stores and food halls selling modest take-away lunches, many restaurants in the Yaesu underground shopping mall, while busy, were noticeably lacking their usual lunchtime buzz. I decided to revisit a popular restaurant where they make fresh noodles. How times change: I had been here earlier this year and queued but on this visit I was shown to a table straight away by a (very) late middle age waitress. We engaged in a brief conversation while she took my order. She also expressed concerns about the latest financial turmoil and worried about her pension. But what moved me was the old waitress’s fragile yet determined optimism as she expressed her belief that, while the latest financial crisis could be long and drawn out – “like a noodle” – Japan would eventually emerge from the turmoil.
Kimiko Barber is the author of ‘Yo! Sushi: The Japanese Cookbook’ (Harper Collins; £15.99). Her book ‘The Chopsticks Diet’ is published by Kyle Cathie in January (£12.99)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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