The summer anime season has just finished serving a variety of delicious shows. To name a few: “You and I are Polar Opposites:” the sweetest story with the most diabetes inducing relationships in all of anime, “Goodbye, Laura:” the bittersweet continuation of the original Danish Little Mermaid story set in modern day, and “Sparks of Tomorrow:” a bountiful feast for the eyes in mechanical and expressive animation that tells the tale of a steam powered world brought into the age of electricity. There’s enough powerful and meaningful stories here to last through the winter.
But there’s one show that doesn’t leave me with a feeling of positivity and hope for the future of these characters. There’s one show that makes me equal parts scared and excited to take the next bite into each episode.
And that show is “Iron Wok Jan.”
“Iron Wok Jan” is an energetic cooking manga that has all the drama and style of anything in the action or martial arts genre. Despite how the manga has been around since 1995, this is its first anime adaptation, and it uses this fact to its advantage to not only set the expectations of the audience, but subvert and educate them as well.
Episode one makes this abundantly clear. It begins with the usual: “This is a work of fiction none of these guys are real,” disclaimer, before throwing us into the kitchen of Tokyo’s well-renowned Gobanchos Chinese Restaurant. Here it introduces the hard working middle aged first-rate chefs, the 45-year-old head chef, Yoichi Gobancho, his 16 year old cooking prodigy niece, Kiriko, and the 16-year-old clumsy and kind trainee, Takao Okonogi.
They all work hard to live up to the Gobancho name, but when the founder of the restaurant, Mutsuju Gobancho, shows up and asks for a fried rice breakfast, the kitchen freezes, and Kiriko gets to work. What follows next is the in-depth fast-paced process of making the PERFECT fried rice in a wok, with Yoichi and Kiriko explaining the depths of the cooking process to Okonogi. Kiriko is praised by the owner for her aptitude for cooking, and how she lives up to the Goboncho restaurant name.
As the chefs clean up after another busy day, someone walks into the closed restaurant and demands fried rice, despite the fact that they’re closed. One of the chefs makes a quick fried rice and passes it to the customer. He glares down at the food, tosses it around with his spoon despondently. Without even tasting the food, he barges into the kitchen, describing every single flaw with the dish, insults the chef, then dumps it into the trash!
Once again, the kitchen is frozen. But that’s because this stranger just took over the restaurant kitchen to make his own fried rice from scratch with the most unconventional ingredients available! This mysterious man is revealed to be Jan Akiyama, grandson of the infamous ‘Conqueror of Chinese Cuisine’ Kaiichiro Akiyama, the head of a rival family Chinese food restaurant that went out of business years ago, and the only rival to Mutsuju Gobancho.
As Jan finishes cooking his impossible dish and serves his creation to the staff, everyone is suspicious. But when they take that first bite, they find that … it’s good. It’s delicious! It’s fantastic! It could be served on the menu! It enrages the insulted chef and amazes the head chef! It impresses everyone but frustrates them that this cocky son of a gun walked into their kitchen and showed them up!
The head chef then reveals that Jan would be working with them for the foreseeable future, and the dining hall is enraged, rightfully so. But then Jan expresses his own thoughts, saying that his grandfather told him to come here when he died, as it was the best in the business. Yet all he sees is mediocrity, and that the Akiyama family is still the King of Chinese Food.
What follows is a competition between Jan and Kiriko, and their two opposing philosophies when it comes to cooking.
Jan says cooking is a contest; it is about making something better than the other person, and you must do anything and everything in your power to prove your dish is better than anyone else’s. This worldview was created by the instability of his life under his grandfather, whose teachings were so strict and punishments were so physically abusive and that it brought this vindictive personality into Jan’s life through cooking. This brings up the question: Is he a good chef because he’s a jackass? Or is he a jackass because he’s a good chef?
Kiriko claims it’s about the efforts the chef makes towards accommodating people’s needs to make the most people happy. This makes sense within her life as the heir to a restaurant name known for their excellency, and while her life was full of people teaching her from a young age, living up to the Gobancho name was always part of the conversation. As such, if she doesn’t cook well, it’s not only a sign of her failing herself, but failing the family name that has taught her so much. So she reacts the strongest when Jan insults her family name. She takes Jan’s bait, and snares her life on his claim.
The only person who doesn’t have a say in this rivalry but is connected to each side is the trainee, Okonogi. The kind boy approaches everyone with a smile and the benefit of the doubt, which some see as a weakness. But he is there to learn, so he accepts whatever abuse he gets as part of the learning process with a smile. He keeps the peace between the two firecracker chefs.
Thus begins the path of healing for Akiyama Jan, learning from those around him that maybe cooking isn’t all about—
SIKE!
You thought Akiyama Jan was going to learn a lesson, just because that’s how he becomes a better person? What part of: “Is he a good chef because he’s a jackass,” did you not get?! His vindictive competitive spirit feeds the fire that is this show’s drama. Every single one of his dishes one ups themselves. He pushes the boundaries of the people around him, because his cooking comes from that horrible view of life he has. Your eyes glue to the screen, waiting to see what uproar he will cause next, how he will shove his ego into your mind, taking up all the space it can fit in, just because nothing else can.
It is terrifying how far he will go, and how hard it is on him when he falls. Every time he takes a risk, there is a real precedent set that he might fail, but he doesn’t reflect on his own personality. He only reflects on his cooking. It is guaranteed that when he falls, he will come back stronger, for better and worse.
As the show includes at the beginning of each subsequent episode, it is true that scenes and themes in the show are considered to be outdated to modern sensibilities. The way Jan is rewarded for his downward spiraling ego, the abuse he was treated to by his grandfather, all of it isn’t directly addressed to the audience as the flaw, but what keeps Jan going, because that is how he imagines it. He copes by cooking and verbally abusing his fellow chefs, which feeds into his ego, which feeds the show’s entertainment.
But they are kept this way out of respect for the source material, and that is fantastic. Many modern shows are more afraid to let a problematic character stay problematic, forcing everything to stop and address the character’s fatal flaws. But “Iron Wok Jan” drives the drama without directly addressing it, always letting Jan’s actions speak for themself. Even if he is an incredible chef, it’s always under the guise of “this is wrong.” Letting Jan sing his uproarious song, stealing the spotlight from all other chefs, and watching him dig himself in a deeper hole, only to make the drama (and cooking) more intense, is pure adrenaline. Every step he takes is one closer to being destroyed by his ego, or raised on a silver platter towards mastery of Chinese cuisine. And I couldn’t help but eat it up—no, devour it, with ravenous attention.
The only thing that does change in the show is when the narrator interrupts to explain outdated cooking theories with modern anecdotes. The show isn’t afraid to address modern times when it comes to cooking; since rare spices have become more common, and new cooking techniques have been mainstays in the business since the manga’s inception.
While the subject of cooking changes and evolves with the times, people are still people, and cooking is still cooking. The world we live in might be constantly rotating, but the fundamentals of what makes us human, our goals and dreams, our humility and ego, it is something that we can relate to. And yet, even when people change, and sensibilities evolve, at the end of the day, we’re all people. It’s food for thought, really.
