At first blush, it may seem odd that an American would be writing about the tastes for Japanese cuisine that have developed in France in recent years, but in this age of globalization perhaps it is not so surprising.

As an American scholar of Japanese studies, one of my specializations is the anthropology of food, particularly looking at traditional Japanese cuisine as an aspect of national cultural identity and as an element in Japanese “soft power” during the past two or three decades as the worldwide popularity of Japanese cuisine has soared. The Japanese government and the mass media certainly present cuisine as an important pillar for the global branding of “Cool Japan”!

In 2013, UNESCO recognized “Washoku: traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese” for inscription on its list of Global Intangible Cultural Heritage. Japanese cuisine joined 7 other gastronomic cultures to be so recognized. Japan was preceded by “The French gastronomic meal,” one of the first four culinary heritages UNESCO recognized in 2010. (As of 2015, a total of 10 cuisines or culinary items have been recognized, nominated by a total of 19 countries (in some cases jointly nominated by two or more nations.)

Of course, culinary heritage is extremely important in every culture and society, but perhaps only French and Japanese cultures have raised gastronomy to such sophisticated, aestheticized, and – dare I say it – sometimes fetishized heights. Japan and France have extremely high regard for their own cuisines, but they also mutually admire and embrace each other’s cultures. Cuisine is one of the most recently important pillars of this sustained love affair, So as an anthropologist interested in food and in how food both marks and crosses boundaries across and among cultures, examining the complicated interactions of French and Japanese tastes, preferences, and mastery of a foreign cuisine is a fascinating (and of course delicious) pursuit.

UNESCO’s recognition prompted me to come to Paris for research, rather simply to visit a cosmopolitan destination with great appeal as I had previously done. Roughly a year after the announcement of recognition for Washoku, I was able to visit UNESCO and Paris for this project.

But that visit, in 2014, after a lapse of many years since my previous visits to Paris, opened my eyes to the ubiquity of Japanese culinary influences in Paris! Not necessarily Japanese cuisine in any strict sense of the term, but certainly Japanese cuisine had captured widespread interest on the streets of Paris!

Over the course of the past two years, I have had the opportunity to re-visit Paris on several occasions, and in each case, my eyes and my palate have been open to grasping what I can about the impact of Japanese culinary styles and principles in the everyday world of French alimentation. Recently, in February 2016, I was honored to be invited to make an address on this topic at a conference sponsored by the Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS.

Thus far, my visits to Paris to consider Japanese cuisine have been brief, and I have not yet been able to carry out systematic or extensive research.

But I do have several tentative observations about the current Japanese culinary boom in Paris. First and perhaps foremost, Japanese and French chefs have developed a serious attraction to each other’s crafts. The volume of exchange of chefs from both countries into the kitchens of the other is enormous. However, the professionalized culinary cultures from which both sets of chefs emerge put an enormous (and highly competitive) emphasis on the achievement of perfect form in the kitchen (see for example, the recent film Jiro Dreams of Sushi).

Certainly, the pursuit of perfection is admirable, to a point, but in the case of the Franco-Japonaise exchanges of chefs, it sometimes appears that the demands of hyper-perfection have overwhelmed the gustatory experience for many or most diners for whom the distinctions are sometimes indiscernible.

And this is perhaps because, in my limited view, Parisian consumers of Japanese cuisine are being bombarded by the siren song of perfection, but at a time when relatively few French consumers are really that familiar with the variety and depth of Japanese cuisine. One might call this phenomenon, “premature connoisseurship.”

Dashi, for example, the highly developed flavoring stock that brings umami (the so-called fifth flavor, a savory flavor often associated with soy sauce, tomatoes, and meat stock) is, as yet, not widely recognized by ordinary French consumers. One Japanese chef I spoke with reported that only about 50% of French consumers he interacted with could recognize umami, and as a result he was conducting “umami education” classes in French elementary schools!

But, the net effect remains that although the stars of French cuisine celebrate their appreciation of umami, many ordinary consumers simply cannot recognize the flavor.

To me, as an outside observer – both to Japanese and French culinary cultures – it seems to me that the Franco-Japonaise culinary love affair is still only a flirtation! The ordinary French consumer will need to have much greater exposure to Japanese cuisine – its flavors, its flavorings, its textures, its composition, and so forth – before this love affair can reach a proper and mutually satisfactory conclusion!!