Life as a salary man in Japan is no joke, and apparently no fun either. It does not matter if one is a manager in a big corporation or a salesman in a small company; it is of no consequence whether one has reached the apex of a career or is still struggling at its beginning; food and booze appear to offer indispensable and welcome havens. At least, this is the lesson that two quirky and enjoyable Japanese TV series – Samurai Gourmet on Netflix and Sunshine Sento Sake on Amazon - impart to their viewers.
Samurai Gourmet, based on Masayuki Kusumi and Shigeru Tsuchiyama's manga Nobushi no Gourmet, follows the daily low-key adventures of Takeshi Kasumi, a sixty-year-old man who has just retired from what is suggested was a decent professional position and is figuring out his next phase. Sent on errands or just killing time, he turns his lunches into occasions to explore the food and spirit landscape that surrounds him. Drinking alcohol with his meal gives him particular pleasure and a sense of audacious freedom, although he has no job to get back to.
Liberated from his obligations but also feeling somewhat unmoored, the protagonist uses his lunches to redefine his social role and above all his masculinity in his relationship with his wife and society at large, as the template provided by his job has lost its validity in the new situation.
In his quest for a new identity, he finds inspiration in his readings about the wandering samurais of the past, who had no master and no allegiance and were both admired and feared for their rough manners, decisiveness, and freedom from accepted customs. Whenever Kasumi feels his manhood is threatened or he is not responding to threats in what he assumes is the appropriate, assertive masculine way, a ruggedly handsome samurai occupies his imagination, appearing in the same spaces he inhabits: restaurants, cafes, food stores, children’s parks. Most of the time, however, the retiree avoids confrontation, concentrating on and finding pleasure in what he eats.
Certain dishes cause his present self to reminisce about his childhood and youth: mackerel for breakfast in a traditional seaside hotel reminds him of his first trip with his teenage friends without adult supervision, while croquettes send him back to his middle school years, when he and his schoolmates hid from their teachers to enjoy their favorite snacks. In Samurai Gourmet, food has the power to both generate powerful memories and to unleash the imagination. Women are both reassuring and threatening, creatures that are clearly mysterious to Kasumi.
A female boss is instead the nemesis of Takayuki Utsumi, the protagonist of Sunshine Sento Sake, also based on a manga (Masayuki Kusumi and Haruki Izumi's Hiru no Sentozake). A young slacker with little professional skills and aspirations, Utsumi, who works in an advertising agency, is pitied by his colleagues, belittled by his boss, and regularly ignored by his potential clients. Although bothered by his situation, he has little interest in putting more effort into his job, preferring instead to spend time in the traditional baths of Tokyo. He is so used to feeling guilty that it is easy for him to shrug the feeling and just let go. In each episode, instead of going back to his office after the umpteenth disappointment, he visits a different bath, luxuriating in hot water and meeting all sorts of characters, with whom he nevertheless does not establish any real contact. After the bath, his desire for a cold beer always brings him to a different eating establishment, where he peruses menus trying to achieve the best pairing between his drink of choice (usually big mugs of beer) and the simple snacks that he seems to prefer. Sunshine Sento-Sake is not only an exploration of Japanese baths, but also of unpretentious bar food, which assumes a comforting aura that makes it intriguing.
To a certain extent, both shows embrace the aesthetics of food porn (close ups on dishes and ingredients, attention to food preparation, focus on the facial reactions of the eaters, amplified cooking sounds) that seem to have become prevalent also in Japan food TV, as the series Midnight Diner also suggests. While the young Utsumi is fixated on the lower rungs of the culinary world, only trying to find solace from his catastrophic career, the older Kasumi meanders from low- to high-end eateries, reconnoitering all genres of Japanese fare in his search for a new role as an older man. In both cases, food and the alcohol that inevitably accompanies it (as it is often the case for Japanese male workers) represent an arena where the protagonists can both express themselves and create a bubble that protects them from a world they often do not fully understand. For them, food is not a tool to establish interpersonal contacts, but rather a refuge to soothe their bruised egos.