Examples in this article are drawn from my in-depth interviews and
observations conducted between 2008 and 2011 in Melbourne, Australia. I visited fortytwo restaurants that are registered as ‘Japanese restaurants’ on the Yellow Pages Local
Australian Business Directory Online.1 Twenty-seven establishments were selected from
the inner city, six establishments from the inner suburbs and nine establishments from
the outer suburbs of Melbourne. I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews
with thirty-two providers, including restaurant owners, managers, chefs, wait staff and
whole sellers engaged in the local Japanese food industry for varying periods of time.2
In this article, I will focus upon two key figures from two Japanese establishments in
Melbourne – Keiko, a co-manager of izakaya style dining pub CHIKA, and Kanta, a
co-owner of café/shop MARU – to demonstrate how the Japanese restaurant in the
Australian context provides a site for the production of a new mode of Japaneseness