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Introduction
Fast food got its birth in Southern California during the late 1940s and flourished all over the USA, later spreading around the globe ([6] Schlosser, 2001). McDonald's Japan, the largest fast food company in Japan, reported annual sales of 542.7 billion yen (approximately $6.65 billion as of 4 February 2011) in 2010, the largest annual sales since the company opened its first store in Japan in 1971 ([4] MSN Sankei News , 2011). In fact, Japan has the second largest number of McDonald's restaurants, after the USA ([8] Ritzer and Maruyama, 2003). The ubiquity of fast food restaurants is widely accepted in contemporary Japanese society.
The fast food industry originally aimed to control its customers into spending their money and leaving the restaurant as soon as possible. In order to accomplish this goal, some fast food chains used security guards and signs for restricting the duration of customers' seat occupation, often to 20 minutes or less. Other fast food restaurants designed uncomfortable chairs to prevent their customers staying too long ([7] Ritzer, 2011). However, the usage of fast food may be divergent in different cultures. Several anthropologists investigating fast food issues in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Japan reported that East Asians tended to:
- stay at fast food restaurants for a longer duration than Americans did; and
- eat fast food as a group instead of eating alone ([11] Watson, 1997).
Additionally, [10] Traphagan and Brown (2002) reported that Japanese often shared their ordered items with others they came with (e.g. family members, friends). For example, fried potatoes were often placed at the center of the table so that everyone in the group could share. In observing Japanese college students in Tokyo regarding their fast food usage, [2] Kamio and Yoshida (1999) noticed that female college students frequently came to the fast food restaurants with a group of four to six members and spent more than an hour there, but such a phenomenon was not demonstrated by their male counterparts.
[12] Yui (2003) claimed that the same food item could have divergent meanings in different cultures. Sushi (i.e. rice with raw fish) was often thought of as "healthy" or "diet food", and rice was classified as a vegetable in the USA, whereas...