My wife and I were talking about sukiyaki (which her mother had enjoyed in a NYC Japanese restaurant sometime in the 1930s-’40s) and I wondered how far back it went in English; the OED, in a 1986 entry, takes it back to 1920 (“Another name by which this dish [sc. nabe] is usually known outside of Tokyo, is suki-yaki. This is derived from suki, which means a spade, and yaki, to cook”), but I figured that could be easily antedated using Google Books, and sure enough I quickly found a hit from 1915 1912 [thanks, ktschwarz!] (something about a “sukiyaki room” in a new Japanese social club in NYC). The most entertaining find, though, was Takeo Oha’s NY Times piece from July 6, 1919 (which you can read without the OCR errors in the Herald of Asia reprint at Google Books); it starts:
Now that the Atlantic has been crossed in the short span of sixteen hours by airplanes, the world has become a very small place indeed. Already aviators are turning their eyes to the Pacific. Soon we may expect to see the United States of America and Japan drawn much closer together by quick aerial transportation and with the shrinking of the ocean may the mutual understanding and friendship of our two nations become the greater. But New Yorkers need not wait for quick aerial transportation to visit Japan. Japan has come to New York.
The part of LH interest comes a few paragraphs later:
There are two vernacular newspapers, one weekly and the other semi-weekly. Doubtless any subscriber to any other New York newspaper could dispense with these without serious danger of backwardness in news. In consequence their readers hover in the neighborhood of the unlucrative two thousands. The parlor game, commonly christened “ta-maya” among my compatriots, has practically become one of the standard features of Coney Island and other New York Summer resorts. From a mercenary point of view the business is good and forms the best Summer side line. Really you need not be an infallible shot in order to turn a cigarette package target into your coveted prize at 50 cents or win a 5-cent doll by rolling away dollars at the Japanese ball game. Business is business, the Japanese has learned.
This metropolis may boast of no less than a dozen Japanese restaurants. Your casual visit will introduce you to fresh sliced fish taken raw, seasoned bamboo shoots, and lotus root and pickled radish served on the same table with “sukiyaki,” palatable at least to the Japanese. “Sukiyaki,” a compound word still unauthorized in any standard English dictionary, is the Japanese “quick lunch,” eaten while being cooked on a small charcoal table stove. Beef, onions, cabbage, beancurd, and other vegetable additions, not forgetting Japanese soy, sugar, and a little sake, are ready to be prepared in a shallow pan á la japonaise on the fire. The rest devolves upon you and your company, ladies not honorably excluded! A great time saving it is for the proprietor, this having his guests prepare their own meals! Though a fairly comprehensive menu is obtainable, Geisha girl entertainment, the Japanese equivalent to New York’s cabarets, is still unobtainable. Rice cakes have risen to a conspicuous place lately and have usurped a position in the bill of fare of chop suey restaurants. Their taste is the same as in Tokyo, but their price is different, as any sen-beiya-san (Japan rice-cake man) in New York City can tell you.
Note the use of “the Japanese” for a single Japanese person, a phenomenon we’ve discussed somewhere, and the Orientalizing “honorably”; what interests us, however, is the mention of “sukiyaki” as not occurring in any standard English dictionary, which of course makes sense at that early date. But I’m also curious about the parlor game called here “ta-maya”; does anybody know what that might be referring to? Google has been of no help to me; I’ve only found 霊屋 tamaya ‘mausoleum; (temporary) resting place of a corpse.’
I assume this is obvious to hat, but if you swapped in “pachinko” for “ta-maya” the sentence wouldn’t seem obviously wrong or confusing to me, although the wording is vague enough that whatever it describes might resemble pachinko quite closely or almost not at all. Wiki says that pachinko-as-we-know-it emerged circa 1930 in Nagoya with some aimed-at-children precursors in the 1920’s, but there was apparently a thing in Europe in the 1700’s called (for whatever reason) “billard japonais” which is ancestral to our pinball machines. But if you can find a more detailed history-in-English of the pre-1930 antecedents of pachinko, ta-maya might pop up there?
There is a company called Tamaya (玉屋) in the pachinko business, apparently founded in August 1953.
I can’t pin down “not honorably excluded”. Are ladies excluded? Is their exclusion dishonorable? Or is failure to exclude them honorable?
Was “ladies honorably excluded” a common phrase of restriction, at some restaurants or some Japanese restaurants, so that a play on the phrase was scannable?
The singular/countable use of “Japanese” or “Chinese” is considered gauche in English-speaking countries but, as best I can tell, is fairly current in English in East Asia, among both expats and locals. I imagine the “… person” formulation starts to wear thin if you actually have to use it a lot.
Note FWIW that this singular “the Japanese” as used in the block quote above is not an identifiable individual but some sort of abstract/generic referent. It’s as if one were saying “The Frenchman is notable for his qualities of blah blah blah” without meaning “that particular Frenchman standing over there” rather than some abstracted typical Frenchman. What’s interesting is that in this particular context swapping in plural “the Japanese” with a plural verb (“the Japanese have learned”) would thus result in a sentence with essentially identical meaning.
I can’t pin down “not honorably excluded”. Are ladies excluded? Is their exclusion dishonorable? Or is failure to exclude them honorable?
You’re trying — honorably but futilely — to parse it on a level it doesn’t deserve. I’m afraid it’s just tossing in an all-purpose Orientalizer (“your honorable self,” etc.) more or less randomly, without regard for logic or grammar.
Sukiyaki is a food, therefore you should check Barry Popik’s site. He’s already combed Google Books and newspaper archives, finding sukiyaki in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine (1906), Chicago Daily Tribune (1911), and Fort Wayne (IN) News-Sentinel (1918). Interesting that it was mentioned in all these other cities so early.
Date correction: this appears to be in the April 1912 issue of The Oriental Review.
Thanks, and I’ve corrected the post accordingly.
@mollymooly:
There is a company called Tamaya (玉屋) in the pachinko business, apparently founded in August 1953.
The Japanese Tamaya company appears to have issued their own (undated) game tokens (here and here).