Tenth International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

The importance of food in understanding the migrant experience has been widely recognised. In the migration context food not only reflects change and continuity but is also deliberately used by migrants to make statements about who they are. This paper focuses on food discourse by descendants of Japanese migrants in Broome, a town in Western Australia. Despite the White Australia policy, Japanese migrant workers flocked to Broome’s pearl shelling industry from the 1880s to the 1960s. Some stayed and intermarried with local Indigenous people, resulting in mixed heritage descendants. Broome is now called Australia’s ‘first multicultural town’, preceding the nationwide promotion of multiculturalism in the 1970s. In interviews with Japanese mixed descendants’, childhood memories of home-cooked food by their Japanese parent is often brought up as a link to their Japanese heritage, who not only brought Japanese cooking from their homeland but also tailored it to incorporate local resources and tastes. Their food is portrayed as equally ‘good’ and ‘authentic’ as food in Japan, as well as that served in Japanese restaurants established after the 1970s, which are seen as symbols of ‘cosmo-multiculturalism’ (Hage 1997). Additionally, interviewees report familiarity with preparing home-cooked food to distinguish themselves from tourists and restaurant patrons. I argue that concepts of authenticity and cost are tools used to negotiate and reconfigure identity within contemporary multicultural and globalized Australia by laying claim to the long history of ethnic interaction in their hometown.