Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (2)

BAREFOOTIN’ IN TEE-SHIRTS and short pants, all the better to deal with the 30-minute turnarounds of pouring rain and blazing sun: yeah, summer has arrived at last in Japan. During the dog days, the archipelago offers all sorts of hot-weather delights, including watermelon, shaved ice, and best of all, the transformation of even the most neo-radical of young women into traditional beauties once they exchange their jeans for yukata (a summer kimono).

What else is going on up and down the islands? Well, take a look and find out!

Firefly festivals

Once upon a time, summer nights on the East Coast of the United States came alive with a light show au naturel created by fireflies. The march of progress and suburbia seems to have ended all that, but the lightning bugs, as we used to call them, are still alive and flickering in the countryside here.

This is Japan, so take it as given that people know just when to expect their appearance every year, just how long it will last, and how to organize the viewing parties and festivals held to coincide with those dates.

Lightning bugs!

The photo shows the fireflies near the Ayu River in Tanabe, in the southern part of Wakayama. It’s one of several locations in the area known as superb firefly viewing sites from the end of May to the beginning of June.

But as with the cherry blossoms and the rainy season, the firefly front keeps marching north, and right now the folks in Yonezawa, Yamagata, are enjoying a month-long firefly festival at the Onogawa spa. The festival is sponsored by the spa’s tourism association and the Yonezawa Firefly Protection Society. The opening ceremony was held at the local memorial firefly tower to pray for the safety of the participants during the event. Those Yonezawans must really like fireflies!

It’s not a festival in Japan without liquor, so right after the prayers they perform another centuries-old ritual by knocking open the head of a sake barrel with wooden hammers and passing the hooch around. They say some people see double when they drink too much, so you can imagine the sort of visions that light up the retinas of the festival-goers when a wave of fireflies floats by.

The viewing in Yonezawa begins on the riverbank right after it gets dark at 8:00 p.m. and lasts until 9:00. The area is such a firefly mecca that three different species breed here, and who but the entomologists knew there were different types of lightning bugs? For a spot of relaxation after all this excitement, the open-air baths stay open until nine, and there’s a tea house set up temporarily next to the firefly tower. The festival fun lasts until 31 July, but some people like to time their visit for the amateur entertainment contest on the 4th and 5th.

Hatsukiri

Sliding over from zoology to botany, here’s a photo of the festival held by the Miyajidake Shinto shrine in Fukutsu, Fukuoka, for the first cutting of Edo irises in a local garden. The purpose of the event, called Hatsukiri—first cutting, appropriately enough—is to present the irises as an offering to the divinities. They’ve got plenty of flowers from which to choose, because the garden has 30,000 individual plants. While the priests grunt, bend over, and swing their scythes, two miko hold irises as they perform a dance accompanied by a flute. More than 200 people came to watch. A small turnout, you say? That’s not a bad crowd for watching two girls perform a centuries-old dance in costume in a garden in a town of 56,000 while priests cut flowers. How many people would show up where you live?

The shrine held its Iris festival on the same day. They place 70,000 irises in front of the shrine and light ‘em up until 9:00 p.m. for 10 days. The shrine has its own iris garden too, started from bulbs sent by the Meiji-jingu in Tokyo in 1965. They now have 100,000 plants in 100 varieties. That’s a heck of a lot of irises, but they need that many to go around for all of Shinto’s yaoyorozu divine ones. (Yaoyorozu is the traditional number of divinities in Shinto. It literally means eight million, but figuratively represents an infinite number, signifying that each natural object has a divine spirit.)

Seaweed cutting

Irises weren’t the only flora getting cut for a Shinto ritual. Four priests from the Futamikitama Shinto shrine in Ise, Mie, boarded a boat with some miko and sailed offshore for some seaweed cutting. They present the seaweed—fortunately an uncountable noun—to the divinities, allow it to dry out for a month, and then distribute it to their parishioners to drive out bad fortune and eradicate impurities.

At 10:30 a.m., the priests set sail on their skiff festooned with red, yellow, green, purple, and white streamers, with bamboo grass placed at bow and stern, and headed for the special seaweed site 770 meters northeast of the Futami no Meoto, sometimes called the Wedded Rocks. (The word meoto designates a pair of something, one large and one small.) Since this is a special ritual, they can’t just start cutting—first they have to circle the divine Kitama rock on the seabed three times, then they haul out a three-meter long sickle and get to work.

Sea goya

Since the subject is aquatic plants, now’s as good a time as any to report that the Fukuka Aquaculture Center in Kin-machi, Okinawa, is ramping up production of a new variety of sea grapes they hope to popularize in Japan after sales start next month. The center has dubbed the new type “sea goya”, after the knobby bitter squash for which Okinawa is famous. (Here’s a previous post about sea grapes in Okinawa and goya in general.)

Tastes as good as it looks!

The center’s director said they discovered these particular sea grapes among a batch imported in March 2008. The new variety flourished in the southern climate, and that gave people the idea to turn it into a new product, particularly as they were looking for ways to juice the market after the prices of regular sea grapes and mozuku seaweed tanked.

They decided to call the new plant sea goya because it’s more elongated than regular sea grapes and has the bitter flavor of goya. The center has already applied to register the name as a trademark, and they’re confident the application will be approved. After hearing about the new product, more than 10 companies inquired about handling the distribution.

Nara ayu

After insects, irises, seaweed, and sea grapes, here come the freshwater fish: namely the ayu, or sweetfish, which we’ve encountered before in a post about their encounters with traditional traps.

Some sweetfish just for you

These sweetfish, however, were caught by means with an even longer and exalted pedigree—trained cormorants. The birds require keepers that are somewhat analogous to falconers, all of whom ply their skills for the Imperial Household Agency because the technique is a tradition of the Japanese Imperial household. (Dig their costumes in the photo at the link.)

Six keepers were employed to catch the fish at the Imperial fishing grounds on the Nagara River in Gifu City, but the keepers can handle up to a dozen birds on the end of ropes, so they must have taken quite a haul. They go out in boats too, but at night, and they take along lighted torches. The fish are attracted to the flame like maritime moths, and the birds dive in after them. The lower part of the cormorants’ necks are collared to prevent them from swallowing the fish, and after they’ve snatched one, the keepers reel them in and make them cough it up. That’s got to be more cruel than feeding a dog peanut butter.

The fish were packed into paulownia boxes and shipped to the Kashihara-jingu, a Shinto shrine in Kashihara, Nara, as well as the Imperial Palace and the Meiji-jingu, another Shinto shrine in Tokyo. Both shrines have an Imperial connection.

The Japanese have been using cormorants to catch sweetfish since at least the 8th century—don’t you wonder who came up with that idea?–and the Nagara River event is more than a millennium old, but this shrine has been receiving the sweetfish shipments only since 1940 to offer in prayer for the safety of fishing and a good catch. (The 1940 date suggests it might have begun as part of the celebrations that year marking the 2600th anniversary of the establishment of the Japanese Imperial House.)

Contributing to the delinquency of minors

Yet another sign of summer in Japan is the yaoyorozu of rice-planting festivals held throughout the country. It’s easy to figure out why—they grow the rice in wet paddies, which are made even wetter by all the rain that falls this time of year.

But the students at Miyoshi High School in Miyoshi, Tokushima, weren’t planting this rice as part of a festival; they were getting classroom credit. The lads aren’t planning to be farmers when they grow up–rather, they’re enrolled in a course covering the brewing and fermentation of food products. They’ll harvest that rice in the fall and use it to make sake.

The rice is grown on a 3,000-square-meter paddy the school rents from area residents. The teachers do most of the planting with a machine, and then some of the second year students wade right in and plant by hand those parts the machine can’t reach. They expect to harvest 1.5 tons of the rice in mid-September, which can probably be converted into enough sake to keep the town of Miyoshi more lit than a riverbank full of fireflies until New Year’s. The school started the project last year, and this year they increased the size of the cultivated area six-fold to use only the rice grown by students.

One of those students, 16-year-old Fukuda Shinya, had planted rice before, but he said the seedlings were more difficult to handle because the size was different than that of regular table rice.

Now why couldn’t I have gone to that school!

Shochu collector

While the high school students were outdoors sweating and getting dirty as they planted the rice for the sake they will later brew, Masuyama Hiroki (73) of Izumi, Kagoshima, was relaxing with an adult beverage as he contemplated the success of his 12-year effort to collect one bottle each from all the prefecture’s shochu distillers. This is Kagoshima, where everyone drinks shochu and almost no one drinks sake, so he had his work cut out for him.

He’s so proud of his accomplishment he’s got them lined up on the wall, and hasn’t twisted the cap on a single bottle. Mr. Masuyama decided to make it is hobby after he retired from a job with the prefectural government in 1996 and started working in sales. His business trips took him throughout Kagoshima, and after he got the idea—probably in a bar during one of those business trips–he made a list and started buying while he was selling. He started with 1.8 liter (1.92 US quarts) bottles, but they were too heavy and took up too much space, so he switched to bottles half that size. He had a few difficulties completing the collection, and no, one of them wasn’t a tendency to polish off a bottle before before he could display it on the rack. For one thing, the smaller bottles were sold mainly to commercial establishments, but he applied his salesmen’s skills to get what he wanted. Another was that he didn’t have much of a chance to go to the prefecture’s many outlying islands on business. After retiring from his second job, it took two more years to finish the project.

Mr. Masuyama says he enjoys looking at his collection while having a late-night drink, but his libation doesn’t come from those shelves on the wall. He hasn’t opened any of the bottles and says it would be a waste to drink them.

Now there’s a man with discipline!

Miko class

Shinto shrine maidens, known as miko, get to do all sorts of fun stuff. In this post alone, they’ve sailed out to the Wedded Rocks to help the priests cut seaweed, carried the sacred sweetfish caught by cormorants, and danced while the priests cut Edo irises in Fukutsu. Even better, they get to handle the money at the shrine during New Year’s.

Doesn’t that sound like a great part-time job? If that’s the kind of work you’re looking for, the Kanda Myojin Shinto shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is offering a beginner’s level course that provides instruction in how to become a miko. Even better, the class will last only one day, on 17 August—the middle of summer vacation!

Kanda Myojin conducts the class every year with the idea of giving young Japanese women a better idea of their traditions and culture, as well as teaching them more about the shrine. Last year, the student body consisted of 24 women who got to wear the red and white outfit for a day as they studied the shrine’s history, the daily conduct of affairs at the shrine, and its religious ceremonies.

Considering they charge only JPY 5,000 yen ($US 52.40), that sounds like a good deal. They’re looking for 20 unmarried young women this year from 16 to 22, and enrollment is open until the end of the month.

The declaration of the eisa nation

Start with a party, end with a party. This particular hoedown is the eisa dance native to Okinawa. Centuries ago, it was performed as a rite for the repose of the dead, but now it’s done for entertainment and is more likely to wake the dead than ease their way into the next world.

Okinawa City issued a proclamation declaring itself Eisa Town earlier this month, and held a Declaration Day Eisa Night event outside the city offices to lay claim to the title. Six groups made their eisadelic statement as they performed in original/trad clothing they created themselves. Eisa Night means that eisa season has officially started in the city, and summer in this city means that local youth groups will give public performances every weekend until the really big show, the Okinawa Eisa Festival in September.

During her greeting at the ceremony, Mayor Tomon Mitsuko said, “We hope you come to Okinawa City on the weekends and enjoy yourselves.” Then the dancing started and everyone proceeded to do just that.

It’s not just for the Ryukyuans, either. One of the six groups performing was the Machida-ryu of Machida, Tokyo, who started their own group in 1999 after a trip to Okinawa. They were so captivated by the dance they had to do it themselves at home. Now the troupe has more than 100 members.

There’s an idea: create your own Okinawan dance and drum ensemble and visit Eisa Town next year. If you want to learn, watching the video is a great way to start!

Finish that bowl of rice and you’ll get into a good school!

IT’S PADDY PLANTING TIME again in Japan, and thousands of colorful rice-planting ceremonies are being held throughout the country to mark the start of the season. Last year we had a post that focused on several of them. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll just offer the link to that post and describe another ceremony that’s a bit different from the others.

This one was held specifically to plant rice that will be sold as a good luck charm to those taking school entrance examinations. It was held at a wet paddy in the Kameoka district of Takahata-machi, Yamagata, on the 15th. The Yamagatans have been planting and selling the rice as brain food since 1991, when the ceremony was cooked up by the local branch of the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations. The crop is grown on a 1.5-hectare paddy that yields about eight tons of rice, which should be more than enough to get the local hopefuls into the school of their choice. After being harvested in the fall, it will be sold in five-kilogram bags.

What makes the Kameoka rice more of a cinch than a crib sheet? Daisho-ji, a Buddhist temple in Takahata-machi, is the home of one of Japan’s three great statues of the Monju Bosatsu, the Bodhisattva of wisdom. Students throughout Japan have paid homage to that divinity for centuries because Monju, as the personification of the Buddha’s teachings, is a symbol for wisdom and enlightenment. One of the priests from Daisho-ji blesses the seedlings before they’re planted, and he’ll put the double whammy in for the examinations by blessing the rice itself after it’s harvested.

Once the priest takes care of business, a group of 15 people plant the rice by hand, as you can see in the photo. And that’s the intriguing part.

Those ladies ankle deep in the muck are wearing the traditional outfits of miko, or the maidens at Shinto shrines who serve in roughly the same role as altar boys at a Catholic church. Bending over to their right is a Shinto priest. In fact, in this photo Daisho-ji more closely resembles a Shinto shrine than a Buddhist temple. It’s also the case that most of the rice-planting ceremonies are Shinto affairs.

Confused? The Japanese aren’t. This has got to be one of the most naturally ecumenical places on the planet. And the Buddhist priests don’t mind bringing a divine spark to a profit-making enterprise as long as it’s in the cause of higher education.

But then again, who wouldn’t want to do their part to promote the cultivation of knowledge as well as grain? In fact, it’s a shame that ceremony is held way up north instead of down here in Kyushu. I’d be glad to tutor those girls for the English part of their exams!

Seaweed for the emperor

It’s good to be the king.
- Mel Brooks, History of the World, Part I

Perquisites naturally accrue to the kingfish alpha males squatting atop the greasy pole of success—emperors and kings traditionally received tribute, China’s Mao Zedong had a parade of young virgins brought from the countryside for his delectation (reportedly eight in the same bed at the same time) and Kim Jong-il seems to have lived out a frat boy’s dream of despotism, indulging in multiple love affairs, a passion for motorcycles, and a taste for Hennessey VSOP cognac at US$ 630 a bottle.

And then Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky.

The same is true in Japan, too, though licentiousness is no longer a factor, if it ever was. The shogun and the tenno (emperor) received tributes of rice, and the tenno still does. But today’s tenno has another advantage in addition to being able to partake at will from the nation’s granaries: He receives free seaweed!

Well, wakame, to be precise, or to put it another way, Undaria pinnatifida. Every Japanese eats wakame, which is most often used in miso soup or tofu salads, and sometimes as a side dish or garnish. It’s rich in calcium, iodine, thiamine and niacin. It’s also said to burn fatty tissue and have a high nutritient-to-calorie ratio, which makes it a favorite of health food folk.

I bring this up because the Imperial Household just got its annual wakame shipment this week from the Munakata Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Munakata, Fukuoka. Jinoshima, an island in the Tsushima Strait that is adminstratively part of the city, produces the seaweed for the dining tables of Japan. A special shrine committee that includes local maritime industry cooperatives conducts a special harvest of 30 kilograms every year at the end of February and selects six kilograms for shipment to Tokyo.

The wakame is dried on boards and then sent to the Munakata shrine. The photo shows the shrine priests and the miko (shrine maidens) cutting it into sheets measuring 25 centimeters long by 20 centimeters wide. They then insert six sheets into a package, which are in turn put into about 15 bags that will contain a total of 1.5 kilograms of the delicacy. The bags are placed into a box of Japanese cedar, and four boxes will be shipped in all.

Come on now, you don’t send the man food wrapped in tin foil!

Interestingly, this tradition for the Munakata shrine isn’t as old as one might think. They’ve been shipping the seaweed since 1963, and this year is only the 47th time they’ve made the offering. Just as interesting, it seems that even Shinto shrines keep an eye on PR for the mass media. Here’s the statement the chief priest made to the press:

This year again, we were able to harvest excellent quality wakame of a deep green color with the strong aroma of the sea.

Ah, but the story doesn’t end there. The shrine doesn’t just send someone down to the post office to ship the stuff off to Tokyo—they take it to the Fukuoka Airport and hold a special ceremony to hand over the boxes to the flight attendants. And we’re in luck, because here’s the local RKB-TV report of that ceremony on video!

The only part of the narration that already hasn’t been covered is the explanation that the passengers on the same plane will each receive a commemorative ornament of a fugu (blowfish) on which has been written the character 福, or good fortune.

Ain’t that always the way? The top dog gets the pick of the wakame crop, and everyone else gets a cheap blowfish figurine.

The video says that the airline will deliver the seaweed to the Imperial Household Agency. Heck, if I were the tenno, I’d tell the agency to have those stewardesses deliver it in person to the palace and have them stay for lunch.

You just know Mao and Kim would have!

Afterwords: Here’s shocking news for wakame lovers everywhere–people outside of Northeast Asia don’t care for it very much. In fact, New Zealanders consider it a weed that’s clogging up the Wellington harbor, and it’s been nominated as one of the world’s 100 worst invasive species.

One man’s gunk is another man’s gold mine

FOR MOST PEOPLE, seaweed is just unpleasant gunk that gets in the way of a good time. It’s the stuff everyone tries to avoid when swimming at the seashore, or that gets tangled in fishermen’s lines and stuck on the bottoms of boats.

But the Japanese, of course, love to eat it.

And now, the Okinawans are beginning to view it–as well as other aquatic plants—as a marine bioresource.

The grapes of the sea

To turn all that gunk into products that are beneficial for the user and profitable for the consumer, the Okinawa government, through the Okinawa Prefectural Fisheries and Ocean Research Center, has been working for the past three years with the University of Tokyo, the University of the Ryukyus, and bioventures and health food companies in the private sector to develop the marine bioresource industry. They’re also working to establish better control of intellectual property, primarily through the Okinawa Technology Licensing Organization, to ensure that research results and benefits flow to local enterprises. The Ministry of Education is kicking in 100 million yen (about $US 1.026 million) to help with the effort, and the prefectural government is adding another 41 million yen to the pot.

One project they’re working on is the cultivation and promotion of so-called green caviar (Caulerpa lentillifera), or sea grape, as it is known in Japanese. Usually found on sandy or muddy sea bottoms in shallow protected areas, it is eaten in salads and all sorts of other dishes, as you can see from this link. They’re also studying ways to maintain hygiene in the production of the plant as a food item, the creation of secondary products using the plant (such as shampoo), methods for increasing yield, and the development of a fertilizer specifically for the plant.

Try to imagine the fertilizer delivery mechanism for a plant that grows on the sea bed!

Another project is an examination of the efficacy of fucoidan, a substance present in such popular Japanese seaweed varieties as hijiki, kombu, and wakame, and which some think has potential for cancer treatment. In the same way that many local governments in Japan are doing with other products, the Okinawans are trying to boost its value by creating a regional brand.

Still one more project is the development of a kit for the simple and quick detection of ciguatera toxins, which are found in some subtropical fish.

One man’ s meat is another man’s poison, some say, but Okinawa is hoping that some people’s gunk turns into a treasure for all the islanders!

How many points on that buck?

HERE’S SOME NEWS that Japanese sportsmen will cheer: The regional newspaper Agara reports that deer season in Wakayama will start on Saturday, two weeks earlier than usual. It will also be extended for an extra month to end on 15 March. The season has been lengthened specifically to control the deer population, because the animals are causing serious problems for local farmers. As a result, the season will be concurrent with that for wild boar, another animal responsible for significant crop damage.

The financial loss to agriculture caused by deer in Wakayama alone has more than doubled from 16.9 million yen in 1998 to over 36 million yen ($US 366,630) every year since 2003. The volume of crops lost has also skyrocketed. Deer in the prefecture spoiled a total of 24 tons ten years ago, but that had soared to 3,337 tons by last year.

Another aspect of the new policy will be an emphasis on hunting females. In the past, the limit had been one deer per hunter per day, but this has been increased to two—only one of which can be a male.

The prefecture’s office for the protection of the agricultural environment said:

“The damage to agriculture caused by wild animals in 2007 totaled roughly 300 million yen, and deer accounted for a large part of that. The new policy focuses on the hunting of females, and we hope there will be a decline in their numbers.”

The only deer that inhabits Japan is the Sika deer, which is common throughout East Asia. Deer hunting was prohibited in the 1950s because the animal was close to extinction, but the ban was lifted in the 1980s when the population was quickly restored. (Wolves are extinct in Japan and the deer has no other natural enemies.)

The Sika deer is said to be harder to kill with a rifle shot than the variety in North America. The breed is also causing problems elsewhere; year-round culling is encouraged in Great Britain because of the danger they present to forests, but this has yet to solve the problem.

If the deer stalkers in Japan needed any more encouragement, here’s another factor: Sika venison is said to be delicious. I can’t vouch for that, unfortunately, because I’ve never been to a restaurant with deer on the menu and never eaten any served at a private home.

Foreigners who live in the big city might be surprised to know there is a long tradition of deer hunting here. This is a description written in English of deer hunting in Japan in the 1890s. The article says the hinds were the primary targets of hunters because the unborn fawns were considered a delicacy.

That makes me wonder: Was the meat eaten raw as sashimi?

Soba in bloom

EVERYONE KNOWS what the rice plant or wheat looks like before it’s harvested and processed into food, but perhaps only a few people would recognize buckwheat—the plant used to make soba noodles—even if they were standing in front of it.

But the photo at the left shows a field of soba in bloom near Shirahama-cho in Wakayama, so they no longer have any excuse! A group of farmers in the area decided last year to grow soba as an off-season crop after the rice harvest, which is starting to become an agricultural trend in Japan. This 50-are field (1.24 acres) was planted on 10 September, and it grew quickly enough for the soba to flower by the end of the month.

Wakayama, as it turns out, is not known for soba production. Hokkaido is the national champion by a wide margin, and Wakayama doesn’t even rank among the top ten prefectures for area under cultivation.

Considering the quantity of soba consumed in Japan, it was surprising to discover that 80% of the soba eaten here is now imported, and that imports didn’t begin until 1952. (Before World War II, Japan was an exporter.) The bulk of the imports come from China, followed by the United States. Most of the crop is processed for noodles, but soba sprouts are also eaten in salads. The dried plant is used for pillow stuffing, though production is somewhat limited because the plant is an allergen.

Now that you know what the flowers look like, there are about two weeks left to spot them. The blooms will last until the end of this month, and harvest begins at the end of November or the beginning of December.

But any time’s a good time to eat some!

Behind the rice curtain

THE SCENE FOR YESTERDAY’S POST was Tanabe, Wakayama, and by a happy coincidence, here is another story about the city that appeared today.

It’s now the season for harvesting rice in Japan, when the farmers cut the grain, tie it in bundles, stack it on end, and leave it in the field to dry. This farm household in Tanabe has a different system, however: they strap logs together to erect a large frame, from which they hang the rice sheaves.

They’ve been doing it for more than 45 years now. (I’d mention their names, but I’d have to guess at the reading.) The frame itself is five meters high and 18 meters wide, and it holds nine rows of stalks. One of the family members climbs the ladder while another uses a wooden pole to snatch the stalks and swing them up for hanging. The entire process, including the frame assembly, takes two full days.

Years ago, the family used to pile the rice from their terraced paddy in one place for drying. One of the reasons they switched to this method was to prevent the wild boar and deer in the area, whose numbers are increasing, from eating it.

The farmer here is one of the lucky ones—his son and her wife plan on taking over the farm. Nowadays the children of many Japanese farmers want nothing to do with farm labor.

It’s not a particularly important story, but I liked the picture, and I’m always interested in people coming up with clever variations on methods that for everyone else have become a cut-and-dried process.

And with the old method of rice harvesting, it literally is a cutting and drying process!

Tastes terrible–give me a second helping, please!

BY MAKING the most unhealthful foods sinfully delicious and the most nutritious foods a challenge to the palate, Mother Nature played a cruel trick on us all. Beefeaters are legion the world over, yet a graph showing the per capita beef consumption in Japan after World War II has a vertical curve almost identical to one showing the increase in the incidence of colon cancer during the same period. On the other hand, we all know the dinner table wars many parents have to wage to get their children to eat spinach.

There are several reasons the Japanese life span is among the highest in the world, and one of the most important is diet. One Japanese doctor told me the secret for a long life is to eat the way Japanese women did 40 years ago: fish, tofu (soybeans), rice, and no fatty foods. That’s a secret worth knowing, considering that Japanese women have the world’s highest life expectancy at 86 years. In fact, Japanese women have had the world’s highest life expectancy since 1985.

Among the Japanese, the traditional Okinawan lifestyle results in even greater longevity. As Bradley Willcox, Craig Willcox, and Suzuki Makoto (all doctors) write in The Okinawa Program, a book promoting the islanders’ healthful diet and lifestyle,

“If Americans lived more like Okinawans, 80 percent of the nation’s coronary care units, one-third of the cancer wards, and a lot of the nursing homes would be shut down.”

So it won’t come as a surprise to find out that some foods in the traditional Okinawan diet are unfriendly to the taste buds.

Goya

One of those is a vegetable whose generic Japanese name is nigauri, but in recent years has come to be commonly known by the word used for it in Okinawa: goya. Despite the switch in terminology, the former is the better descriptor: in Japanese it means bitter gourd (or melon).

The goya is green and slightly smaller than an American cucumber (which is thicker than the Japanese variety). Like a green pepper, it is hollow on the inside, with some pulp and seeds, and it has a soft, knobby skin.

It is indeed bitter; it’s not the sort of vegetable that people would slice and put into a tossed salad. That’s why the Okinawans most often eat it in a stir-fry with eggs, tofu, and bean sprouts, and sometimes pork, though some people keep it simple and just use the eggs.

It’s an excellent source of vitamin C, and is also said to moderate the blood pressure. What sets goya apart from other vegetables rich in vitamin C, however, is that it retains the vitamin even when cooked at high temperatures. The reason for its bitter taste is that it contains curcurbitacins, which doctors think help prevent cancers.

Goya is not native to Okinawa or Japan, but is thought to have arrived in the country from China several hundred years ago. The Chinese variety is known as chin-li-chih, goo-fa, or ku gua, and is slightly less bitter than the strain found in Japan. It’s also eaten in Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and India.

Not only is goya nutritious, it’s also good for what ails you. People throughout Asia have used it as a medicinal plant, including the Chinese and Arabs. It’s also used in the traditional Ayurveda medicine of Inda to treat skin diseases.

Thus it’s only logical that Kamiita-cho municipal employee Dan Hitomi in Tokushima has created a trial version of goya soap to publicize the town’s goya production. The first photo shows Ms. Dan holding a cube of the pale green soap, which is made entirely of natural ingredients and commercially available vegetables.

To create the soap, Ms. Dan took the liquid squeezed from goya rind and added it to water, sodium hydroxide, olive oil, and other vegetable oils. She poured the mixture into a mold, let it harden for a day, and then dried it out for a month.

Ms. Dan, who has been making soap as a hobby for 10 years, claims there is no goya odor (though the vegetable does not have an unpleasant smell to begin with) and it is more gentle on the skin than other soaps using discarded oil. That makes the bitter gourd good for you, both inside and out

But goya has even more benefits. The vegetable grows on a vine, and the Okinawans often suspend those vines from the roof eaves of traditional houses. This has a two-fold effect. First, it provides the plant with the sunshine it needs to grow, and second, it cools off the interior of the house during the hot summer.

That goya vines have a cooling effect has been demonstrated by an experiment conducted this summer at the Environmental Disaster Prevention Research Center of the University of Tokushima. The second photo shows the vines suspended over the windows of a small building at the center. The study found that this “goya curtain” reduced interior temperatures by 1.5° to 2.5° C when the outdoor temperature was 30° C or higher. The use of the goya curtain made the interior cooler than hanging a traditional bamboo curtain.

And just think—the people who live in homes with a goya curtain don’t even have to go outside to pick some for the dinner table!

The only drawback is that the cooling effect is negated by closing the windows, which will turn off those people who can’t live without air conditioners. Then again, those folks would be unlikely to live in a traditional Okinawan house to begin with.

Shiikwasa

Okinawa is also home to some fruit tart enough to cause tongue spasms. One of those is known as shiikwasa, which is the Okinawan name for the hirami lemon. This small, green citrus fruit is extremely sour, with a touch of bitterness. It is packed with flavonoids, which fight cancer, and also lowers both blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

A shiikwasa is sometimes squeezed over sashimi or cooked fish to add flavor, much as lemons are used in the West. The juice is sold in concentrated form, and this can be drunk as a beverage if mixed at a roughly 8-1 ratio with hot water (which I sometimes do).

The shiikwaasa harvest has now started in the Katsuyama district of Nago in Okinawa, and some of the crop is shown in the third photo. Local farmers say this year’s harvest is a good one owing to excellent weather conditions—no typhoons hit during the growing season, total rainfall was down during the rainy season, and the heavy rains came just at the right time.

The use of the fruit depends on the time of year it is harvested. The shiikwasa picked now will be used to garnish fish, but the fruit taken from October to mid-December will be used for juice. Finally, the fruit harvested from the end of December to the end of February will be sold as produce to be eaten raw. (I can’t imagine eating one raw, but surely the Okinawans know what they’re doing.)

For accuracy’s sake, I should add that many similar kinds of fruit with different names are grown throughout Kyushu. Perhaps the most well-known is kabosu, which is grown in Kumamoto and is also being harvested now for sale at produce shops throughout the region. (I don’t know anyone who eats them raw, either.)

Though Okinawa farmers produce an abundance of food that promotes longevity, there’s a reason the doctor told me to follow the dietary habits of Japanese women 40 or 50 years ago. That’s because many younger Japanese women (and younger Okinawans) no longer follow those dietary habits themselves. Like most people everywhere, they tend to eat more of the things that taste good, rather than the things that are good for you.

Those Epicurean ways new to post-war Japan might make for more delectable dining, but it comes at a cost. Life expectancy figures may start slipping for Japanese women, as they already have for younger Okinawans.

But then, Mother Nature is the one who sets the rules, and we break them at our own risk.