Word: shinobu
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...Etsuko Shinobu has 33 years of experience as a proper Japanese housewife, shopping twice a day for fresh groceries and cooking traditional meals for her husband and two children. I have a refrigerator full of half-empty Coke bottles and shop twice a month, usually for more Coke. Shinobu-san has much to teach me in the art of Japanese homemaking, which is why I've come to her tidy home in northwest Tokyo, where she's begun offering cooking lessons for curious tourists...
...commuter trains rumble outside the window of Shinobu's crowded kitchen, we prepare tuna sushi cake, tofu, a carrot and radish soup and a vinaigrette salad. As we sit on the tatami mat, sipping plum wine and eating from each bowl in turn, the kimono-clad 60-year-old explains what makes a proper Japanese meal. "It's about the balance of nutrition," she says. "We need to have fish, vegetables, soup at every meal - and of course rice." Shinobu's meal is scrumptious, but when I compliment her, she demurs. "I'm just an ordinary housewife...
...Thirty years ago, perhaps, but today Shinobu is anything but ordinary. The proper Japanese meal, prepared by the mother and eaten on the tatami mat by the entire family, is increasingly rare, thanks to long hours at work and at school, and social changes that have resulted in more women working out of the home and delaying marriage. With limited time and inclination for balanced home cooking, many people simply grab prepackaged meals at ubiquitous convenience stores, or down fattening fast food. That has nutritionists and public officials fearing that knowledge of traditional Japanese cooking - and eating -is being lost...
...Traditionally, Japanese families would eat meals like the one prepared by Shinobu every day: low in fat with lots of seafood, it is a cuisine that has helped the country to world-record levels of life expectancy. But Nobuko Iwamura says the wholesome Japanese diet is, today, mostly a myth, and she has the photo evidence to prove it. Since 1998, Iwamura has conducted in-depth surveys on what the Japanese are actually eating, asking thousands of Tokyo-area parents to photograph the meals they serve their families over the course of a week. The results are surprising to anyone...
...Even Shinobu's family seldom eats at home on weeknights. As she wraps the leftovers from lunch, Shinobu says that her own grown daughter, a travel agent in central Tokyo, has been too busy to learn how to cook. "But she chose a husband who knows how to cook, so she's lucky!" Shinobu adds. Luckier than many in Japan...