Eating while walking in the street (Japan)

01The misunderstanding begins in the dictionary

The Japanese word 食べ歩き (tabearuki) refers first of all to a valued practice, actively promoted by the tourism industry: touring a district or a town to sample its specialities, from stall to stall - what French would call a gourmet round. That is the sense given by the reference dictionaries, beginning with the Digital Daijisen. The sense "eating while walking" is a later extension, to the point that usage manuals treat it as an incorrect employment; language columnists in fact propose, for that particular act, the distinct form 歩き食べ, built on the model of 歩きたばこ.

A tourism research study devoted to this word identifies 1985 as the typical year of this splitting of senses in the press corpus analysed. The misunderstanding is therefore inscribed in the vocabulary itself: what is frowned upon is not eating in the street, it is moving along while eating.

02The actual norm: stopping, not abstaining

Buying a skewer, a takoyaki or an ice cream from a stall is entirely normal. What is expected is that one comes to a halt: eating standing in front of the stall, beside the vending machine or in the space provided for the purpose, then moving on. The rule of the Nishiki market in Kyoto says exactly that - buy, then consume on the spot rather than while circulating.

The underlying principle is the same as on the train: not inconveniencing others. To this is added a justification frequently given in Japan, and reported as such by the international press: walking while eating means not giving the meal the attention it deserves.

03What the regulations say - and do not say

Two measures are regularly presented abroad as prohibitions. They are not quite that.

The city of Kamakura brought into force on 1 April 2019 a municipal regulation on the improvement of manners in public places. The municipality itself specifies that the text neither prohibits nor regulates eating while walking: it lists it among inconvenient behaviours and aims at raising awareness. No penalty is provided for - the local press noted, from the moment it took effect, that this absence raised a question of effectiveness. The motive is concrete: Komachi-dori, a street some 350 metres long, absorbs 50,000 to 60,000 visitors a day, with the litter, the collisions and the stained clothes that come with them.

In Kyoto, the merchants' association of the Nishiki market asks people not to eat while circulating and has had signs put up, from October 2019 onwards, in four languages - Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean - accompanied by pictograms. The reasons are just as material: a narrow, saturated aisle, where moving forward with a skewer in hand risks jostling another customer and staining one's clothes.

04A recent norm, not an ancestral prohibition

The explanation by an ancient ethic, according to which the meal should be a separate and contemplative act, does not withstand the history of food. Edo-period Japan was on the contrary a country of street catering: after the great fire of 1657, the stalls multiplied, and the city's four great specialities - soba, grilled eel, tempura and sushi - were born or refined on street stands. The tempura of the period was eaten standing at the stall, and if the pieces were threaded onto skewers, it was precisely so that they could be consumed in that way.

Eating in the street is therefore an old Japanese tradition. What has changed is not the morality of the meal, but the density: tourist numbers in a few narrow streets have turned a commonplace gesture into a problem of circulation and cleanliness.

05Where it goes wrong, and what to do

The visitor commits one or the other of two symmetrical errors. Believing in a general prohibition and depriving themselves of a street gastronomy that is there for the taking. Or ignoring the nuance and walking up a crowded lane while eating, skewer in hand - the case the signs are aimed at.

The exceptions are broad: traditional festivals and their stalls, food streets and expressly arranged areas all relax the rule. Elsewhere, the expected conduct comes down to three motions: buy, stop for the time it takes to eat, and keep one's wrapper until a bin - they are scarce in Japanese public space, and vendors will often take back the waste from what they have sold.

Geography of misunderstanding

Historical origins

Le mot 食べ歩き désigne d’abord la tournée gourmande d’échoppe en échoppe, sens donné par les dictionnaires de référence ; le sens « manger en marchant », pour lequel les chroniqueurs de langue proposent la forme distincte 歩き食べ, est une extension dont une étude touristique relève en 1985 l’exemple typique. La norme n’est pas de s’abstenir de manger dans la rue — l’Edo des yatai en fait une tradition ancienne, la tempura se mangeant debout au stand — mais de s’arrêter pour manger. Les dispositifs récents (règlement de Kamakura en vigueur le 1er avril 2019, sans sanction et sans interdiction ; panneaux du marché de Nishiki à Kyoto) répondent à une pression touristique sur quelques rues étroites, pas à un interdit ancestral.

Documented incidents

• 2019 — Le 1er avril 2019 entre en vigueur le règlement municipal de Kamakura sur les manières dans les lieux publics, qui range le fait de manger en marchant parmi les comportements gênants. La ville précise qu’il n’interdit rien et ne prévoit aucune sanction : il vise la sensibilisation, sur une rue de quelque 350 mètres qui reçoit 50 000 à 60 000 visiteurs par jour. (CNN Travel, « Japanese town asks tourists not to eat while walking » ; ville de Kamakura, page officielle du règlement)

Practical recommendations

Neutral alternatives

• Les fêtes traditionnelles, les rues gourmandes et les zones aménagées relâchent nettement la règle.
• En cas de doute, s’écarter du flux et manger debout à l’écart du passage.

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