I collected all the hardcover Time Life Foods of the World books and while I have occasionally cooked from various volumes, I'm now actually reading them all cover to cover. This is the first one I read.

Like all of the FOTW books, this book has glorious photos of food and people cooking and eating in Japan around 1969. The author makes a special point to talk about the importance of how food looks in Japan and harmonizing with nature through cuisine. The photos do a good job illustrating that. There is a kaleidoscope of soups on one page, photos of people dining out in inexpensive restaurants and high end inns on others. I especially love the map of Japan in the beginning of this volume, made with a few strokes of ink like a sumi-e painting.

I would love to cook more Japanese food, although I feel daunted by it. Reading through the recipes in this book, I think I would definitely attempt a few. The descriptions and instructions for tempura are enough to have me pricing air fryers. (Apparently it's possible to make tempura that way? I guess I'll find out!) There is a great chapter on Japanese home cooking with some ideas that I would like to try. I wouldn't call this the most cook-able volume and I did google many of the recipes I'm interested in to see modern cooks' interpretations of the same dishes, but I do think many of the recipes look fairly approachable.

I'm reading all of these books with the assumption that, given that they were written fifty years ago, many of them will be insensitive if not outright racist. I didn't come across anything I really cringed at in this one, although the fact that a white guy wrote the whole book is strange. Certainly, if you want to explore Japanese cooking, this book isn't anything like a definitive book on the topic. It is a nice time capsule and a very sincere love note to Japanese cuisine and culture. ( )