What is the name of this Japanese dish?

Does anyone know the name of a Japanese dish that involves a long apprenticeship in which the apprentice is forbidden to look at the actual cooking of the dish by the master chef? Apparently the apprentice prepares some or all of the ingredients and serves them to the chef while he is cooking, even though he must not look at the cooking itself. At the end of the apprenticeship, the apprentice must prepare the dish perfectly himself.

Some years ago I watched a television programme that featured this apprenticeship but do not remember the name of the dish and I�fve had no success in trying to google what little I know about it.

You have to tell what dish it was like. Apprentice practices and training are always like that more or less, so it is hard to tell what they cooked just from the practices/relaitionship of them you mentioned. The couisine must be somewhat unique...

Ah. Thank you. I should have made myself clearer. My interest in the dish was only because I wanted to use it as a means to access more information on this particular apprenticeship method, and I thought that the apprenticeship method only applied to the one dish. I personally consider this training method � which I take to be learning by a form of largely unconscious osmosis � to be an excellent approach, and I would like to learn more about it.

Does this apprenticeship method have a name? Are there any web pages in English that discuss it? Or even web pages in Japanese? (Google�fs language translation capability is now quite good.) If so, I would appreciate a link or links. Alternatively, if there one or more key words that refer to it, I can google them.

Frankly it sounds like some ridiculous thing that someone made up for that TV show.

100% agree with Umami Dearest.
I've never heard such a thing.

Apprentices of most of the traditional craftsmanship and itamae (Japanese chefs) are expected to 'steal' the skill from their masters, not to wait to be told and taught while doing the basic/menial jobs under the master and senior apprentices.

What OP saw on TV sounds like a contorted and over-exaggerated version of this fact.

Thanks for the further comments. What I saw on the television programme may have been simplified and sensationalised -- though it didn't seem so -- and for that matter my memory of it may not be completely accurate. Nonetheless, the idea that apprentices are expected to 'steal' the skill from their masters goes some way toward what I recollect, as does the idea that they are �gnot to wait to be told and taught�h.

Again, if I recollect correctly, the apprentice was not permitted to actually cook the dish himself during the apprenticeship, and at the end of the apprenticeship he was expected to cook it for the first time in front of an audience. Is this not the way it happens in at least some cooking apprenticeships in Japan?

If the television programme or my recollection of it is faulty, I would still be interested in any links or googleable key words that relate to the idea of stealing the skill and not waiting to be told and taught. This idea appears to be absent in much vocational training here in New Zealand. Generally, apprentices are specifically taught how to perform an action such as cooking a dish early in their apprenticeships, and they are expected to get better by practice in doing so. Naturally, in the course of performing menial tasks around experts in the task they may pick up greater skill, but all this is far from the idea of stealing and not waiting to be told and taught.

Chris Eilers,

I've never heard of such a method either, but I can tell you how typical training is done in Japan.

Typically, anyone in the kitchen is free to look at the master chef cooking, but newbies aren't supposed to hold the knife.

In fact, they might be too busy to watch the master chef, because they are ordered to do the most harsh work in the kitchen such as washing pots and pans.

Gradually, they would be allowed to do some simple cooking such as pealing potatoes or stiring stews, but it will take a long time until (s)he is allowed to use the real cooking knife. By then, the apprentice would have learned everything in the kitchen just by seeing it while (s)he works.

Hope it helps.

Thanks, Lico.

Placed in the context you describe, I can understand the concept of stealing and not waiting to be told and taught, and I now have a picture of a typical Japanese cooking apprenticeship. It sounds as if the kind of apprenticeship I saw in the television programme is unknown to most people and is certainly atypical.

What you are describing sounds more like a scenario for a reality show than a traditional apprenticeship method- or perhaps one particular chef likes to train people that way.

Perhaps it was the approach of one particular chef, though it was certainly presented as an approach that belonged to the particular dish, and to a very long-standing tradition, not to one particular chef. Naturally, narrators on television programmes can be inaccurate in their interpretations of what is being shown in the video sequences, but I strongly suspect that the video sequences themselves belonged to a traditional apprenticeship.