That part in the Japanese isekai light novel

while i agree that sometimes it gets boring and goes a little too far

but if you've ever lived in a completely foreign country, you will miss the food that you've always eaten

it's just part of being homesick and it happens to everyone sooner or later

 

You are simply not a foodie
Shogeki no Suma is very formula for a reason
Along with that Isekai Rokudou and the live action Japanese restaurant drama that has both Chinese and Korean remakes I believe.
It is not all about padding. Stop being such a cynic.
Since the authors on Syosetu don't get paid. It makes no sense to pad chapters
I believe the authors genuinely love food.
I hate to beat a dead horse but Syosetu novels are rough drafts with zero editiing and no proofreading even.
I don't know what you are expecting but it is like someone getting angry that 5 year olds can't solve calculus.
Everything is not a conspiracy.
Everything is not done for nefarious purposes, it might just be a poor dude trying his hand at writing and being aware of the obvious fact that food focused stories are very hot and in vogue and a very popular trend.

Stop seeing the worse in everything.
Personally, I think you are just jaded.
Take a break from novels.
I recommend 3 months but even one month will do you a lot of good.
Cheers!

 

Well, the origin of the rice is when people accidentally found that they could use a certain grass whenever there was a flood.

 

To be fair Rice, wheat and many other domesticated plants have been cultivated for so long that we do not 100% know how people discovered that they could be eaten, or how to prepare them. But in general if your people have been in an area for centuries to millennia that ill have experimented with eating pretty much all the local flora and fauna. Especially from periods of starvation and failed crops.

 

Nah. Proper foodies will talk about a wide variety of foods and include all sorts of complex dishes. "Transmigrator Meets Reincarnator" is a good example of what this would look like. Japanese books that just use the same old miso-rice-soy sauce is just the writer being uncreative so they go for the same old same old.

 

Haha, a foodie will appreciate even an half assed food story.
Just the way girls enjoy average or even bad romantic comedies.

 

These stories don't even qualify as "half-assed"; it tends to end up uninteresting to read because the writers usually don't put any real effort into it.

 

True. I also pointed out how foodie stories are in vogue.
It is now a cliche just like your standard harem

 

Sure. But it's possible to write these stories well so there's no excuse for doing a bad job of it. Same with harem really. Right now I'm reading a book that does a great job of it so I end despising poor quality harem all the more.

 

Food is an intrinsic part of culture and everyday life.

If you were sent to a fantasy world with sub-par food and had the ability to cook, wouldn't you want to make something nice? And as a side benefit, you introduce better tasting cuisine to a new world.

Now, you're in the kitchen, ready to cook up a storm. What do you cook?

Well, probably the food you're most accustomed to. A food you eat a lot, whose coexistence is easy to bring about. You aren't going to make a pizza on your first attempt unless you have the powers of the Cooking Deity on your side.

That's where we end up on the aforementioned food: rice and miso.

Is it a cliched trope? Yes. Is it rather annoying when it seems forced because it's popular? Absolutely. Is it a sign of bad writing? Well, that's opinion-based. Some people say the use of tropes at all is a mark of bad writing (and I personally disagree), but my point is that a simple scene can be written well, and if your audience enjoys it, it becomes good writing by association.

TL;DR, it makes sense in context, and it isn't a sign of bad writing. I think you're being a bit too cynical about this, but assuming you read a bunch of back-to-back cooking subplots, I can see where you'd get annoyed. Still, don't dock the hustle.

 

Well, Japanese webnovel are usually unedited and not proofread, so I give them some slack.
I dont expect too much from amateurs.

 

Even being amateurs isn't really the reason why most of this stuff is so bad though. If it was, then there'd be no reason why Chinese web novels are so much better at characterization, world building, and just overall prose. My conclusion is that Japanese web novelists aren't interested in being better writers so they end up never building up better techniques.

There are better Japanese web novels out there, like Overlord or Bookworm, but these are few and far in between.

 

I know this wasn't your main point, but I wanted to bring this up: I don't believe JP writing is inherently inferior to CN writing as a whole. As someone who primarily translates and reads light novels, web novels and light novels are like night and day.

Oftentimes, light novels will not come to the level of prose given by actual Japanese novels, but they can sometimes come frighteningly close, or even best their contemporaries. Overlord, as you mentioned, is a good example. It even does world-building well. If you haven't had a chance to read the light novel yet to compare it to the web novel, I highly recommend it.

There's even some generic sounding light novels that handle their prose extremely well. The Magic in this Other World is Too Far Behind! is another good example. As for more unique stories, the Monogatari Series. I don't think I can do it anymore justice then by name-dropping it.

That isn't to say all light novels are angelic-tier writing compared to their web novel counterparts. In Another World with my Smartphone is a personal guilty pleasure of mine, but the light novel mostly reads like the web novel with some removed pointless/wasteful scenes, non-sequiturs, and grammatical improvements. There's no large overall difference between the two.

And as you said, characterization in JP novels tend to be far behind their CN counterparts. The reason I give for this occurrence is that generally, web novels tend to rely heavily on character tropes, which by their nature render change and development invalid. Tropes are extremely popular with web novels, and also allows for easy-tagging if someone wants a specific "dere" style character. Look at the popularity of Tsundere character archetype in JP fiction, for example.

TL;DR I don't want the misconception that "CN writers spend more time on their stories than JP writers" or that "JP writers cannot be good writers" to be something that catches on. It's just the JP landscape tends to lend itself to a lot of generous use of copy & paste character formulas, and it seems to be more casual overall.

I think the fact that some of these light novels exist, and are brilliant, is proof that JP writers can grow and develop new skills over time.

 

Last I checked, you have 13 year olds posting novels on Syosetu.
You are making Apple to Oranges comparison
Websites like Qidan are commercial websites unlike Syosetu.
You have works like Bookworm
And some seasoned writers who post on there but for the most part, poor novels are the norm.
It doesn't help that people translate the same novel over and over to justify their fetish : translator A translates isekai food fetish. One of the reader of translator A translates isekai food fetish

Author is an actual 13 year old kid:

https://www.novelupdates.com/series/renkinjutsushi-desu-jijou-wa-gomibako-ni-sutete-kimashita/
https://www.novelupdates.com/fdrev/?comid=86889&sid=18990
I read a bit on how web novels in China are published. Some authors spend money to have bot accounts buy their chapters and other services so they get discovered.
Different ways to get popularity.
It's a completely different beast to Syosetu
https://pandaily.com/are-chinese-online-novels-the-mcdonalds-of-literature/

 

The problem is the sub par food part.

The recipes will be different, but the food should not be suppar. People are creative and experimental so unless there is some factor stifling creation it would be as good as is to be expected with the ingredients available.

There would be ingredients not readily available, but that would be primarily due to distance, cost (spices and sugar should be expensive), or just no having the tech to produce them (allot of food additives require modern processing). Quality of ingredients could also be an issue but replacing a recipe does not fix that.

 

There are two main routes that Japanese writers take to learn their craft. The first is the traditional route, starting with literature club, progressing to junior writing contests, and other writer development programs and systems. These writers learn the different parts of creative writing: from characterization to themes to building settings, and so on. This group can produce fantastic writers, and indeed some of the best writers in the world are Japanese.

The other route are the otaku. Unlike the first group they don't do any of that, and base pretty much everything they do on the otaku media they consume. Having such a thin background to base your work on inevitably leads to a thinness in the material produced. And so what ends up suffering the most tends to be the settings and especially the characterization. Things like prose and theme tend to suffer as well; albeit in a more indirect way. I see this group as almost a rejection of the other one, and I just don't know how it's possible to write well when you ignore the fundamentals of creative writing. I also can't see them improving significantly because the things I deem as bad writing aren't things that these writers care about. They also don't seem to have much ambition and with that there's just not all that much impetus for growth.

The big reason why Japanese web novels are so bad is because they are predominantly drawn from the otaku crowd. It's no surprise though that some of the best web novels are written by people who draw significant parts of their inspiration from other sources. Overlord is a good example here as Maruyama draws heavily from his tabletop RPG experience so he ends up caring a lot more about world building and the varied cast of characters.

I see Chinese web novelists as being inherently superior for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that their fundamentals are based primarily on real world literature and a lot of them have the aspiration of being as good or even better than the people who inspired them. Obviously this doesn't happen all that often, but having ambition means a lot for beginning writers. And I've witnessed good results to the extent of reading material with more depth than I've ever seen in decades of reading English-language literature.

There's some truth to this, but the Chinese sites are only commercial for the most popular writers. The 95% less popular ones make no real money writing and can be directly compared to Syosetu. Hell, one of my favorite writers right now started writing 3 years ago when he was 17. And his prose and characterization are excellent. I don't mind amateurs who start off without really knowing how to write but are still willing to put in the hard work to improve themselves, but that doesn't mean that the crap that gets on Syosetu should be excused.

 

There was an article about how a Japanese publisher banned Isekai in their writing contests.
https://goboiano.com/kodansha-bans-isekai-and-teen-heroes-in-light-novel-contest/
Most young writers learn as slave interns from accomplished writers and might even get their work stolen.
Also, editors for light novel publishes complained in a news article that the authors know nothing about the basics of creative writing and they had to rewrite the entire story
https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/editor-claims-many-of-japan’s-light-novel-authors-can’t-write-aren’t-the-ones-creating-their-books

I need to clarify on one thing, I don't like Syosetu.
It's an exploitative model.
Publishers support it because it means they don't have to invest in authors the traditional way ( even if I consider using aspiring authors as slaves interns for accomplished authors is bad. At least they learn something)
They use Syosetu like a Colosseum where authors duck it out with no input from publisher and have the website use a process of elimination to provide them the most popular works.
Basically. The author does the marketing for them

 

IDK about JPLNs but I find the master chef filler more abundant on Korean novels. Which is kinda ironic because they finally made a novel about cooking, God of Cooking, but they made it about tasting.

 

The solution is simple. Instead of reading Japanese isekai, you should read Brazilian isekai. Japanese isekai are written by the Japanese people for the Japanese people. Japanese authors do not care about you, in the same way that you do not care about supporting them. So they're not writing for you, they're writing for the Japanese people, who do support them.

If it's Brazilian isekai, you can count on there being more alcohol and nude beaches. If it's French isekai, you can count on there being lots of creme brulee or full course meals. If it's British isekai, you can count on there being lots of teas. Even Alice In Wonderland has a tea scene.

Complaining about the Japanese writing for the Japanese is like complaining about why you can't park a bus in a motorcycle's parking space.

 

Please tell there is a Brazilian isekai I would love to read it