She certainly makes it look easy. No wonder Japanese women adore her. Kurihara, a svelte and youthful 54, is Japan’s answer to Martha Stewart. Like the American lifestyle guru, she has a rapidly expanding publishing, retail and restaurant business, including her own glossy quarterly, Lovely Recipes. Her dozens of cookbooks have sold more than 10 million copies. The chain store Yutori no Kukan (Quality Space) carries tableware, aprons and gardening tools that she designed or selected. In the latest expansion of her empire, U.S. consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble signed her on as an adviser and last month launched a Japanese Web site, shufufufu.com (a combination of “shufu,” or housewife, and “fufufu,” a giggling sound), that features her tips, essays and recipes. Kurihara balks at the comparison to Stewart. “Martha-san is an important businesswoman,” she says. “I’m not in her league.”
Or is she? The two celebrities pitch similary elaborate homemaking fantasies. But Kurihara’s underlying aim–to help housewives please their husbands–would probably make Stewart, a divorcee, cringe. Kurihara says Japanese husbands take their wives for granted. Instead of wasting time being unhappy about it, the wives should have fun with what they do. Says Kurihara, “Which is nicer for him: a wife grumbling as she gets up to make breakfast and see you off in her pajamas, or [a wife] going about it looking neat and tidy and with a smile on her face?” She doesn’t mean to imply that wives should deprive themselves; on shufufufu.com they can find “reward recipes” for themselves, like a cup of spicy herb tea.
Japanese women love Kurihara’s down-to-earth unpretentiousness. She says it derives from her upbringing in a big family in Shizuoka, in central Japan. When she was growing up, her house was always jammed with relatives and workers from a nearby printing plant that her family owned. She had no choice but to learn good manners and hostessing at a young age.
She picked up the rest of her skills after starting her own family. She and her husband, former TV anchor Reiji Kurihara, have two kids, now in their 20s, who used to bring friends home unexpectedly. So she came up with home-entertainment rule No. 1: always be prepared. Not enough food? No reason to panic. “When you have only two pieces of asparagus,” she says, “cut them in thin strips so they look like more. Put on a little wasabi and light soy sauce; top it with something crunchy, like peanuts. It goes well with wine.”
Her rise to fame began when she was hired to prepare food backstage for TV cooking shows. Then, about 10 years ago, she started turning out best-selling books with her original “impromptu dishes.” She says there is extra demand for easy-to- prepare meals these days, because more women are working outside the home. At the same time, families are increasingly inviting guests to their homes.
Japan’s economic turndown hastened Kurihara’s rise. Sociologist Yoko Kunihiro, author of the book “Housewives and Gender,” says the women who adore Kurihara are mostly in their 30s and “came of age in the years of economic growth.” In the lingering recession, their household income is unlikely to increase, so they want to improve their lives with what they have. Kurihara admirers “aspire to make their little home a comfortable place, so they can be a little happy,” says Kunihiro.
And what’s wrong with that? Recently, in her monthly segment on an evening news show, Kurihara told anchorwoman Yuko Ando that she gets up at 6 every morning to do a little housework, feed the cats–and bring her husband a cup of hot tea in bed. After a stunned silence, Ando deadpanned: “I can hear a big jealous sigh coming from husbands all over the country.” And, perhaps, from their wives as well.
