アンチグローバルとしてのラーメン

Ramen Adventuresなんて英語ブログもあるんですね。

The Untold History of Ramenの本の始まりは以下の引用で始まっていました。レーガン大統領のジェリービーンズ好きは有名だったようです。

“You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by the way he eats jelly beans.”
Ronald Reagan



この著者は日本のラーメンとアメリカのピザを同じような役割を果たしていると見ています。

Ramen, available throughout Japan in different regional varieties, is not cheap, but it is usually affordable. Its preeminent role in the postwar Japanese diet can perhaps be understood as similar to the role of pizza in American food practices.

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4. The foreign origins, regional variations, ubiquity, affordability, and symbolic associations with youth and the working class are some of the key features shared by both ramen in Japan and pizza in the United States.

ラーメン屋vs.マクドナルド―エコノミストが読み解く日米の深層 (新潮新書) (2008/09) 竹中 正治 商品詳細を見る

この本で面白いと思った視点は上記の本を参照していて、ラーメン屋をマクドナルドのようなグローバル化した大企業に対抗する職人の動きと見なしているところでした。

The role of the post-1990s ramen shop as a site of employment and
potential business ownership for Japanese born in the 1970s, and thus left
out of the nation's experience of rapid growth, has endowed the food with
a strong symbolic currency as a form of opposition to corporate America
and the American fast-food industry that represents it. In The Ramen
Shop versus McDonalds, for example, economist Takenaka Masaharu
captures the oppositional politics projected onto the production and
enthusiastic consumption of ramen.' The book begins with a prologue
denouncing the tendency of Japanese academics to unabashedly criticize
their own country while abroad, particularly when in the United States,
and adds that this authors aim was instead to understand what is worth
preserving about Japan in the face of increasing U.S. influence. He argues
for the need to draw a general comparison between the practices of the
two countries rather than simply extolling the United States to arrive at a
balanced assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of each country's business culture.