So… Tiramisu, huh…
While looking for scenes to use in the Maruzensky post, Tiramisu came up a LOT. Now, you could see it as just a random thing she likes… and if you do, you clearly haven’t paid attention to the many times in other posts where the smallest details send you down a rabbit hole.
So I start looking up Tiramisu in Japan and, as I expected, it indeed threw me down a rabbit hole chasing a white rabbit.
You see, in the late 1980s, during the economic bubble, Japan saw a boom of popularity for Italian food, the so-called Itameshi Boom (イタ飯ブーム).
In this article, Mari Ariki of the Hot Pepper Gourmet Restaurant Research Institute elaborates on the reasons why italian cuisine and the economic bubble were so tied to each other. Basically, in that era where more people had disposable income, it was very common for guys to take girls out in an effort to look cool, and what better way to look cool than with foreign gourmet cuisine? But unlike say… French food, the ingredients and concept behind Italian food were easier to understand for the layman Japanese.
Magazines were also a big element at play. Not unlike many things before the internet, trends tended to be more centralized, and it wasn’t uncommon to see a feedback loop where magazines would talk about something being high class only for people to reinforce that image and cause more magazines to report on it and such.
This loops back to Tiramisu. Despite the dessert existing since the 1960s and the “boom” existing for a couple of years before its popularity exploded, Tiramisu didn’t experience its own popularity boom until 1990. This is attributed to an issue of Hanako Magazine where they had a whole feature about Tiramisu.
But you see, this isn’t all. There is an urban legend that Tiramisu was a to cap off a night out. With the coffee and sugar in it giving the couple the energy to keep going after getting out of the restaurant. Thus the theory that that’s what Tiramisu’s translation (pull me up) is meant to mean.
Regardless of if Tiramisu is or isn’t the We Gonna Fuck Or What dessert, this whole thing suddenly made a LOT of other things make a sudden lot of sense. After moving into Japan I was actually surprised by the amount of traditionally Italian restaurants that are around.
The best example I can bring up is Pizza. Italian and American-style pizza are two completely different beasts, and unless you specifically go to a place that explicitly works with American pizza, Japan seems to default to Italian pizza.
Then that made me wonder about if Saizeriya came to be during this boom… but no, Saizeriya predates the boom by at least 10 years… and in the process I learned that the first restaurant the owner opened burned down from a fight that broke out with some Yakuza.
And if you told me a couple of days ago that asking the question “why does Maruzensky like Tiramisu so much?” would lead me to learning there was an italian food boom, that tiramisu had sexual connotations, and that good ol’ reliable Saize was a victim of gang warfare…
…I’d say “Yeah, that’s just business as usual with this game”.
