🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Japanese

Japanese are the main population of Japan, an island country in East Asia. For a long time milk was not an everyday food in Japanese cuisine: the diet was based on rice, fish, soy products and vegetables. Even so, the country’s history has a notable “dairy” episode.

From the 7th to the 10th centuries, so was made at the imperial court — a product of milk cooked down over a fire for a long time; a dictionary of the Heian period describes it as a mass of layers of milk skin. According to the Engishiki code (10th century), so was supplied to the court; it was eaten by the nobility and used as medicine and as an offering to the gods. According to the sources, an even more precious product, daigo, was obtained from so, but historians disagree on what exactly it was. After the Heian period this court tradition died out.

Widespread milk consumption in Japan began only in modern times, from the late 19th century, and after the Second World War milk became part of school lunches. In the 1980s a farm in Nara Prefecture revived so as a traditional delicacy.

The Japanese tea tradition centres on matcha and chanoyu, the tea ceremony. Powdered tea came from China in the 12th century, the way of tea took shape in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591) gave it its present form with the principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity. The largest schools today are Omotesenke and Urasenke. Japan also has its own distilling tradition, shōchū from Iki, Kuma or Satsuma.