I built this project around a simple, almost stubborn question: why does omuraisu (omelet filled with ketchup-flavored fried rice) feel so “Japanese” online, even though it is yōshoku—a cuisine whose very premise is historical borrowing and reinterpretation? My working statement is that omuraisu, as yōshoku, reflects waves of Westernization in Japan, yet in online circulation it is often read through a familiar image of Japan as refined and aesthetically meticulous: everyday comfort that looks polished, controlled, and emotionally soothing. Omuraisu is especially revealing because it stages a transformation of “Western” speed and simplicity into something distinctly Japanese: careful, delicate, and designed for display. By documenting my repeated attempts to reproduce the iconic “cut” and the inevitable gap between edited perfection and kitchen reality, I argue that omuraisu’s appeal today rests less on culinary lineage than on how visual media turns historical ambiguity into an exportable aesthetic of “Japaneseness.”

This project mattered to me for reasons that are both academic and personal. I genuinely love cooking, and I also love making videos—filming, structuring, and editing are not “add-ons” for me but an artistic language I’ve been practicing for years. I think omuraisu was almost too perfect as a topic: the ingredient list is short, even deceptively simple, but the dish demands technique and attention to timing. In other words, it invites a certain kind of perfectionism. I also wanted to avoid making something that only a small classroom audience could sit through. Compared with long, unedited cooking videos, I hoped a tightly structured, carefully edited piece could reach viewers who are already interested in the topic online—and, importantly, could demonstrate the very platform logic my argument depends on. I spent about four full days on editing the final cut, and roughly six total hours on cooking and filming across multiple attempts. That time commitment is not just “effort” for effort’s sake; it is part of the method. I feel the point was to let repetition and revision become evidence.

Many Asian audiences—including the Chinese and other East Asian students I spoke with—seem drawn to omuraisu precisely because it does not offer Japan as “Oriental exotica.” In casual conversations with Asian international students, the appeal was described less as adventure or spectacle and more as recognizable foreignness: Japan feels culturally adjacent yet still distinct, so yōshoku reads as a familiar comfort reframed through Japanese refinement rather than as an “otherwordly” cuisine.  

Just by employing a variety of everyday ingredients and small modifying cooking methods, it can be possible to create a “foreign-style feast.” For Asian audiences, this is a win-win.

For Western “foodies,” the discourse frequently frames value through “culinary adventure,” privileging “exotic ingredients” and “unusual foods from remote climes”, and casting the exotic as an “adventurous desire…to explore and possess the unknown Other”. Omuraisu, by contrast, is built from globally ordinary elements (eggs, rice), so it may appear too domestic to satisfy an exotifying gaze.  However, for many Asian viewers, that ordinariness is the point: It invites identification, replication, and quiet admiration for how “the West” is domesticated into something carefully Japanese.

Historically, omuraisu belongs to yōshoku, a category that emerged from Japan’s modern encounters with “the West.” One of the clearest ways to make this legible is to start with how Japanese cuisine itself was defined as a boundary.

Omuraisu, as yōshoku, is best understood not as an awkward “hybrid” but as the product of a modern classificatory regime in which “Japanese cuisine” and “Western cuisine” were constituted through contrast. Cwiertka shows that under bunmei-kaika elite life was split into a Western sphere (yō) and a Japanese sphere (wa), with yōshoku served in Western-style rooms and accompanied by Western dress; crucially, the category washoku emerged in response to the diffusion of yōshoku, the food of the most powerful “other.” Omuraisu therefore inherits a historically produced ambiguity: it exists inside a boundary that modern Japan itself had to draw.

The popularization of yōshoku did not depend on reproducing Western cuisine, but on reworking relatively simple western dishes into forms that fit Japanese budgets, tools, and everyday routines. Western-style restaurants shifted from multi-course set menus to a la carte ordering accompanied by Japanese-style boiled rice; pan-frying was often converted into deep-frying, a method already familiar through domesticated tempura. Omuraisu stages precisely this historical operation: the transformation of “Western” speed and simplicity into a Japanese grammar of care, texture, and presentation.

This framing fits omuraisu precisely: omelette plus rice might sound like a straightforward Western pairing, yet in practice omuraisu becomes something else—seasoning choices, texture, plating, and the expectation of care all re-code “Westernness” into an everyday Japanese domestic aesthetic.

If this were only a historical argument, my project could have been a paper. But a video seemed most apt and even necessary, for there is a reason omuraisu felt urgent as a topic and relevant to our times: I kept encountering it not as a restaurant dish or family meal, but as an online event: an anticipated reveal. The “cut”.

To make my argument more concrete, it helps to describe the common structure recurring across omuraisu videos in both Western and Asian media. In most clips I surveyed, the sequence is remarkably standardized. The thumbnail (or opening frame) almost always foregrounds the same lure: a flawless, pillow-smooth omelette surface poised to be cut, shot close enough to promise texture before any context is offered. After this hook, the video moves through a middle section that functions as either instruction or montage—whisking, frying, shaping, plating—often compressed into a quick, legible sequence rather than a full-duration cooking process (for example).

 “Now the Climax, cutting time”: The ending then delivers the anticipated payoff. The cut itself. The knife presses down, the omelette parts like a curtain, and the soft interior spills or folds open in a controlled reveal. This finale retroactively justifies the viewer’s attention, turning waiting into reward. In other words, the “cut” is not a casual step but a programmed climax: a repeatable visual contract that organizes the entire narrative arc of the video.

To connect the friction between edited perfection and kitchen reality to scholarship, I drew on work that treats “tradition” and “authenticity” as produced—not simply inherited. The authors of “From Italian Pizza to Sushi Kebab” argue that traditional food functions as a constituent of collective identity: it is “a symbolic and imaginary mark of a group,” but also an object that carries narratives, knowledge, and techniques that “reinforce the authenticity of that collective identity”. Read this way, yōshoku’s hybridity is not an embarrassing flaw that needs to be corrected; it is the very condition that allows Japan to narrate a modern culinary self through selective borrowing and taming. My project extends that logic into the platform age. If authenticity is reinforced through the narratives and techniques, then short-form video becomes a modern engine of “traditionalization”: the repeatable visual form—especially the iconic cut—operates like an informal style, teaching viewers what counts as the “real” omuraisu and making that version legible, teachable, and shareable at scale.

I found a powerful parallel in Yamaguchi’s study of katsu curry in the UK. In British usage, “katsu curry” splinters into four distinct forms: from the original Japanese meal (cutlet + curry sauce + rice) to versions that drop rice, then versions that mean only curry sauce, and finally “katsu curry” as a generalized flavor label for products that do not resemble the original dish at all. Once a dish becomes a circulating sign—whether a name, taste label, or visual climax—its meaning can detach from lineage and reattach to what is most portable. For omuraisu, that portable sign is the cut.

In the end, my project is an argument made through making. I do not claim that the “perfect cut” reveals the authentic essence of omuraisu. I claim almost the opposite: the cut reveals how authenticity can be relocated—away from lineage and toward circulation, away from historical explanation and toward visual form. By filming multiple attempts, enduring failure, and then finally producing a successful cut, I was not just learning technique. I was tracing how yōshoku’s historical ambiguity became, in the platform age, an exportable aesthetic of Japaneseness—refined, careful, and designed to travel.

Works Cited

Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. (2009), “The Culinary Other: Seeking Exoticism,” in Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, Routledge. Pg 97 – 101

Kordzińska-Nawrocka, Iwona. Japanese Culinary Culture and Identity. 2019

MOGUMOGU – Food Entertainment – モグモグ . Funny and Amazing Omelette Rice Show Omuraisu Master – Japanese Street Food – How to make https://youtu.be/tZRWsRIK0bQ?si=nqgoSzYvcny4KUGt  (15:07)

Bayashi TV. PERFECT OMELET (OMRICE) @omletpro9356‬ #shorts https://youtube.com/shorts/2ce1ncjdl84?si=loRPQuaukTYsKmpr‬

Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. (2006), Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. Chapter 1, “Western Food, Politics and Fashion,”  Eating for’Civilization and Enlightenment

da Silva, Eduardo Mangolim Brandani, Gessica de Brito Bueno, and Christian Fausto Moraes dos Santos. “From Italian Pizza to Sushi Kebab: A History of Identity, Authenticity and Food Hybridism in Traditional and Fusion Cuisine Recipes (19th to 21th Centuries).” Revista Aracê, vol. 7, no. 8, 2025, pp. 12

Yamaguchi, Michiyo. “The Journey of Katsu Curry: Borrowing and Reinterpretation in the UK.” The Academic Reports of the Kyoto Prefectural University, no. 77, 2025, pp. 21–34.