Erkenntnis geht durch den Magen

The beginnings of the present-day nutritional life-style of Japan lie in the Meiji period, when Western foodstuff, cuisine, and dietary habits were imported. Natsume Sôseki's first novel Wagahai wa neko de aru (English: I am a cat) offers much material on the early encounter of Eastern with Western cuisines in the process of Japan's modernization. But Sôseki's novel does more than just describing this encounter: Food and eating as a cultural system constituted by, as well as constructing fields of meaning and their symbolic representations becomes one of the main vehicles in the novel to negotiate the complex changes which modernisation entailed.Thus, sôseki uses food and eating in this novel as one example to consider the different concepts of the relationship between body and spirit, individual and society, or tradition and modernity. He goes on to show how these diverging, and at times contradictory ideas affected a reconceptualisation of the body (e.g. in terms of diet, hygiene, or medicine) as well as a restructuring of daily activities. Food as relationship is also employed to elucidate issues of power, whether it is interpersonal or imperial/political.Focusing on the example of food in I am a cat, this paper investigates Sôseki's engagement with, and critique of altered power relations, changing forms of perception and theories of cognition in Meiji-period Japan.