CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Globalization of Japanese Cuisine

Kumakura (n.d.) says that nowadays, Japanese cuisine has caught consumers’ attention globally, and has obtained its fans all over the world. As the demand for healthy food products is on increase, popularity of Japanese food has been growing effectively with the awareness of its healthiness. Today, a lot of Japanese restaurants are opening in many countries and big cities to meet its high demand.

The boom of Japanese cuisine has started throughout the United States during 1970’s, and has been spread to Asia, Europe, and the rest of the world (JETRO, 2012). Tsuchida (2007) says, Japanese cuisine became one of the most popular foreign foods in the world, however, it was just a kind of weird type of food for foreigners in the beginning. Only some food products which are similar to western food, such as teriyaki, teppan-yaki and others were accepted, and those food which used raw fish were quite difficult to be accepted by westerners as it was too different from their food culture.

However, since the time when lifestyle related disease has been spread mainly around developed countries because of their eating habits, and people’s interests on health diet have increased, Japanese food culture strongly gained people’s attention as it is healthy yet delicious, and different, especially in terms of cooking method, from any other cuisines such as Western, Chinese, French and others. Japanese cuisine’s