The woman who is arguably the world's foremost English-language authority on Japanese home cooking didn't go to Japan 40 years ago with food on her mind. And she wasn't the typical Japanophile, harboring romantic visions of cherry blossoms and mountain inns. She didn't speak a word of Nihongo and her work as an anthropology student at the University of Michigan didn't concern Japan.

"It was a total accident," said Elizabeth Andoh by phone from her parents' New York home, where she was taking a break from a book tour in support of her latest work, "Washoku: Recipes From the Japanese Home Kitchen" (Ten Speed, hardback, $35) — a tour that will bring her to Honolulu in August.

The 20-something Andoh was dissatisfied with school and her adviser suggested she apply for a scholarship from the UM Center for Japanese Studies. "I applied — I don't think anybody else did — and the rest is history."

The Andoh family, with whom she boarded on Shikoku, one of Japan's rural South Islands, would become her own family. She would marry Atsu-nori Andoh, one of the sons of the house. And the woman who from the first was known to her as "Okaasan" ("Mother") would become not only her mother-in-law, but her first cooking teacher.

"I never really thought much about food before I went to Japan. If I was hungry, someone, thankfully, fed me. ... It wasn't until almost everything on the table looked unrecognizable and I had to do something about feeding myself that it dawned upon me how important food was and how it could become a window into the larger experience of a culture," she recalled.

Her first few years in Japan were a mind-expanding adventure as she learned the language; even the simplest sign at a train stop was a scintillating puzzler. But once she had enough facility to "crack the code," she said, "language acquisition was just plain boring." She needed another challenge and learning about food in Japanese became that.

At the Yanagihara School of Classical Japanese Cuisine, she found a mentor in the famed teacher and writer, the late Toshio Yanagihara. Ahead of his time, he wanted non-Japanese to know, understand and appreciate Japanese foodways. He encouraged her to write her first query letter to Gourmet magazine; she is now their Japan correspondent. His son, Kazunari Yanagihara, "the best teacher I have ever seen," said to her, "There's nobody teaching Japanese cooking in English in Tokyo, why don't you do it?" and in 1973, he helped Andoh found Bunka no Aji (A Taste of Culture).

Today, Andoh is so steeped in the culture that she even looks Japanese, with her smock-style aprons and her hair swept neatly back and covered by a kerchief. "I am not ethnically Japanese," she says with a gentle laugh, "but definitely, body language has been acquired."

BEYOND JUST RECIPES

Her goal now is to delve deeper than recipes, to open to Westerners the infrastructure of Japanese cuisine, the guidelines that her late mother-in-law, Kiyoko Andoh, had so internalized that she employed them without thought.

The elder Andoh selected ingredients according to the seasons. Every dish offered a palette of colors, textures and flavors. Different cooking techniques were showcased in every meal. She chose tableware with great care and might decorate a plate with a swiftly carved vegetable or the table with a few well-chosen flowers.

Along with thousands of other Japanese, Okaasan was practicing "washoku," what Andoh describes as "five principles that describe how to achieve nutritional balance and aesthetic harmony at mealtime."

FIVE PRINCIPLES

In short, each meal should feature five colors, five flavors, five cooking techniques and engage all five senses. The fifth principle, based in Buddhist practices, urges cook and diner to be mindful of the work that went into the meal, to be grateful, to put aside ill feelings, to eat for spiritual as well as physical well-being.

"One of the ideas of washoku is that the food be regional and seasonal, tied into the place," Andoh said. "It's very much about the terroir of the food," she said, referring to the term used by winemakers for a wine that is characteristic of the place from which it came.

"The person able to transform the most mundane, locally available foods into a sublime meal is the person who is really looked up to in Japan," she said.

But does the average Japanese think about "washoku" as they cook dinner, or choose a takeout meal? Could most people in Japan define the term?

Andoh says that if you stopped the first 10 "sweet young things" getting off a train at the Shibuya station, they'd probably define washoku as "Japanese food," as opposed to yoshoku, "Western food." But if you went over to a station in Shitamachi, where more elders live, they would probably talk about the five principles.

The point, she says, is not that people understand washoku intellectually, but that they practice it experientially. They've been raised to make these kinds of choices whether or not they can articulate the principles behind them.

But why should a Westerner bother?

Three reasons, said Andoh: