New Year’s Eve in Japan:
Watching a hit TV show
about a man who eats alone
By Anna Fifield
Asia & Pacific
December 26
TOKYO — Forget big and almost always disappointing parties, and that struggle to get home after midnight. In Japan, New Year’s Eve is all about watching TV at home with your family, a reward after you’ve done your end-of-year deep clean.
Usually, Japanese families gather to watch the “Year-end Song Festival” on NHK, the public broadcaster, where popular singers are divided into teams — red for women, white for men — and battle it out, with the winner announced shortly before midnight. (More often than not, it’s the men.)
Some families switch channels to watch the “This Is No Task for Kids!”variety show in which comedians do stupid things and get punished for screwing up.
But this year a show that for many Japanese “salarymen” is pure escapism will take on the entertainment programs. “The Solitary Gourmet” will broadcast its first New Year’s Eve special, in which the star, a character named Goro Inogashira, will travel by himself to the western coastal area of Setouchi and eat. All by himself.
“I think TV Tokyo has given up trying to win audience for this slot,” Yutaka Matsushige, the actor who plays Inogashira, joked about the channel’s decision to broadcast a New Year’s special on a night that, for almost 70 years, has been defined by the red-and-white singing contest on NHK.
“The Solitary Gourmet,” now in its sixth season, is a uniquely Japanese kind of hit.
This is a country where men are supposed to get jobs in big companies and remain there for life, spending long days in the office and then long nights eating, drinking and sometimes singing karaoke with their superiors. If your boss asks his team to have dinner together, there is no saying no. These salarymen barely see their wives and children during the week.
That is why Inogashira has emerged as a kind of role model for a big swath of Japanese society. He’s a middle-aged Japanese man, but he’s free from the round-the-clock obligations of corporate life. He’s a self-employed salesman of soft furnishings imported from Europe.
He doesn’t drink. He’s not obliged to socialize with colleagues. He’s unencumbered by a family.
He just travels the country selling his wares. And when he gets hungry, he stops off at small, no-frills, family-run restaurants and relishes the local specialties. Over six seasons, he has eaten chicken hot pot in Fukuoka and grilled beef tongue in Sendai.
“Salarymen are corporate slaves who work tirelessly for their companies and their families,” said Ushio Yoshida, a TV critic for the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. “But Inogashira has escaped this slavery. That’s why he’s a hero to many people.”
In food-mad Japan, the show also has helped take some of the stigma out of eating alone.
Inogashira is a fictional character, and the show is scripted — he thinks about what to eat, describes what he is eating and comments on what others are eating — but the restaurants he visits are real.
Before season six began this spring, Matsushige told local reporters that he didn’t understand why people were interested in watching a middle-aged man just eating — and eating slowly. Still, he said, it’s the food that’s the star of the show. He’s just a supporting actor.
The show is made up of lots of long, lingering footage of the menus and the meals — sizzling meat, trays of sashimi, steaming bowls of noodles. These are the kind of shots typically seen on cooking shows rather than drama programs.
Inogashira sits there, by himself, and just savors the food. He’s not looking at his phone; he’s not reading a book — he’s just enjoying every mouthful. He never Instagrams his meals.
He’s not self-conscious about being alone in rowdy bars or barbecue restaurants. He even has a sweet tooth and enjoys desserts — something associated with being a sissy for many Japanese men.
“He’s very particular about how he eats each dish. He always asks the restaurant staff how to eat the meal to maximize the flavor and loyally follows their instructions,” Toyo Keizai, a popular weekly magazine for salarymen, noted in an article. “You hear Goro’s inner monologue. That’s all there is, but the time passes fast.”
Sometimes, however, the show proves controversial. A minor furor broke out on Twitter when Inogashira put soy sauce in his natto, a sticky ¬fermented-bean dish, and then mixed it in. Aficionados say the natto should be whipped up first and then the soy sauce should be added.
On New Year’s Eve, TV Tokyo will run a 90-minute special, from 10 to 11:30 p.m., in which Inogashira takes his last business trip of the year to the Setouchi area, between Hiroshima and Osaka.
The area is famous for its seafood but also for udon, a thick wheat-flour noodle. On New Year’s Eve, Japanese people usually eat soba, a thinner buckwheat noodle said to symbolize longevity — long life like a long noodle.
But TV Tokyo is keeping the menu for New Year’s Eve under wraps for now.
The show is based on a comic-book series that was popular in the 1990s and was translated into languages including Spanish and French. The writer, Masayuki Kusumi, will appear live on television before the show is broadcast.
At the beginning, these stories were popular among men in their 30s to 40s, who started writing online about their experiences visiting the same restaurants, Kusumi said.
Business executives who can eat alone feel liberated from the demands and stresses of work, and the audience enjoys that, the program’s producer has said.
A senior government official who often has to endure long, stuffy dinners for work said he tries to follow the solitary gourmet’s example as often as he can, patronizing small eateries and enjoying not having to talk about government business.
But now, the show has become popular among women and younger men, too, with viewers eager to see where Inogashira goes next.
“The main character behaves honestly, following his appetite and his instincts like a wild animal. He’s just an ordinary middle-aged man, but he lives very freely,” said Yoshida, the TV critic. “That’s liberating and refreshing to watch.”
The fact that Inogashira is single resonates in a country where young people are spurning marriage, said Hiroyoshi Usui, professor of media culture at Sophia University in Tokyo.
His choice of simple, ordinary, inexpensive restaurants shows that one can find small bursts of happiness without trying too hard, Usui wrote on his blog.
Yoshida said that when she watches the show, she often gets a craving for whatever Inogashira has been eating. “If Inogashira was eating curry, I might eat curry the following day,” she said. “It’s quite influential.”
But Matsushige, the actor who plays the solitary gourmet, has a warning for viewers: “If you watch the show at this late hour on New Year’s Eve and get hungry, there won’t be any restaurants open. So don’t get mad at us.”
Yuki Oda contributed to this report.
（The Washington Post 2017.12.26)
記事の中で、「Usui wrote on his blog」と紹介されているのは、ヤフー！ニュースの連載で「孤独のグルメ」について書いたものを指します。
以下に、転載しておきます。
あと数回となった“幸福な一人飯”
「孤独のグルメ」を味わい尽くしたい！？
今年上半期のテレビ界、あちこちで“食ドラマ”を目にしました。「ホクサイと飯さえあれば」（ＴＢＳ系）、 「野武士のグルメ」（ネットフリックス）、 「ワカコ酒」（ＢＳジャパン ）、「幕末グルメ ブシメシ！」（ＮＨＫ）などです。
しかし個人的には、あと数回を残すのみとなった「孤独のグルメ Season６」（テレビ東京系）が、最もフィットする食ドラマです。
定番の味「孤独のグルメ」
開始から５年。「孤独のグルメ」はシリーズも６を数え、すっかり深夜の人気定食、いえ人気の定番となりました。
何がいいかと言えば、「変わらないこと」ですね（笑）。主人公の井之頭五郎（松重豊）が、出かけた先の町で早々に仕事を済ませ、食べもの屋に入るというパターンは、ずっと変わっていません。
今期も、新宿は淀橋市場の豚バラ生姜焼き定食を、世田谷区太子堂の回転寿司を、また千葉県富津のアジフライ定食を、どれもうまそうに食べています。しかも、このドラマの名物である五郎のモノローグというか、心の中の声がよりパワーアップしているのです。
たとえば渋谷道玄坂の「長崎飯店」。皿うどんに入っていた、たくさんのイカやアサリに、五郎は心の中で「皿の中の有明海は、豊漁だあ～」と感激です。また春巻きのパリパリした食感について、「口の中で、スプリングトルネードが巻き起こる」と熱い実況中継を展開します。
さらに追加注文の特上ちゃんぽんに、長崎ソースをドバドバかけて食べながら、「胃ぶくろの中が『長崎くんち』だ。麺が蛇踊りし、特上の具材が舞い、スープが盛り上げる。最高のちゃんぽん祭りだ！」と、驚いちゃうほどの大絶賛です。
もしもこれを情報番組などで、若手の食リポーターが語っていたら噴飯ものでしょう。きっと「オーバーなこと言ってんじゃないよ！」と笑われてしまいます。
しかし、我らが五郎の言葉には、“一人飯（ひとりめし）のプロ”としての説得力があります。「食への好奇心」、「食への感謝の気持ち」、そして「食に対する遊び心」の３つが、過去のシリーズ以上に“増量”されているからです。
最近の「食ドラマ」
そういえば、「孤独のグルメ」をはじめ、最近の食ドラマは主役１人で成立させているものが多いですね。
かつて「一人飯」は「ぼっち飯」などとも言われ、マイナスイメージが強かった。でも、いまどきは未婚や晩婚に加え、離婚も増えたりして、個の自由を大切にする考えが広まり、「一人飯」が共感を呼ぶようになったのではないでしょうか。
しかも、最近の食ドラマに出てくるのは、高級店や高級食材ではなく、普通の食堂や食材が中心です。デフレが日常化する中で、無理をしなくても手が届く幸せを、じんわりと肯定してくれているのです。
あと数回の幸福な一人飯「孤独のグルメ」。その“定番の味”を、まさに味わい尽くしたいと思います。
（ヤフー！ニュース「碓井広義のわからないことだらけ」2017.06.17）