Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast the podcast at Pomona college. I'm Patty Vest. In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes. As we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today, we're talking with longtime Pomona college, professor Sam Yamashita, the Henry Sheffield professor of history. Mark Wood: Welcome Sam. Sam Yamashita: Thank you. Thank you. Happy to be here. Mark Wood: It's good to see you in these strange times. So how are you adjusting to life in the time of pandemic? Sam Yamashita: Well, I've been on leave all semester and so it's been like being an advanced graduate student and I'm like work on project a in the morning and I work on project B in the evening of dinner, drink a lot of wine. They can nap wake up, listen to Brian Williams. And I'm reading "A Very Stable Genius" by Rucker and Leonig. And it's a fabulous book on one, our dear president, I mean, really wonderful. It should win a prize. You know, it's, it's cramped our eating out style because we usually go into LA on weekends to eat our favorite restaurants, but sadly, some of them have just closed. And so I think the food scene in LA is going to be very different. Well, not just LA all over the U S and maybe, and I'll talk later about a piece that I just finished on fine dining in the U S and I really think that it's going to become a kind of period piece about a particular moment in American culinary history that is ending at the moment. So yeah, I'm doing where we're healthy and I'm swimming twice a day, which is great. And you know, it's still healthy. Patty Vest: That's great to hear Sam. You grew up in Hawaii. Can you tell us a little bit of your, about your upbringing and what were you like as a child and what were you interested in? Sam Yamashita: Well, I was born in Honolulu, but I was raised in a beautiful beach town called Kailua, but we didn't live on the beach. We lived one mile inland and I, I had a great childhood. My friends remember me as being really naughty that I was very good at getting into mischief. Sam, I've known you about 20 years now. I'm not terribly surprised by that level. I'm still the same. I would invent the craziest things like we we found a huge mirror. We went up onto the roof and we would see people walking on the street about a hundred yards away. We would hit them with the, the beef in some famous film set of it in classical times in the Mediterranean where somebody uses mirrors to set the sails of ships on fire. We thought, Oh, maybe we can get somebody to combust like that. You know, I spent a lot of time going to the beach. Both my parents worked in order to loop. So after school I was on my own and then I had a bicycle and, you know, I would do every kind of thing. But you know, it was a great childhood, but the problem was that I wasn't studying. Sam Yamashita: I was really indifferent to school. And what saved me as I mentioned to stale, when she interviewed me a while back, is that I wanted to leave home. And there were only two possibilities. I could go to a Hawaiian boarding school that's very famous. And the other was to go to a, another prep school that had a great baseball team. And so I claimed that I wanted to play baseball, serious baseball, and I couldn't go to the first school because I didn't have any Hawaiian blood. So I went to the second prep school and I boarded and I had to study every night for two hours. And that, that rescued my academic career to get into college. And that's where I started. I started to study Latin. I mean, Mark has seen the, I think the piece that I wrote on studying classical languages and things, but yeah, I had a great childhood. My parents loved each other a lot and they were really preoccupied with each other. They had eloped. And so I had a lot of freedom and I had a younger brother whom I terrorized and but I think he's better for it Patty Vest: It's for his own good Sam Yamashita: Daughter got into college and graduated in 2004, but yeah, no, I had a really wonderful childhood. We grew up in a completely multiethnic neighborhood. Hawaii was becoming a truly integrated place. The old segregated public school system was abolished in 1947. So the public schools, I went to primary and middle school where were extremely well-integrated. I had really wonderful teachers. I feel very lucky to grown up in Hawaii at that time. It's a very different place now. Mark Wood: So I know you mentioned baseball, I know baseball played a role in your life. You had, you, you have some really nice stories about baseball. So I'm just going to ask you if you could tell us a few of those. Sam Yamashita: Well, you know, my father had been a famous baseball player in Honolulu, high school baseball star, and he had played for the Nisei army unit that he was a part of the first new unit formed during world war II. And they trained in Wisconsin and played minor league teams in Wisconsin. And, and they even played in, in Mississippi or they play in Arkansas, one of the concentration camps. And then when they got to North Africa, they played their last games. And so when my father came home to Hawaii in 1946 he coached for a while and then became a professional umpire. So I was raised in a household that was focused on baseball and baseball was also almost a religion in the Japanese American community that it was taken very seriously. And so at age eight, I got my first baseball uniform and my father spent some time teaching me how to put on the leggings in a particular way so that if I slid hard in the second base with my spikes up, you know, my leggings wouldn't come undone and I played little league baseball for three years. Sam Yamashita: And then I played, what's called babe Ruth baseball. And I went to mid Pacific to play baseball, but I was only four 11 and 110 pounds. Mark Wood: What was your position? Sam Yamashita: Well, they tried me all over because I was so small. UI, I, when I was in little league, I played in the outfield. I caught, played for space,uat, in high school. They used me mainly in right field. Ubut it was pathetic. I mean, I was so small, it had so little follower. And when I came up to bat, everybody would come in, I quit, I didn't even play the whole first season. And I found that because I was so light,uI was a good, long distance runner and I became,ua top 10 runner in Honolulu at two first place finishes against put a whole, our arch rivals where Obama went and,uI even ran in college briefly. So my baseball career morphed into a long distance running career. And I even as a freshmen at McAlester where I went to college, I ran in the NCAA, which I was quite impressed by. Although I mentioned this to Kirk Reynolds, our,uour cross country coach is Kirk Reynolds. Right. And it turns out that he's the division three cross-country historian. So he looked me up and he said, Oh, I see you placed 167 out of 175. I stopped telling him that story. Sam Yamashita: It was real thrilled to run. You know, as a first year, Mark Wood: You also showed me some photos of you as a child with some baseball greats. How did happen? Sam Yamashita: Well, my father when he gave up coaching, after a couple of years, he became a baseball, umpire, serious baseball on fire. And I think he was pretty good. He's he umpired until he was 91. And it was very well regarded. I think he had a good eye and had a good strike zone. And so when the Yankees and Dodgers and Cardinals came to Hawaii after the world series on their way to Japan to play in the top Japanese teams, they would play a couple of games in Honolulu. And my father was asked every year to be one of the six umpires in the game. And so he would arrange he had a friend who had a brother who was a journalist press photographer. We had a real camera and he would arrange for him to take photographs of me. I think Mark has seen the one of me and in between Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella before the game, my father said, meet me at the third base dugout before the game. Sam Yamashita: And I did. And, and he said, I'd like Jackie and Roy to come out and have their pictures taken with my son. And that's the photograph that was assessed on antiques roadshow and apparently Robinson and Campanella didn't get along that well, because can't be, was biracial and he could stay at the team hotel. Whereas Robinson had to stay at, at a black only hotel. So it's one of the few photographs of them together. And as a result, it was worth, I don't know, four to $6,000, nine years ago. And it's now in my safety deposit box. So that was, that's probably the most famous photograph. And then I have photographs taken with Casey Stengel with Mickey mantle, with Roger Maris. I'm sitting on the bench between Eddie Matthews and Don Bob Turley and, and Lou Berdett. It was right after the Milwaukee had played in the world series. And Burdette even gave me his cap, which like a dummy, which like a dummy, I wore to little league practice. And of course that doesn't exist anymore, but I have the photograph of me with Mantle in my bathrooms on the wall, you know, in my baseball shrine. Sam Yamashita: Now I, and I had expected to play for the Yankees. That was my, that was my beginning. And when I was only for 10 or 11 and 110 pounds at the age of 14, I gave up those dreams. And somebody from Hawaii, a Japanese American from Hawaii named Len Sakata would go on to play for the Yankees. So I feel as though my dream was fulfilled by somebody by somebody else. Patty Vest: There you go vicariously through him the best way. I like that. Sam, you mentioned that your, your, your school suffered a little bit and it was saved when you went to a boarding school. Tell us about when, when that interest in history was sparked, was it was in when you went to school to boarding school, or where was, where did you find those? Sam Yamashita: I think in boarding school, I had really good history teachers. I had a really great sophomore us history teacher named Ruth angle Brecht, who was from Iowa. And then I had a really good world history teacher, I guess in my sophomore year named Bob Farian from Seattle. Ruth Engelbrecht taught me when I was a junior and it was in my first year in college. Mcallister was on the four one four plan. So the one was one month between fall and spring semester. And I took a course, signed up for a course called the great books of history. And I expected that I'd be reading in facilities and Heraclitus, I don't know why I thought I would understand them and enjoy reading them. And I showed up at the office of the professor who was a man named Boyd Schaffer, who was a really fine historian. Sam Yamashita: He had been editor of the American historical review for a long time and then came to McAllister and he said, Oh, here's the list of books that we'll be reading. And I'd like you to choose 12. And they were all modern historical works. And he helped me choose some really wonderful classic works. And so I read a work by Carl Becker, right? European historian. Becker is famous for a work called the heavenly city of the 18th century enlightenment. And the book that I read by Becker was called the declaration of independence. And it was so clearly and beautifully written. And Shaffer explained to me how Becker wrote Becker wrote one sentence at a time. He would write a sentence at the top of a legal pad and then rewrite it all the way down the pad. I read a [inaudible] Muhammad and Charlemagne. I read Arthur Schlesinger, Junior's age of Jackson. Sam Yamashita: I ended up reading 12 books in four weeks and writing a four to five page review of each, of course, I'd never read that much before ever. And it meant sitting in the library from nine when it opened until 9:00 PM when it closed. And I essentially outlined every book as a way of retaining the information and then wrote the essays. And I still have them. I look at them occasionally to see how bad I was when I was the first and after Shaffer's his class, that January, I took the introductory modern European history class, which I liked, and I still expected to be a political science major and go to law school until all of my sophomore year when I took a state and local government course taught by the top political science professor McAllister. And it was, it was essentially a law course, and it was so boring that I barely a week. Sam Yamashita: And I went over to history and became a history major. And of course I assumed that I'd come back, go back to Hawaii and do what my parents did. My mother worked at the bank of Hawaii. My father worked in payroll at lion pineapple, which became Dole. And I assume that, that I go to work at one of the banks and I would aspire to be, become a bank manager, which a lot of my childhood friends became. And so that was the beginning of my sort of interest in history. I liked it and I was pretty good at it. So you specialized in Confucianism it's important, is that correct? Well, actually I, as a junior, I studied in Tokyo international Christian university where our students go, the ones who go to Tokyo and, and I developed an interest in Japanese history and I thought I might do immigration history. Sam Yamashita: And so I applied to places that had good immigration historians, and I was also interested in intellectual history cause my advisor Boyd Schaffer was kind of intellectual historian. And so I went to Michigan and tending to study with a famous American immigration historian named John Higham. But hi I'm was so forbidding that I ended up not doing immigration history and instead of doing intellectual history. And at that point, the plan was to write a master's thesis on German, romantic intellectuals, and then to write a PhD on Japanese intellectuals. And that's where my interest in, in Confucianism and Confucian academies and Confucian scholars really began. Patty Vest: So tell us more about Confusionism. Why is it such an important part of history throughout Asia? Sam Yamashita: Well if you think of Plato and Aristotle and the philosophical tradition that they engendered Confucius and gender, the comparable philosophical tradition in in China and that spread to Japan and Korea and in Vietnam. And once the Chinese began to test applicants for government positions they, they would give them what were called the civil service examinations beginning, really from the eighth century what you had to study and essentially memorize or the Chinese classics. So there were the six books, six classics, and then many dozens of commentaries on those classics, all written in classical Chinese. And so if you were literate in East Asia and Vietnam before world war two, you had studied the Confucian classics. And this was true of certainly of Korean intellectuals. It was true of Japanese intellectuals. It's a little bit like all literate well-educated Europeans and Americans before 1900, knowing Latin and Greek can having read the classics. It's importance is largely due to, it's been foundational both for service and, and for any kind of intellectual or literary at work. So you know, given Pomona's craze over the number 47, I have to ask you about the first book on your resume, the one that you helped to translate title the four seven debate. Mark Wood: Tell us a little bit about what that was about? Sam Yamashita: The 4 7 debate took place in Korea in the 16th century and, and the four and the seven refer to famous passages in the Chinese classics and, and the four refers to what were called the Fort beginnings,uwhich referred to the beginnings of four virtues that every person was thought to have. And, and seven refers to the seven emotions, which every person was thought to have as well. And, and, and the four beginnings of the seven emotions are first articulated in the work of Confucianism major success, or a man named mention. And, and so the debate that takes place in Korea is really a debate about the meaning of the four and the seven, and whether virtue moral virtue is within you at birth or whether, whether it has to be developed,uin the realm of emotions. Sam Yamashita: And so these two really impressive Korean scholars had a debate that went on for two or three years. And I can't remember the total number of letters they exchanged, but there must have been close to a hundred and Korea by the 16th century was highly Confucianism and its intellectuals, its elite was extremely well versed in classical Chinese and in the Confucian tradition and the various commentaries on the classics. And so the two men, the two leaders in the debate go argue back and forth on the question of the four beginnings and the seven emotions. And there classical Chinese was probably the most difficult classical Chinese I'd ever read. I mean, it was, it had a kind of purity that I hadn't seen before that I was brought into the translation as a Japanese specialist. The leader of the group was doing, I mean, professor do at Harvard who has been the leading expert on Confucianism outside China. And then there were three or four Korean scholars. And so we would meet once a year, usually in November for three years running, we would meet in Cambridge and, and meet all day, Friday and Saturday. And it was all always the Saturday of the Michigan Ohio state game. So it was always very frustrating for me to have to be pouring over Confucian texts while Michigan was playing Ohio state. I'm a Michigan graduate. So that's what the four seven debate is. And yeah, it was really a wonderful project project. Patty Vest: Sam in the nineties, your research focus shifted to the 20th century more specifically to Japan during the war years. What sparked that change? Sam Yamashita: Well, I've teaching a course called modern Japan really since 1977. And there really wasn't, there weren't any primary source materials that had been translated into English, represented the views of ordinary Japanese. And I was really curious. I thought, you know, we need to know what ordinary Japanese felt during the war. Were they all fanatics or are they all willing to die for the emperor? And when I wanted to find that out, so I began to collect diaries on my annual trips to Japan and, and I would, I initially used the library at dosha university where I was on sabbatical twice, but I use mostly the national diet library in Tokyo, which is the bibliotech national of, of Japan. And over the course of 15 or 20 years, I collected about 210 diaries and 50 memoirs. And what I realized about 10 years ago was that there was actually cheaper to buy used copies of the diaries and to pay for copies made at the diet library. And so I began to read these diaries and, and Mark knows that I read the classical Chinese texts every morning from 1969 until 1980 until actually 19. Sam Yamashita: Maybe it was 93 and I simply switched the diaries for the classical texts. And so I would read diaries every morning for about an hour from, I think it was July 4th, 1992 or three really well I'm still doing it. And so I got pretty good at well at, at knowing what learned a lot about what Japanese felt during the war. And what I discovered was that not all Japanese were completely loyal. There was a lot of resistance to government regulations and government policies. For example, Japanese were not supposed to buy food on the black market, but many people in the cities did in desperation. Japanese also were not supposed to buy directly from farmers, but a lot of people did in fact, on any day in Tokyo 1944 and 45, approximately 20 to 30,000 people left the city to go to the countryside to buy directly from farmers. Sam Yamashita: It was the only way for them to stay alive. People also stole things. They sometimes stole food. Children would steal each other's lunches, but more typically people still items that could be sold and they then use the money to buy food for other commodities that, that they needed in about 2001, I was having lunch with the director of the university of Hawaii, press Pat Crosby. And she expressed an interest in publishing some of those diaries. And so I picked eight three diaries by men, two diaries by women, one diary by a teenage girl who'd been mobilized for war work and two diaries by evacuated school children. And of course I'd already translated parts that I intended to publish, but then I needed to get permission to publish. And I worried about this because although my Japanese is pretty good, you know, I'm a kind of a suspicious character. Sam Yamashita: I look Japanese, but I speak with an accent and I have of a foreign devil. So I had to hire someone to act as my agent. And I had a friend who was teaching at ICU in Tokyo who had a graduate student who had finished and who was unemployed. And she also was the daughter of a doctor. So she could speak polite Japanese. I knew her a little from a sabbatical in Tokyo. I knew that she was pretty stubborn. And so I hired her to get the permissions for those diaries as she got all of them. And my, my strategy in hiring her, I actually worked. So I'm truly indebted to her for getting those permissions. Otherwise, you know, there would have been fewer Tyrese in, in my book and a less good cross section of the population. Well, that's the story behind I work on diaries. Sam Yamashita: I I'm working now. I'm reading diary entries from around the time that Japan surrendered. And I'm hoping to read as many as, as I can to see how people responded to the news of the surrender. I'm also trying to gauge, trying to determine why Japanese were so loyal and I have a theory about why they were loyal. And, and my theory might explain why Japanese still feel much guilt about the, in the way the Germans did. And so I'm currently reading the diary of a man in his sixties or seventies. And it's just fascinating to read someone's account of how they're feeling on the day of the surrender or how they're, how they're feeling in the days afterwards. And I really feel as though, you know, I'm dealing with real people and real feelings and, and this is something that's priceless. In my opinion, I value individuals. I've added value individual moral action. And this is my way of, of, you know walking the talk and living what I believe in Mark Wood: To me, maybe the most intriguing part of all of that was your work in translating the letters and diaries of kamikaze pilots. I, you know, that's, that's a group of people that I think most of us find difficult to understand, you know, sort of like the suicide bombers in the middle East. We think of them as some kind of religious zealots and hardly even think of them as people like us because you know, their, their choice was so alien to us. What drew you to that? And what did you find about them? Sam Yamashita: Well, I was attracted to the, the kamikaze phenomenon or the special attack and on and on. So I thought if I wanted to know what Japanese felt about the war, that would be a good place to start. And what I did realize at first was that the last letters that they wrote were based on templates that they were given. Secondly, their diaries were submitted to their officers. And so I have to figure out how to read material that was essentially being censored. And I did figure out how to do it. And often during a pilot's training his officer's comments would also appear. So I got a good sense of what values were being reinforced by the pilots, superiors and how the pilots themselves responded. And the real prize fine was the complete diary of an army pilot who began, who went into the air Corps when he was 16 and who flies until August 15th when he scheduled to go off on a special attack at 8:00 PM on August 15th. Sam Yamashita: And of course, Japan is surrendered at noon. And his diary was extremely revealing because he unlike university students who were drafted and who became special attack pilots, you know, he couldn't read German, he didn't play the piano, he hadn't read Hagle and, and, and you know, hadn't read essentially the great German thinkers. He was just a ordinary guy who wanted to become a pilot. And so his frustrations in the last year of the war really revealing cause he begins to have what we would call psychological problems. And and to have real doubts, especially as some of his fellow pilots are killed in training accidents. And so that, that was, I mean, if I were younger, I would translate the whole diary and publish it. But I used his diary a lot in a chapter in my book daily life at that time, Japan. So that phenomenon has been really interesting study. Patty Vest: Sam, tell us how you approach your, your translation work. Even in Western languages, you know, there's difficult decisions that you have to make about style connotations, rhythm. How do you approach your work? Sam Yamashita: Well, let me, let me tell you how I did the eight diaries that I, that I published. I would translate them one line at a time. And so on a note card, I'd have, you know, each sentence would be numbered and, and I translate them as literally as I can initially. And then I, I typed them up. And then at the later stages, after I've established that my translations are accurate, I try to recover the, the texture and rhythm of the original text. And so in the case of the children, for example, well, I found that I had to stop using polysyllabic Latin at words, but instead to use a kind of nine year old girls language or an 11 year old boys language. And, and so whenever possible, I tried to capture the level of abstraction in the originals. I also tried you know, to recover the rhythm of the original the women's diaries were the hardest to translate because they were the most complex thinkers and the most literate the serviceman's diaries were the easiest to translate because they were pretty pretty matter of factly and pretty functional. Sam Yamashita: So each, each diary manuscript went through many stages, easily five or six different stages. And you know, a translation is at some level than interpretation. So I can't claim that they're perfect in every way. They're simply attempts to duplicate what I found in the original text. Mark Wood: Recently, you've made another big change in your research topics and you've managed to bring together what I know to be two loves of yours, Asian cultures, and good food. Can you tell us about that? Sam Yamashita: Well, as, as Mark May, as you may remember from my interview that Sneha did it started in 2008 or nine when I just finished lunch with Pat Crosby, my editor at the university of hawaii press was a wonderful lunch at a beautiful hotel in Waikiki. And we were both feeling no pain. And as we were walking back to the car, she said, how would you like to write a history of Japanese food? Sam Yamashita: And I was already, you know, in my early sixties and had I been younger, I would have said, sure, yes, right away. But I knew that I needed to think about this. And I said, Pat let me think about this. And so I thought about what sources, primary sources I would use, how I would organize it what kind of narratives I would write and essentially what audience I would pitch it to. So after half a year, I, I wrote her back by email and I said, sure, I'll give this a try, but you, and I know that you'll be long retired by the time I finished this. And she retired about five years ago and I'll finish maybe around 20, 25. So that was the, the sort of existential choice that I made early on. And I began to use the world war II diary material to write about food in wartime, Japan. Sam Yamashita: And I wrote three papers, two, which have been published in a third. I'm about to send off. I wrote the first on the food situation of the evacuated children, which was dire and they was slowly starving to death. And the second paper was on the food situation on the home front. And the third paper is also on the home front situation, but it highlights how desperate people were. And the third is called hunger on the home front. So I wrote those papers and then I was having to visit my widowed father and whole life three or four times a year after my mother died in 1999. And I thought, you know, I need to be able to write off these trips. I think I was interviewing chefs. And so my first interview was in 2009, and I would interview a couple of chefs on each trip. Sam Yamashita: And I also interviewed farmers, retailers Aqua marinas food writers. I interviewed 36 people altogether between 2009 and 2015. And you know, those were interesting because I'd never done interviews before. And the interviews initially were an hour to 90 minutes long, which is far too long. And I got a good sense of what I thought was going on with this food movement called Hawaii regional cuisine. And I, one of my former students, Madeline Shu, who's a brilliant historian of Asian America who teaches at university of Texas Austin. She organized a panel in 2011 on Asian food and invited me to be on it. So I presented some of my findings on that panel and gave a paper entitled the significance of Hawaii regional cuisine and post-colonial Hawaii, and somebody heard it who wanted to publish it. And so it was included in the first anthology on Asian American food. Sam Yamashita: It's an anthology called eating Asian America, a food studies reader published by NYU press in 2013. And the editor of that anthology also was the editor co-editor of a food series that Hawaii published called food in Asia Pacific. And he and the other editor persuaded me to submit the manuscript for that series, which I did in 2016. And it was published last April, Hawaii, regional cuisine, the food movement, the changed the way Hawaii. So that's essentially the story of, you know, my interest in food studies. I, while I was working on the Hawaii regional cuisine book, I discovered an interesting moment in Los Angeles food history in the early 1980s, chefs in LA were making something that one of them called Euro Asian cuisine. And it's a term that he claimed to invent in 1980. And so Wolfgang puck was doing this. There were a bunch of Japanese chef sent from Japan who were doing Franco Japanese cuisine. Sam Yamashita: And then Roy Yamaguchi, the man who invented the concept of Euro Asian cuisine and Nobu Matsuhisa, they all opened restaurants between 1982 and about 1986, five or six and Lissa, they were, they were doing this Euro Asian cuisine. So I went back to it in 2017 to 2018 and gave a paper at a food conference called the Asian impact of fine dining in the U S and then the more research I did, the more I realized that a really important moment had occurred in American food history. And it's what I call the Japanese turn in fine dining. And I was able to do some, well, let me tell you how it started. It started when Japanese cooks and trainees began to go to France to work in the kitchens of the great chefs. And this began in the 1960s and seventies, and it continued, it really continues to the present, but a lot of chefs leaving French chefs noticed that there were suddenly more Japanese and one of them, a famous friendship in New York city Daniel Boulud's said, you know, there was this strange thing, the Japanese would come, they would study our cuisine and they would go home and they would replicate it. Sam Yamashita: And then other chefs that were interviewed and that I interviewed said, yeah, strange thing. There were all these Japanese cooks in the kitchens of the great restaurants, French restaurants in Europe and in the U S and what also happened as part of that of development is that the top French chefs began to go to Japan and were introduced to Japanese cuisine. And so all the great friendships Robichon Paul bookoos, Alicia Al Ellen, Ellen Chappelle all of them Bernard Lazo began to go to Japan several times a year, and 10 of them opened restaurants in Japan. And so not only were Japanese going to Europe, but the French chefs were also going to Japan. And this is the beginning of what I, what I call the Japanese stir. And so if the stage is this exchange of chefs between Japan and Europe in the 1960s and seventies, the second stage takes place in Los Angeles as a well trained chefs begin to cook a kind of Franco Japanese or Italo Japanese cuisine in Los Angeles. Sam Yamashita: And then it goes to New York. And I really dated in New York from 1985, there was a restaurant tour, a famous restaurant tour named Berry wine, who had a restaurant called giraffe giraffe in New York, the best and most expensive restaurant. And he discovered Japanese cuisine. And so his cuisine becomes very Japanesey from 1985 onward. And so in LA and New York, you have similar developments that run through the nineties. And then in the 21st century, a fourth stage begins when Japanese ingredients and Japanese culinary techniques, Japanese culinary concepts become pretty widespread. And I argue even that Japanese cuisine is naturalized in the U S and I'm arguing that it ends in 2020. And so I have a paper coming out this month called the Japanese turn in fine dining, 1980 to 2020, that will appear in gastronomical, one of the leading food journals. And I present my arguments about the Japanese term. It's been great fun. So that's where that conversation with Pat Crosby, after lunch in 2008 or nine has led. Patty Vest: That's a great turn. You took two. Sam Yamashita: No, it's, it's been great. It's been wonderful. Patty Vest: You mentioned in the book that you're working on that's going to be on 2025, the history of Japanese food, any other projects that you're working on? You said you're on the Sam Yamashita: Well, so that'll be the last book and I'm, I'd like to write a book on I don't know what to call it tentatively. I might call it the Asian turn in fine dining along the Pacific rim that I've been tracking a fine dining establishments in Japan in Australia and New Zealand, Hawaii California, even Mexico and Peru and Korea now. And something really interesting is happening. I'm not sure how to describe it yet, but the chefs in New Zealand and Australia, for example, using many more Asian ingredients and Asian techniques, and these are the top Michelin star restaurants there, the French train, Japanese and Korean chefs are also making a French cuisine that uses Asian ingredients and techniques. And the same thing is happening in San Francisco at Benu this fantastic Korean Korean American restaurant it's happening at Cato, this fabulous Taiwanese American restaurant in Santa Monica. Sam Yamashita: I'm not quite sure how to describe it. It's actually what happens is that chefs who are trained in French cuisine ended up making their own cuisines and using local ingredients that really reflect local flora and fauna. And they come up with something very different and reggae and reggae. Olvera is a leading Michelin starred Mexican chef, who has a restaurant Mexico city called Google's is a top 50 restaurant in New York called cosmos. And he's a very good example that when he first opened his restaurant in Mexico city, he had trained at the culinary Institute of America. And so he made stuffs that he thought he should be making. And I think he was criticized. People said, Enrique, you know, why don't you make your own food? This food seems so foreign, and that marked a change in his orientation. And so he began to, to make dishes that reflected the local flora and found he's about to open a restaurant in LA, or he was, I don't know if he's still going to, that's probably the next book and the Japanese history history of Japanese food will be the last book. I think that's not going to work. Mark Wood: So on that note, I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap this up. We've been talking about Asian history and food history with professor Samuel. [inaudible]. Sam Yamashita: Thanks again, Sam. Thank you, Mark. And Patty and Jeff, this has been good. Glad we're able to make the connection that I was able to make the connection. Patty Vest: And to all who've stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast the podcast of Pomona college, stay safe, and until next time.