2004 Annual Meeting - Abstract

Working Title: “Rice Ball Rivalries: Japanese Convenience Stores and the Appetite of Late Capitalism”

Gavin Hamilton Whitelaw
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology
Yale University

Address: 14 Pearl Street, #1 New Haven, CT 06511
Email: gavin.whitelaw@yale.edu
Phone: (203) 782-9441

Neither elaborate nor difficult to make, the rice ball, or onigiri, may be one of Japan’s oldest “fast foods” and its ultimate convenience meal. Japan’s rice ball roots are traceable back to the Heian period (794 A.D.-1192 A.D.) when military accounts praised the onigiri’s portability and the fact that no plate was required for it to be served. While the ingredients comprising the onigiri have changed with time, its basic form has not. Consisting of a heaping fist-full of rice pressed into a round or triangular shape, the food’s very name comes from the Japanese verb “nigiru”, meaning to pack something together with one’s hands. Today, onigiri remain a common food for those on the move. They are eaten for lunch by school children and harried workers, carried in hikers’ backpacks, and handed out at community events. Though still seen as an easy way to quickly feed a lot of guests or to conveniently use up left-over rice from the previous night’s meal, the onigiri image has been changing from that of a “family” food to one that is purchased outside of the home, in stores and supermarkets.

Perhaps no retail industry has relied on the onigiri more than Japan’s convenience stores, where the rice ball has played an important role in redefining convenience and establishing chain distinction. When the American convenience store franchise model was introduced to Japan in the early 1970s, the onigiri was a key component in domesticating this foreign retail form for the Japanese palette. Corporations seeking to provide a familiar, convenient, and freshly packaged food that would still be considered a meal by the Japanese consumer turned to the onigiri. This attention to the rice ball led to innovations in its production and content. Today, there are onigiri with flavorful fillings ranging from pickled plum and tuna-and-mayo to kimchi and Alaska salmon. 7-Eleven Japan alone sells close to 1 billion onigiri a year.

For Japan’s second largest convenience store chain, Lawson, the onigiri has been nothing less than the flagship of its revitalization. In 2001, the fate of Lawson seemed uncertain. Its parent company, Daiei, was on the verge of bankruptcy and an increasingly competitive retail market had driven a staggering number of its franchisees out of business. The chain’s restructuring began with the hiring of a new, young company president and, under his guidance, the development, marketing, and launch of a gourmet line of rice balls under the moniker Onigiri-ya. In less than a year, the Onigiri-ya campaign netted the company nearly 25 million dollars in profit and re-established Lawson’s brand image in both the eyes of the consumer and franchisees (NHK 2003).

In this paper, I draw upon my pre-dissertation ethnographic fieldwork to explore the significance of the onigiri for consumers and corporations in Japan’s late capitalist economy. Building upon Appadurai’s challenge to follow things in motion in order to understand how meanings are “inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (Appadurai 1986:5), I trace the path of a Lawson onigiri from the corporate drawing board to the consumer’s mouth. I use the onigiri’s trajectory to argue that we must think beyond merely the semiotics of consumption offered by Douglas and Isherwood (Ferguson 1988:493) and the symbolic analyses of rice and identity (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993) By looking more closely at how food is constructed by specific corporations for political and economic ends and the contingent nature of this project. In addition, by examining how a particular food is commodified, my paper raises the question of the dichotomy between notions of “fast” and “slow” food in modern society and the ways in which these categories, themselves, are products of larger political processes.