In Japan, Food Can Be Almost Too Cute To Eat

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  Hannari Tofu is a character who shows up on a range of plush merchandise.

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  To-fu Oyako is a soybean-curd-inspired line of products, including bags, planners and pillows.

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  A kyaraben, or character bento, inspired by characters from the anime Yondemasuyo, Azazel-san.

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  Two of the heroes from the anime series Go! Anpanman. The head of Shokupanman (left) is made out of white bread. Anpanman (right) is named after a Japanese sweet roll stuffed with red bean paste.

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  Food imitates art imitating food: a pancake shaped to resemble Anpanman's sweet roll head.

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From an early age, Japanese kids are taught to "eat with your eyes," and this emphasis on the visual delights of food can be found in many aspects of Japan's vaunted culture of cute.

Take children's television, for example. Some of the most beloved cartoon characters in Japan are based on food items.

One favorite is Anpanman, or "Bread Man" a superhero whose head is made out of a sweet roll filled with red bean paste (yeah, we're a bit baffled, too). Anpanman spends most of his time running around, saving starving children by letting them take bites out of his oh-so-delicious head. His friends include Shokupanman, whose head is made from a piece of sliced white bread, and Currypanman, whose head is made from a piece of you guessed it curry-filled bread.

This obsession with cute food manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Take, for example, Hannari Tofu the cutest chunk of soybean curd you're likely to encounter. The character pops up on a range of plush merchandise, from stuffed animals to key holders.

Debra Samuels, a chef and author of My Japanese Table, used to live in Japan with her family. She says it didn't take her long to realize how tightly everyday life revolved around visuals, especially when it came to food.

After her young son started complaining that the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches she was packing for him weren't "cute enough" for kindergarten, Samuels started embracing the Japanese food aesthetic.

She began carving apple wedges into the shapes of bunnies. She added "baloney bangs" to sandwiches with faces.

"The first thing you do when you look at something is to see whether you want to eat it or not. It's very important in Japanese culture," she tells All Things Considered host Audie Cornish. "Kids learn this from a very early age."

And from an early age, Japanese kids also get some pretty excellent school lunches, called kyushoku. Served to all first- through sixth-graders, these standardized meals serve a similar purpose as school uniforms. As Samuels explains, "Everybody gets the same lunch. There are kids that are traumatized because their lunches are not as cute as their neighbors.' "

These school lunches are locally grown and usually made from scratch. They're so yummy that, as The Washington Post reported earlier this week, some kids ask their parents to re-create the meals at home. And they're healthful, too, which has encouraged some parents to ring up schools for the recipes. It's hard to imagine the same thing happening in the U.S.

By the way, if you're curious about how school lunches compare around the world, check out this slide show from our friends at Shots. Eat your eyes out, folks!

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Japanese Sake Makers Shake Off Tradition, Try Brewing Craft Beer

Until recently, if you ordered Japanese beer, there weren't many to choose from. Before the industry was deregulated in the 1990s, four major brewers Asahi, Suntory, Sapporo and Kirin controlled the manufacture of Japanese beer.

But the major brands' domination is ebbing, for reasons that have as much to do with Japan's ancient history as with its evolving palates. And now some traditional sake brewers are ditching the tradition and trying their hand at craft beer brewing.

From a dusty country road about 100 miles north of Tokyo rises the white-washed facade of a sake brewery. Here in the quiet town of Naka, the Kiuchi family has been brewing Japan's ancient rice wine for seven generations, since the time of the shoguns.

But these days, the beverage rolling off Kiuchi's production line would make its 19^th century founders squirm. The brewery is now a leading maker of micro-beer.

"That building furthest away used to produce sake," says vice president Youcichi Kiuchi as he shows me around. "Now it's only for brewing beer."

The humid air inside the newly expanded plant is fragrant with malt and wheat. After being in the beer business for just 15 years, the company will produce more than 250,000 gallons of craft beer this year, earning about $8 million. Half of that is destined for pubs and supermarkets in the United States.

Kiuchi Brewery is among scores of Japanese sake makers that have branched into craft beer. The most successful have seen year-on-year growth of as much 40 percent, in the face of a long, slow decline for sake.

Ry Beville, publisher of The Japan Beer Times, says that demand for craft beer is unprecedented.

"A lot of people are saying 2012 is the year of craft beer in Japan," he says. "You're seeing an explosion of craft beer bars and restaurants in Tokyo. There's over 100. All across the country, they're popping up every week."

For Youichi Kiuchi, shifting into beermaking was not just a savvy business move, but an act of personal liberation. Making beer, he says, has literally changed his life.

"Making sake is like judo or flower arranging you're judged by how well you stick to the rules; there's no margin for improvisation," Kiuchi says. "But beer is about doing what you want. It's fun to make and sell. Sake is hard to make and tough to sell."

Experienced at handling the microbiology of brewing and blessed with high-quality water sources, the Japanese have started to gain international renown for their ale, stout and lager, Beville says.

"There are some Japanese breweries that are making better beers than Americans," he says. "A good example is Fujizakura, which made a rauchbier, a [World Beer Cup winning] smoked beer. It's a traditional German beer. That was shocking to a lot of people, that a Japanese brewery would win in a traditional German category."

In an effort to stand out in a global beer market brimming with choices, the Japanese have added in novel ingredients like ginger root, oyster shell, wasabi horseradish, and even miso a soybean paste more commonly used in soups.

But if brewing has proved no stumbling block, Japanese brewers are still learning how to sell their stuff, says Ryouji Oda, president of the Japan Craft Beer Association.

"Technically, it's very easy for sake makers to switch to making beer," he says. "But the markets are completely different. So those sake makers are struggling to figure it out."

Microbeer remains a micro-corner of the Japanese beer market. And at close to $9 for a single-serving bottle, it's out of the price range of many guzzlers.

But small beer makers are confident about grabbing market share away from mass-market brewers and other alcoholic beverages for years to come.

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