Some of you may have heard people say that English food isn’t very delicious. You may have heard that it has no taste and is rather bland. Well, one of the reasons for this is that British food is often eaten with sauces and other condiments to give it taste. Those of you unfamiliar with England may be unaware of the wide range of traditional sauces and condiments that can be found in a typical British household. It is not unusual for condiments to be put out at most mealtimes. There are so many that it is difficult to tell you about them here. So today I am going to introduce what I think are the top 5 essential British condiments.

Branston Pickle

Branston pickle is a pickled chutney first made in the village of Branston in Staffordshire in 1922. It is made from a variety of diced vegetables, including swede, carrots, onions and cauliflower, pickled in a sauce made from vinegar, tomato, apple and spices. It is sweet and spicy containing large chunks of vegetables in a thick brown sticky sauce. It is often served as part of a ploughman’s lunch, a popular food served in British pubs. It is also often eaten with cheddar cheese in sandwiches. The Branston brand was sold to the Japanese company Mizkan in 2012.

Mint Sauce

Mint Sauce is a condiment made from finely chopped peppermint leaves. The chopped leaves are mixed with vinegar and sugar. In British cooking it is usually only served with roast lamb.

Golden Syrup

This is a thick amber coloured syrup made from sugar. Its appearance and consistency is similar to honey. It tastes very sweet and is used in a lot of British baking; for example, cakes and flapjacks. The first can of Golden Syrup was sold in 1885. Interestingly, it is recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as having the world’s oldest brand and packing. The label is very unusual and shows the rotting carcass of a lion surrounded by flies. This comes from an old biblical story. The motto is ‘out of the strong comes sweetness.’

Worcester Sauce

The history of Worcester Sauce is an interesting story. Apparently the idea originated from Sir Charles, the Chief Justice of India, who sent the secret recipe he had found in India to Lady Sandys in Worcester. It consisted of an unusual mixture of anchovies, brine, molasses, vinegar and spices. Lady Sandys asked a local chemical company, Lea and Perrin, to make it. Unfortunately the resulting sauce was found to be inedible, so it was never used. Some years later one of the workers in the factory found an old barrel of the original mixture in the basement. The chemists decided to try it and found that the taste had mellowed with age. In 1837 the company started producing bottles of Worcester Sauce and it is still popular today.

Bovril

This is a dark paste made from beef extract. It was originally a war food designed to provide nutrition to the British soldiers fighting in the Franco Prussian War (1870). It was first sold to the public in 1888. Nowadays it is eaten spread on toast or mixed with water as a hot drink. It is a little similar in looks and consistency to Marmite and Vegemite which are made from yeast extract.

So there you have it. Five delicious British sauces to add a little spice to your meals!

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In the previous post, we highlighted the plights of sexual, gender, racial, and ethnic minorities in Japan. There may be a veil of illusion over Japan’s society to both its own citizens and people abroad that masks what these minorities are facing. Agency is, of course, a powerful act and while the marginalized have limited agency, they should be empowered to tell their own stories from their point of view and define these terms according to their most authentic emotions. Creating discourse within the society is an important tool for social change. Japan’s historical construction of identity as a nation, what this implies in regards to Japanese mainstream and minority identities alike, and what kind of position it has put Japanese society in the context of international relations, entailed fruitful discussions and discourses concerning Japan’s introspection, essentialism of cultures, be it of Japan’s or otherwise, civil societies, diasporic identities, and defining the center and periphery. Regardless of spatial and temporal boundaries, resisting constraints, seeking identities, claiming agency, and initiating movements involved decentering the center to make way for the periphery. The many actors within Japan’s periphery and its center demonstrated that differences will always exist between and amongst individuals. Even more significantly, differences remain even amongst those that, in theory, are supposed to belong to the same peripheral group. In other words, a periphery and a center will always exist in some form or another since without one the other cannot exist. This can be challenging at times, and in many societies, it is precisely these differences that generate segregation, discrimination, and hardship. Yet it is clear that without differences, little space would be left for individuals to learn and grow.

 

Identity cannot be explained by a single word or two. Identity and all of its concepts is an attempt to explain how humans yearn to make sense of this world and ways in which our existence is truly interconnected. In our current world, are many of us not diasporic people in one sense or another regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class, intimidated to a certain extent by the uncertainties of our own being and belonging? The dilemma of questioning one’s uniqueness is not only the case for the Japanese but also the world’s population as a whole. The mixtures of cultures, upbringing and even the traces of locations where the individual has been to, can truly separate them even from their own supposed place of “belonging” in other groups. However, it also signifies the possibility of that individual to connect with a wider range and variety of people from different constructions of identity as well. After all, the line between segregation and inclusion of individuals is extremely thin. The fluidity of the human body, mind, and soul is truly breathtaking to the extent that it enables its possessor to be segregated from yet also integrated into multiple forms of culture, society, and even class, whether it might be based on an empirical reality or even an imagined community.

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Discovering a sense of self and belonging, allowing social forces to take hold, is through the humanistic emotion of what every person has felt at one time or another – love. Love is a very complex thing and it can happen to anyone at any point in time. Love, for example, for an elderly woman, is coming back home and seeing her grandchildren happy, and love for a young man is riding his motorbike. People feel something beautiful when they talk about something or someone they love, and love is the thing that binds social beings and forces together.

 

On the other hand; however, we form communities and seek a sense of belonging due to the underlying driving force of fear. People are afraid of being social outcasts and feel helpless in a growing disconnected society. Furthermore, we construct identity in response to challenges. Natural disaster, for example, served as a driving force to unite people together through the construction of “victim” identity. There can also be cultural challenges, such as foreign economic and cultural domination. It seems that people can also use and manipulate identities for securing social well-being. In the process of modernization and the making of nations and ethnicities, it is clear that the construction of shared identity helps to unify people. However, this is only one side of the picture. It is dangerous to think that all people have an equal level of agency in constructing their preferred identity. In many cases, people fall victim of other people’s construction of their “superior identity.” In the modernization process, the making of “us” is inevitably accompanied by the construction of “other.” While sometimes the “other” is the powerful West, there are cases in which the domestic “other” – the minority groups in a nation state – becomes the victim of discrimination and suppression. To put it differently, when the majority group builds the ideology of superiority, the minority group automatically becomes the victim whose identity is categorized as inferior.

 

However, identity is a fluid concept. If we take a thorough observation of identity formation in different generations, we can see different reasons for constructing an identity. In the case of Zainichi Koreans or Nikkeijin, some in the later generations have chosen to retain their “roots” and identity and prefer not to assimilate into the “homogeneous” Japanese society. It can be argued that their cultural roots offer them shelter and a signifier in which they can find a sense of belonging as they pursue a society that recognizes and respects the difference.

 

Minorities in Japan such as the Nikkeijin, Zainichi Koreans, Muslims, and also Japanese minorities such as day laborers, women, and LGBT people and their activism reveal Japan’s transition into a multicultural society that aims to create an environment more open to change and accepting of differences. It is clear that learning about the existence of this growing diversity through education will help start that shift to making Japan a comfortable living environment for everyone. Even if minorities feel integrated in society, it will not work unless the Japanese people also feel comfortable with minorities and foreigners in their midst. People fear what is perceived as “different.” But if the consciousness that we are all people and we should not be segregated or discriminated against is nurtured through education, it will create a society where marginalized individuals will no longer feel unwelcome due to “difference.” Does the term/category “Japanese” even hold any meaning anymore? Multicultural theorist Bhikhu Parekh writes that a multicultural society cannot be connected by ethnicity, race, religion, etc. because the society is simply too diverse. Instead, it must be connected by a common political agenda. This entails having shared political goals and forming a political community. What are some concrete political goals? One could be changing the existing system to create a more tolerant and accepting society by accommodating ethnicities and cultures of the “others.” It can also mean that true acceptance of diversity entails an understanding that people relate to others who stem from similar life experiences and those who are different can more easily discover that sense of empathy with other people who are different.

 

To be continued next week.

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My first year students of the College of International Relations’ Global Studies Program Spring 2019, who stem from twelve different countries, worked hard for one year obtaining important academic skills that will launch them forward into their academic paths. Below I compiled a summary of their thoughts on personhood, identity, culture and society.

 

Global Studies Academic Skills Spring 2019

 

What does it mean to contemplate upon one’s identity within society? Various philosophers and thinkers, including Emile Durkheim, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, Karl Marx, Benedict Anderson, Jürgen Habermas, and others have presented a glimpse of selves within society such as individual and collective identity, the structure of society, agency, culture as a map of meaning, sociological imagination as the intersection of history and biography, identification and interpellation, race and discrimination, and multiculturalism, to name a few. Encountering some of these theories, it is overwhelming and simultaneously astonishing how our nature is manipulated by society. We are creatures who are driven to spend the vast majority of our lifetime “killing” our identity amongst the constraints of the society to secure our positions. Basically, many theories tell us that the identity of a person is not constructed by the individuals themselves, but by society. And it seems that each individual has little or no agency to resist the constraints of society due to the fear of isolation. But is this true? Is an individual’s identity simply managed and manipulated by society? Do individuals act only within the constraints of society, and do people have little or no agency to construct their own identities or create their own destinies?

 

Social movements within Japanese society tell another story – they reveal moments where people have resisted their socially constructed identities. For instance, the Nikkei-Brazilians in Japan broke out from the assumptions that they were racially homogenous to the Japanese by forming their own community and emphasizing their Brazilian-ness through language, custom, and culture; the marriage migrants in Yamagata prefecture had challenged their conventional stereotypes as passive victims who need help to become active agents who can make a contribution to spread multiculturalism in the community; and the “tōjisha” movement by Japan’s LGBT community introduced people who claimed human rights and legislation for lesbians, gays, transgender, and bisexuals. At first glimpse the constraints from society seem to minimize individual agency to construct one's own unique identity. However, regardless of the constraints, people display agency by opposing what society dictates, elucidating each person’s unique life story that empowers an individual to resist and break free from the constraints of society to make it a better place.

 

The understanding of identity in different social contexts is important for every individual in the world to make sense of who they are and where they belong. Through examining the origin of identity formation, it also becomes clear how discrimination and marginalization can be formed and how individuals, communities and societies can encounter these issues in a contemporary world where a growing number of marginalized citizens and non-citizens try to position themselves. Why do human beings form communities and seek a sense of belonging? Perhaps the underlying driving force is fear – human beings are afraid of being social outcasts and feel helpless in a competitive and ever-changing society. Seeking identity then may be in response to social transitions and challenges. But also identity and belonging are sought because of a desire to find a place within society.

 

To be continued next week.

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A holiday tradition that is not so common in Japan is making a New Year’s resolution. The Cambridge dictionary defines a New Year’s resolution as “a promise that you make to yourself to start doing something good or stop doing something bad on the first day of the year.” Some of the most common resolutions concern health, and many people decide to get in shape by joining a gym. In January many gyms and health clubs will be filled with new members, but by Valentine’s Day most of them will have quit. Why? There are a variety of reasons why someone might quit; ranging from the time required to the expense, but many people will quit because they are dismayed with the results of their hard work. These people might go to the gym three times a week for one month only to see a little muscle growth, or a slightly smaller waistline. The likely reason why these people are disappointed in their results is because they do not understand some basic principles of weight training. To build muscle it is important to understand four principles of weight training: hypertrophy, progressive overload, calories in versus calories out, and the importance of compound exercises.