Date: February 15, 2010
Location: MOS Burger, North Side of Mitaka Station
Subject: "Rice Burger" or "Raisu Ba-ga-"
When I went to MOS Burger to do my report, I was happy to discover that the Rice Burger was actually the target of a current 'campaign.' The original MOS Burger from 1987- called 'Tsukune' - has been brought back for some undefined period of time. Its featured ingredients are chicken, Japanese pickled radish slivers, and soy sauce.
What's the big deal about the Rice Burger, besides the fact that it's made of... well, rice (an assumption that I intend to correct in a moment)? I chose the Rice Burger because I believe it represents the concept of yoshoku and cultural adaptation so neatly, and so deviously (through marketing among other things), that it can successfully parade itself as being considerably further on the 'Japanese' end of the culinary scale of similar fast food products.
Let's take a look at the Yakiniku Rice Burger. The concept of a burger is heavily American, and largely came with american influence from the early Taisho period with surging popularity in the post-war era. Yakiniku comes from Korea, and while it is now considered a part of the Japanese culinary world, it is still well-known as something of a Korean origin. The third ingredient, rice, of course, exists throughout Asia, and the Japonica variety is not exclusive to the island archipelago. But to the Japanese, their rice is peculiar: it is from Japanese soil, and since the Japanese are tied to the land, the food and the people are linked. The feeling of Japanese rice being Japanese is so strong that the addition of rice to any food makes that dish into a 'Japanese dish'. The ties between rice and identity work on both psychological and gustatory levels of the Japanese. These processes are apparent with the Yakiniku Rice Burger, the current model of the much-vaunted 'Japanese' burger that made the chain famous -- the same burger which, in this particular form, is paradoxically more 'ethnic' than any other item on the menu. To quantitative logic, the Yakiniku Rice Burger should be seen, in a breakdown of percentages, as one of the most 'foreign' items on the menu, with only 33% attributable to a Japanese culinary tradition (assuming that rice is the Japanese culinary tradition).
However, upon investigation, I discovered that the Rice Burger doesn't quite live up to its' name. The staff was quick to correct me of thinking that the burger was made of rice. Actually, The rice patty-buns aren't made from kome, or rice grains, but komugi, a mixture of barley, three types of millet, and some rice.
But I noticed that this was completely avoided in the promotional flyer given out with my meal as a placemat. While the deliciousness of the rice patty is briefly mentioned in the paragraph with the arrows pointing to its' subject, the contents of the rice patty are never mentioned (although the other ingredients were commented upon). One might argue that the customer wouldn't noticed this - after all, why wouldn't a rice burger be made of anything but rice?
A search through the internet reveals (with some effort) that the Rice Burger is not made of rice alone. The MOS website vaguely admits that the rice patty is made of a sort of rice 'bread' which could really be interpreted quite freely. I think the big point here is that Mos Burger, as a business, doesn't want the information to affect their profits, and the idea, the perception, that the Rice Burger is made only of rice matters, even if it doesn't affect the taste of the product at all. It might be inferred that Japanese customers want pure rice, not 'mixed' rice. But it could also be that Japanese customers don't really care.
Promotional Paper Place-mat (February 2010):
MOS Burger Official Website (English)
The Chinese Perspective. Amy Cheung. An Exclusive Interview With Gary Rosen, Mcdonalds's Chief marketing Officer in China. 12/11/2006.
Rice burger image (top of post) from Gourmet.com... I started eating mine before I remembered that I needed to photograph it!
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