• Gosplan14 [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    This random GDR eatery I saw while skimming through a west German documentary about the city of Leipzig from 1983.

    Apparently the GDR had a pizza-like dish called Krusta from at the latest 1976, with different ingredients than the Italian one. In the 1980s, there were actual Pizzerie and by 1988 a pizzeria chain called Pizza Buffet had 42 stores across the country, alongside the small eateries offering the dish, as seen above.

    Partially off topic, but the GDR also had Europe's third Japanese restaurant in the Thüringen town of Suhl since 1966, which even won some international recognition from the Japanese state for its high quality.

      • Gosplan14 [any]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Yes, the oldest Japanese Restaurant in Europe seems to be Takara (Paris, France), which opened in 1958.

        Mind you, out of the almost 4 million Japanese people living abroad, about 3 million 400 thousand live in either Brazil or the USA, while Europe put together has only about 200 thousand. Most of the latter also came in the 1980s with the real estate boom and Japan exporting capital abroad, which spawned things like Düsseldorf's Japanese community.

          • Gosplan14 [any]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Yeah, here in Germany it's mostly Vietnamese people, but when I lived in Italy it was Chinese people.

            Japan was way less touched by WW2 (and the preceding period) than say China was, despite the events of 1945, and also got massive development aid from the US + did state capitalism to create a high tech industry, which made Japan the only country developing faster than the USSR in the cold war. Also, despite their sinophobic government, Japan maintained relations with countries like North Vietnam and supposedly also had some of the less openly exploitative trade deals with the GDR in the cold war.

            On the other hand, Japan was pretty active in imperialism (still is, in countries like... Vietnam) and working there or for a japanese company is often like living hell. Though Japan's imperialism is not as potent as it was in the 1980s, as landlords crashed their economy and the companies, despite their technological edge, lost relevance in many ways.