CHEESE FROWNED ON IN JAPAN.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 3, 28 September 1907, Page 3

CHEESE FROWNED ON IN JAPAN.

A Japanese who is not of tho highcollar or ultra-European cult would no more think of 'eating a ripe Cainonibert cheese than an American would think of giving a broiled lobster to a friend for a birthday or a Now Year's gift. Yet the people who call cheese "rotten milk" find decorative and symbolic attributes in tho humble j crustacean that has become a word of reproach in the Western world. Because there aro no cows in Japan except those kept near tho foreign settlements to supply Europeans and Americans, thcro wao no cheese. in Japan until that delicacy came in with the white resident. The Japanese, being introduced to cheese for tho first time with the advent of tho French restaurant in Yokoliama and tho foreign style Imperial Hotel in Tokio, appraised it with elemental directness. It smcllcd bad and was unfit food, so says the New York Sun. •'Wo eat daikon, which smolls somewhat strongly," a Japanese student of tho Imperial University oncp said, "but tho smoll is natural; it is part of the daikon. Your foreign cheoso smells of decay; it is not cheese until it' lias' decayed.' I don't think it is proper to eat decayed things." So imbred seems tho Japanese antipathy to cheeso that tho rats in chrysanthemum land.will_not touch it. Foreign housewives in Y'okohama say that when they open a tin of Denmark cheese they have no need to cover it, again, for the. rats will run right over tho can and tackle tho bag of rice next on the pantry sholf. The rats, it would seem, have never tasted cheese and do not care to try. -The lobster, on the other hand, is a popular cmc-lem of long life with the Japanese. To givo one to a friend on his birthday or at New Year meaDS that the donor wishes that he may livo so long that he may become doubled over like the lobster. Sometimes a boiled lobster is hung up with pine boughs that are used to decorate the houses' on New Year's Day. but more often it is a more abiding lobster made of cotton and scarlet cloth that has the place of honor over the door lintel.