Argument for “Glocalization”: Japan for the World in the Japanese Gastronomical Advertisement
Argument for “Glocalization”: Japan for the World in the Japanese Gastronomical Advertisement

Summary/Abstract: The present study aims to emphasize how the rhetoric of the gastronomical advertisement can reveal the meaning of Japanese cultural identity in the context of “glocalization”. Using graphical and cinematographic presentation, the gastronomical advertisements offered by Wa Raku magazine (2008) or by the documentary film Japan: Fascinating Diversity (2012), on which the present analysis establishes its arguments, is seductive. Not only does it use a method of “syncretic” semiosis to offer access to the “philosophy” of Japanese cuisine, which is based on the natural (rawness, freshness), but also glimpses how Japanese culinary science turns into a cultural “uninterrupted text” which “writes” itself before the eyes of the consumers. At the beginning of a century that highlights globalization on the one hand and exacerbation of identity on the other, Japan seems to have instilled, in the definition of its own cultural identity, the characteristic of hospitality as only cuisine can comprise. By means of the gastronomical advertising discourse, Japan invites its guests to symbolic communication, turning them into equals with whom it shares its joys and pleasures, for a better mutual understanding.

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