Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (4)

JUST because the warts of the overseas media and the commentator-bloggers who rely on them think their folderol is insight doesn’t mean you have to fall for it. The national decline of Japan, if it exists at all, is greatly exaggerated. Here are a few short snorts testifying to the national vitality. The first is a translation of a brief article, while the rest are summaries.

Island hopping

Japan Air Commuter, a small Kagoshima-based airline serving the prefecture’s outlying islands, has hired its first female pilot, Hamada Eri (29). Her maiden flight was as co-pilot on two round-trip flights between Kagoshima Airport and the islands of Amami and Tokunoshima. After returning in one piece, Hamada said, “It was different from training. I sensed the weight of the responsibility for carrying passengers. I was very nervous, but it was a lot of fun and I was relieved when it was over.”

Hamada Eri

Her ambition to become an aviatrix originated when she was a student at Ryukyu University (Okinawa). While flying on commercial airlines to her home in Sendai (the northeast part of the country), “I discovered I liked the scenery from the cabin window and wanted to see the view from the front.” She enrolled at a flight school in Miyazaki City after graduation. She chose to work at JAC because she enjoyed her many flights over Kyushu during training, and because she wanted to repay the many people in the industry in Kyushu for their help.

The flights to the outlying islands are a lifeline for the people living there. “I was spurred by a desire to be of service on these flights, which are so important for their daily life.”

The Tohoku earthquake struck while she was still in training. The family home was washed away by the tsunami. While her parents were safe, a grandmother living in an institution died in the wave. She wanted to be near her family, but her parents encouraged her by saying, “We’re fine. You work hard in flight school.”

“I’m far from the stricken area (about 740 miles), but I decided to put forth my best effort along with all the people who suffered as they head toward recovery.”

Ms. Hamada is the 13th female pilot in the JAL group. “I intend to gain experience and become a full pilot, not only for my benefit, but also for the women who follow.”

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A Japanese sentiment permeates every sentence of that article. For contrast, imagine how much self-importance it would have contained had the story originated in the Anglosphere instead of Kagoshima.

Tokushima seaweed comes home

Last year’s Tohoku disaster was also a disaster for Sanriku wakame, a noted product of Miyagi. To help rebuild the industry, a Tokushima Prefecture maritime research institute in Naruto sent local fishing co-ops some wakame spores last October that the Miyagians raised in Kessennuma Bay. The first harvest was last week.

It was a homecoming in a sense for the wakame because the folks in Miyagi shipped the Tokushima institute some of theirs in 2004 for cross breeding. The spawn from that mating is what Tokushima sent back. The spores grew to a length of two meters, though the water temperature this winter was lower than ideal. The quality, color, and thickness of the seaweed is good enough for it to appear on your dinner table soon. Local watermen harvested 400 kilograms on the first day. The harvests will continue until the beginning of April, when they expect to have hauled in a total of 3,400 tons.

Off to see the Iyoboya

The big maritime product in Niigata is salmon. The Niigatans like it so much, in fact, they established the nation’s first salmon museum in Murakami called the Iyoboya Museum.

Niigata was the Murakami domain during the Edo period, and it was there that salmon were first successfully bred in Japan. Since then, salmon has been an important part of local culture. Iyoboya is the name for the fish in the local dialect.

Iyoboya fanciers say the best part of the museum is the mini-hatchery. Starting at the end of October, the museum recovers salmon eggs and fertilizes them. The eggs hatch two months later. Visitors get to see the fingerlings, and if they’re lucky, the hatching itself. The museum is now raising 50,000 fish, give or take a few, which it plans to release in the Miomote River at the beginning of next month. The museum also offers views of the river through glass windows.

There’s a restaurant on the museum premises. Guess what’s on the menu!

Snow fun in Kamakura

The Kamakura winter festival has been underway since 21 January at the Yunishikawa Spa in Nikko, Tochigi. The event is held in small snow huts in a gorge along the banks of the Yunishi River, which sounds like just the ticket for those who get off on nose-rubbing. This is a hot spring town, so visitors can enjoy both the hot and the cold of it, dipping in the spa waters for relaxation after all the fun with snowmen, snow slides, snow hut barbecues (reservations required) and musical performances. If you’re in no hurry for spring to start, the festival will last until 20 March.

Let 100 dragons soar

There’s a lot of snow in Hokkaido, too — probably more than in Nikko — but that didn’t stop Sapporo kiters from holding their 35th annual kite-flying contest in the city’s Fushiko Park. The winner this year was Tanaka Mitsuo, whose design featured a 100-meter-long chain of 100 linked kites.

Mao Zedong once said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom”, but that’s got to be easier than getting 100 kites up in the air. Each of the hundred was 60 x 42 centimeters, made of bamboo and washi (traditional Japanese paper), and designed to look like a dragon. This is Dragon Year in the Chinese zodiac.

Rebuild it and they will come

They’ve been repairing the Izumo Shinto shrine in Shimane lately, the first major renovations in more than 60 years. The local carpenters know just how to go about it, too — the Izumo shrine has been rebuilt 25 times, the last in the 18th century, and also moved several times.

It’s the oldest shrine in the country, but ranks only number two in order of importance. (The enshrined deity is Okuninushi no Mikoto, the nephew of the Sun Goddess.) There’s still a fence around one part where mortals may not enter.

The repairs are being made in conformity with the original construction techniques. That includes softening thin sheets of Japanese cypress by soaking them in water, and then using them to thatch the 600-square-meter roof with bamboo nails. Preparations began in 2008 and the work won’t be finished until next year, though the current phase ended in February. Had I finished this post when I intended, readers nearby might have been able to glimpse the main hall. Alas, I was sidetracked by other work and projects, and now the hall won’t be on view for another 60 years. Attendance also required a dress code: t-shirts, sweatsuits, or sandals will not do for a visit to the abode of Okuninushi, even though the divinity was moved to a temporary site on the premises in 2008 for the duration.

Leg room

Naruse Masayuki of Tamana, Kumamoto, has presented a paper on the safety of his single pedal automobile system to the Society of Automotive Engineers in the United States. Mr. Naruse operates a company that makes industrial materials, one of which is One Pedal. That’s an all-in-one pedal for controlling the gas and the brake to prevent accidents caused when drivers step in it by stepping on the wrong one. There’s an attachment on the right side of the floor pedal for acceleration, which drivers hit with the right side of their foot to move forward. Stepping on the floor still brakes the car.

The pedal’s been around for awhile — the old Transport Ministry conducted trials that demonstrated its safety. Mr. Naruse has custom-fitted nearly 200 cars in Japan with the device, but the major automakers don’t seem interested. Said Toyota, “Technicians have studied it, but we have no plans to adopt it now.” One complaint is that it’s more difficult to keep one’s foot against the gas pedal to maintain a constant speed than it is to downpress a pedal. Nevertheless, SAE plans to hold trials in Tamana with 70 drivers of all ages and foot sizes.

Hokkii rice burger

Tomakomai in Hokkaido has the largest haul of the surf clam — that’s the spisula solidissima for you shellfish enthusiasts — in Japan. They’ve got to eat them all somehow, so they’ve begun promoting a clam rice burger made with what’s called a hokkii, which is also the city’s “image character“. (The name isn’t derived from the hockey puck shape.) It was created by college students who liked the clam and made it for their school festival, and used rice for the bun instead of bread. City officials must have stopped by for a taste, because they adopted the idea and sold 1,600 at a three-day event last year. They then conducted trial tastings and questionnaires to get the perfect recipe, and shops around town began selling it in mid-December. There are several varieties with different condiments, but most sell for around JPY 400 yen, which is not a bad price. The idea is to get more people to come to Tomakomai.

Goya senbei

They’ve got as many goya in Kagoshima’s Minamiosumi-cho as they have surf clams in Tomakomai, so a local hot spring resort developed a way to incorporate them in senbei rice crackers. They slice and dice them and knead them into the batter. Reports say they give the crackers a slight bitter taste. That makes sense — the goya is also called the nigauri, which means bitter melon. Several groups in the city, including the hot spring resort and the municipal planning agency, created the snack as a way to use non-standard goya and gobo (yeah, that’s a vegetable) that can’t be sold on the market. They’re cooked by Yamato-ya, a Kagoshima City senbei company, and 40-gram bags are sold for JPY 315 yen. That’s a bit steep, but some of the proceeds go to local welfare services. Give them a call at 0994-24-5300 to see if they have any left.

Strawberry sake

Instead of clams or goya, Shimanto in Kochi has a strawberry surplus. That was the inspiration for a sake brewer in the city to combine the berries with their sake and create a liqueur with two varieties, one dry and one sweet. The employees even filled the 500-milliliter bottles by hand, and you’ve got to wonder if they had the temptation to sample some. There were 1,000 bottles of the sweet stuff and 2,000 of the dry type going for JPY 1,600 apiece. The idea is to sell it to “people who normally don’t drink sake”, which is code for young women. They’re even selling it outside of the prefecture, so if the idea of strawberry sake appeals to you, input 0880-34-4131 into your hand-held terminal and ask for some.

Extra credit

The more serious drinkers in Aira, Kagoshima, don’t fool around with fruity beverages, and demonstrated it by starting shochu study sessions last month. Some stalls specializing in that particular grog have been set up near the Kagoshima Chuo station, and the people who will operate the stalls attended three training sessions. One of them included lessons in the local dialect for dealing with customers. (Kagoshima-ben requires listeners to pay close attention, and even then you’re not going to get all of it, sober or sloshed. That includes their Kyushu neighbors.) The scholars also examined the traditional process for distilling it, listened to lectures on the origins of satsumaimo (a sweet potato variety) and how it came to be used in the local shochu, and visited the Shirakane brewers. Now that’s dedication for being a liquor store clerk. There’ll be 50 of them working in 25 shops at the stall complex.

Really high

If the last story didn’t convince you that Kagoshimanians are serious about shochu, this one will. They’ve just marketed a new brand called Uchudayori, or Space Bulletin, made with malted rice and yeast carried aboard the international space station Endeavor last May for 16 days. It was developed by researchers at Kagoshima University and the Kagoshima Prefecture Brewers Association. (The university has a special shochu and fermenting research institute for students, and I sniff a party school subtext.) There are 12 different varieties because 12 companies used the base materials to distill their own well-known products, including those made with satsumaimo and brown sugar. Those interested in getting spaced out can buy a set of 12 900-milliliter bottles for JPY 24,000 yen, which is reasonable considering the transportation costs for some of the ingredients. Sameshima Yoshihiro, the head of the research institute, says it has a better aroma than normal. No, he didn’t say it was “out of this world”.

This'll beam you up.

Exotic booze

Did that space travel bring back an alien life form? The shochu kingdom of Kagoshima is about to get its first locally brewed sake in 40 years. Hamada Shuzo of Ichikikushikino (try saying that after a couple of hits of shochu) announced they have started brewing the beverage. They’re the only sake brewery in the prefecture, and the first to go into the business since the last one shut down in 1970.

That's where they make it, you know.

Hamada Shuzo remodeled their shochu plant last year by adding facilities for producing 60 kiloliters of sake annually. An affiliated company used to make sake in Aichi until 1998, so they’ll blow the dust off the old notebooks and apply those accumulated techniques and expertise. A Shinto ceremony was held to receive the blessing of the divinities before they began fermentation with 20 kilograms of rice from other parts of Kyushu. (Kagoshima rice doesn’t work so well.) The company hopes to cook up 800 liters by March.

The company says Kagoshima’s higher temperatures — it’s Down South — make sake brewing difficult, and the shochu culture took root several hundred years ago. I have first-hand experience that Kagoshimanians drink shochu in situations where other Japanese drink sake, and it took about a week to recover. Statistics from the Tax Bureau support that anecdote. They say 36,767 kiloliters of shochu were consumed in the prefecture in 2010 compared to 1,379 for sake.

The company’s idea is to use sake brewing techniques for shochu product development. They might begin full scale production later, but the sake is now being brewed primarily for research. Didn’t I tell you these guys were serious? They’ve also got a restaurant/brewpub on the premises, and they hope it attracts customers who’ll also take a shine to their shochu. Sales in the restaurant begin in May, and in shops after that.

Build it and they will come

The slender, the fat, and the shapeless

Former sumo grand champion and now slimmed down stablemaster Takanohana announced he was starting a program to build sumo rings throughout the country to promote the appeal of sumo. The first will be in Shiiba-son, Miyazaki Prefecture. (Takanohana’s wife, the former newscaster Hanada Keiko, is a Miyazaki girl.) Mr. T believes that sumo helps build character, and he wants to see the rings restored at primary schools and other sites around the country. The Shiiba-son municipal government will contribute funds to the project and manage the ring once it’s built. The construction will be handled by the local Itsukushima Shinto shrine under the guidance of the Japan Sumo Association.

Mr. and Mrs. T sometimes visit a local juku that seems to be more of a character training institute than an academic enhancer. When they were in town to make the announcement about the sumo ring, they attended a lecture by the head of the juku on the Yamato spirit. (Yamato is the older name for the original ethnic group of Japan.) The lecture included this message:

Live as the cherry blossom, blooming vividly with full force and quickly falling from the branch.
We cannot see the color, shape, or size of the spirit, but a person’s spirit manifests in his way of life, deeds, and words.
There are three important things in the way of the rikishi and the way of sumo: form, greetings, and etiquette.

That old time religion is still good enough for plenty of Japanese, and not just old guys who drink shochu and watch sumo. This month, a team from Saga Kita High School in Saga City was one of two selected for the grand prize in an annual calligraphic arts competition in Nagano conducted for high schools nationwide. It was the 17th year the sponsoring organization held the event, and the 17th straight year Kita High School won the grand prize. Kita students also won 11 of the 65 awards in the individual division. Teams from 273 schools participated and submitted 15,420 works.

The Kita girls have been getting ready since October. They practiced every day after school until 7:30, and voluntarily give up their free Saturdays. Said second-year student Koga Misaki, the calligraphy club leader, “We encouraged each other while being aware of the heavy pressure of tradition, and I’m happy we achieved our goal.”

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And don’t forget Okinawa!

Visions of mochi dancing in their heads

ARE there any people more culturally syncretic than the Japanese? Examples of that syncretism present themselves every day in Japan, but this is one of the best I’ve ever seen.

A Fukushima City nursery school held its annual Christmas party this week, and about 50 parents and children attended. Though only about 1% of Japanese identify as Christians, secular Christmas parties are commonplace, as they are in some other non-Christian countries. Speaking of syncretism, one survey that broke down the national population by religious affiliation found that the statistically average Japanese would consider himself a believer in 2.7 religions.

This was a party for young children, so the guest of honor was Santa Claus. But it wasn’t the usual department store actor playing Santa. The report said this Santa was certified by the Finnish government. The newspaper was probably referring to the Lapland government, which has a Santa Claus office at the Arctic Circle.

So, how did the Fukushimanians show their appreciation for a visit from an officially certified Kris Kringle? They put him to work pounding mochi!

Mochi is a type of rice cake, for want of a better term, made with a particularly glutinous form of rice. The old-fashioned way to make it was to place the steamed rice in a large container called an usu that serves as a pestle, and to pound it with a wooden mallet known as a kine until it solidifies. Mochi is a popular traditional snack and soup ingredient, and the cakes are also used to decorate the home during the New Year. One traditional seasonal activity is to have a gathering of family or friends to do the pounding out in the yard. I’ve done it — once. It was worth it to be invited to be a part of the tradition and to see what happens, but it’s also real work that requires almost as much energy as chopping wood. Good timing and care is essential because two people work together: One to do the hammering, and the other to turn and wet the mochi in the usu. The rice will stick to the mallet unless it’s moistened, but the assistant has to get his hands out of the way fast.

The local report doesn’t say how long they put Santa to work swinging the kine, but it does say the kids got excited because he pounded so hard the water splashed on their faces. Good for Santa for getting into the New Year spirit!

Eating mochi also requires care, because it takes a long time to chew. Some people get impatient and swallow chunks of it that are too large. Early in the new year every year there are newspaper reports about the number of people nationwide who died from choking on their mochi.

By the way, any junior Scrooges concerned about exposing the kids to radioactive rice and air can relax. The nursery school bussed everyone to Yonezawa, Yamagata, for the event, where they used a borrowed space. The school has been regularly driving the kids to Yonezawa and back this year because it wants them to play outside without worrying about nuclear plant fallout. The head of the school said it allows them to talk to the parents about education rather than radiation.

That also allows Santa to return to the North Pole without having fed his reindeer any radioactive hay!

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One of the best mochitsuki videos is this one showing a performance with music in the United States. The handclapping at the end is how parties are often ended in Japan.

Hospitality

FEW outside the country may be aware of it, but archaeological research is a thriving enterprise in Japan. The artifacts from two millennia of human activity lie beneath everyone’s feet throughout the archipelago, and it is likely that most people here have seen an excavation site at least once in their lives. Yoshinogari, one of the most important historical sites (see right sidebar), was discovered when construction work began on a shopping center on the outskirts of town.

Dazaifu dig

The accompanying photo shows just how close the past is to the mundane present. That’s the site of a former Nishitetsu railway switching yard in Dazaifu, Fukuoka. More than a millennium before that, however, from the early 8th to the early 9th century, it was the site of a reception and lodging house for official missions from the Korean Peninsula and the Asian continent. Scholars and officials have been shoveling away since 2005, and last week they confirmed the discovery at the site of Silla-type (i.e., early Korean) ceramics and high quality, metal alloy dinnerware. The spoons are identical to those in the Shosoin repository of ancient cultural treasures in Nara.

There’s another contemporaneous facility for receiving foreign guests in Fukuoka Prefecture closer to Hakata Bay, known as the Korokan. Historians now suspect the Korokan was used primarily for trade negotiations, and the Dazaifu facility was used for more informal interaction, i.e., parties and ceremonies. In other words, they talked turkey at Korokan and ate it at Dazaifu.

The visits of important delegations from overseas are a matter of historical record. The Silla Kingdom on the peninsula sent a delegation to Korokan in 688, 25 years after they and forces from T’ang Dynasty China combined to defeat the army of the Baekche Kingdom, backed by the Japanese. Many Baekche refugees wound up in Kyushu, including those from the royal house. In addition, the Silla prince and a group of 700 people visited in 752, and imperial emissaries from China came the following year. Considering that this Dazaifu site was for eating and drinking, and another site from the same period in the same place coughed up enough dice to gamble away a weekend in Vegas, the ancient Koreans and Chinese probably looked forward to the trip.

Dazaifu continues to offer distinctively Japanese hospitality today, albeit of a more modern variety. Starbucks Japan announced they will open a shop on the sando, or approach path, to the Dazaifu Tenman-gu Shinto shrine on the 16th. It will be the first Starbucks shop at a shrine or Buddhist temple.

Dazaifu Starbucks

The Tenman-gu shrine is a large facility with gardens containing 6,000 plum trees in addition to the buildings. A Shinto shrine was first built there in 905, and the current building, registered as an important cultural property, dates from 1591. It was built on the grave of Tenjin, the deification name of Sugawara no Michizane, renowned for his erudition and learning. They’re opening the Starbucks at just the right time, too, as tens of thousands of people will visit the shrine for New Year’s. The visits will continue into January as students make the pilgrimage to ask the deity for a blessing to pass their high school or university entrance examination. (I could have used some of that juice myself.) Another attraction, the Kyushu National Museum (right sidebar), is within walking distance nearby.

The location demands that this shop not resemble the typical shopping mall Starbucks. It was designed by University of Tokyo architect Kuma Kengo, known for his work on the Suntory Museum of Art and the Nezu Museum (got them on the right sidebar too). That design combines the traditional and the modern with natural materials, primary among which is 2,000 pieces of Japanese cedar obtained by thinning out forests. It will also have two gardens, one in front facing the sando and one inside with more plum trees. There will be 46 seats in the interior and 10 on the terrace.

The coffee and food, however, will be the same as that of other Starbucks outlets.

Said the company’s PR release:

From the entrance to the interior, the distinctive design employs a traditional wood pattern, which has been incorporated both in the interior and exterior. It offers the warmth of wood and the opportunity to spend some time in a luxurious setting while surrounded by the aroma of the highest quality coffee.

There’s more to modern Japanese hospitality than trendy coffee shops, too. Here’s some news that might wake you up faster than a cup of Starbucks espresso: Three Tokyo restaurants were awarded a third star last month in the Michelin guide to restaurants. Japan now has 32 restaurants with a three-star rating, the guide’s highest.

There are 25 in France.

More worthy of note for me is this dambuster-sized preconception destroyer: One of the new two-star eateries in Japan is a Korean restaurant.

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Want to take a quick visit to the Tenman-gu shrine without buying a plane ticket? Try this YouTube video. It starts at the Nishitetsu Dazaifu station and walks you right to the shrine. Along the way you’ll see the reason that a Starbucks won’t be out of place in the neighborhood.

Finis for the fins?

Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you and remain silent.
- Epictetus

SOCIAL critic Miyazaki Masahiro offered some observations on recent trends in Chinese cuisine earlier this week. Here they are in English.

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With everything else being destroyed in China, is the core of their food culture also at risk? Shark fin soup, the sine qua non of sophisticated Chinese cuisine, has become a target of attack. This has surprised both the Chinese and the Japanese, who export shark fins to China. Activists have converged on Shanghai to strip the Chinese of their dietary culture by demanding that people stop eating shark fin on some pretext or other — environmental protection, ecological protection, anything will do.

Japan has been deprived of the whale. In China too, bear paws and dog meat are now de facto illegal. (Manchuria is an exception. There, dog meat restaurants still flourish.) Stewed bear paw has, for all intents and purposes, been banned for about two years. The primary reason cited was hygiene, and now there is mock bear. But bear paws are considered an indispensable part of elegant dining, though it took a month of stewing in a pot to soften them and remove the toxicity.

Whole grilled squab is popular in Guangdong, but the shops serving civet have disappeared from the main streets. A campaign promoting a trial tasting of dog meat had been scheduled, but was canceled.

Most people in Beijing no longer eat dog meat. Even in Guangdong, owl eyes, which had been a favorite of young women (because they were said to improve eyesight), are not as popular as they once were, and there are signs that grilled squab (doves) will be the next target. (Why it is that Japanese women’s groups don’t criticize the Chinese for eating the symbol of peace, I don’t understand.)

And then there is shark fin.

It’s said that 30% of the world’s shark species are threatened with extinction, and most of those have disappeared into Chinese stomachs. China imports most of its shark fin from Japan. It became so scarce after the Tohoku earthquake that local fishermen began receiving premium prices.

WildAid was held on 22 September 2011 in Shanghai, and many Chinese were surprised to see basketball star and national hero Yao Ming in attendance. Most Chinese love shark fin soup (N.B.: It’s traditionally served at wedding banquets), and a controversy erupted when Yao Ming and Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, held a news conference to declare that eating shark fin was barbaric and should be banned.

I wonder — is this the first time Chinese food culture has come under simultaneous attack from inside and outside the country?

(end translation)

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The World Park Junkies have survived all these years, so maybe shark fin soup will too.

Food roots

It’s a mongrelized world we live in, and among those most aware of the degree of mongrelization are the people who study national dietary habits. The Korean dish kimchee is just one of many examples of the phenomenon. It’s such an integral part of Korean life that it’s served free in restaurants with meals in the way water is provided in other countries. The image of the food that immediately arises in the mind’s eye is tinted a bright red from the chili flakes used for seasoning. But though Koreans have been eating different forms of kimchee for at least 2,000 years, chili wasn’t cultivated there until 1600, after it was introduced from Japan. (That’s also roughly when Chinese cabbage and daikon radish became the main ingredients).

Also, the image of the basic/classic Japanese meal, both inside and outside the country, is of a bowl of rice, a bowl of miso soup, tsukemono (pickled vegetables), and some fish or meat on the side. But Katarzyna J. Cwiertka argues that what many consider to be the classic Japanese diet was a 20th century invention created with considerable Western influence:

(A)ll Japanese canteens (by which she means cafeterias at worksites or universities) share a common heritage, which can be traced to the 1930s military food. A standard menu in a Japanese canteen consists of a bowl of rice, a bowl of miso soup, and pickles (tsukemono) supplemented by two or three side dishes, one of them being a kind of “main side dish” usually featuring fish or meat. Other canteens’ mainstays include Japanese-style and Chinese-style noodles, spaghetti, sandwiches, and the Japanese-Western rice-based hybrids served on a plate (not in a bowl), such as curry on rice (kare raisu), pilaf, and rice pan-fried with chicken and tomato ketchup given the name ‘chicken rice’ (chikin raisu). As will become obvious in the course of this paper, the majority of these dishes appeared in wartime military menus.

Also:

The fact that the Japanese military fed its troops on novelties, and that these dishes were among the favorites, is extraordinary, considering that this was against the general rule of military caterers elsewhere, who precisely avoided serving unknown food…As practically no “all-Japanese” cooking existed in Japan at that time, and proper nourishment could be achieved economically only by adopting non-Japanese dishes instead of providing traditional food, Japanese military caterers chose to serve hybrid culinary experiments. We may surmise that the fact that these hybrids were served with a mixture of rice and barley eased the resistance towards the unknown food. Rice was the staple of choice for the Japanese (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993), but the conscription experience meant for many farmers’ sons and other drafted members of the underclass the luxury of having rice three times a day.

She’s even written a favorably reviewed book on the subject, called Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. (The Amazon page contains the claim that “key shifts in the Japanese diet were, in many cases, a consequence of modern imperialism”. That would be true if one equates having a standing national military with imperialism, but some people have a taste for connecting all sorts of things Japanese with militaristic imperialism. Then again, it’s difficult for more than a few people to recognize that correlation doesn’t always equal causation.)

The question naturally arises of what sort of meals Japanese ate before the 20th century, especially during the Edo period (1603-1868), when there was little contact with the outside world. Fortunately, the Japanese keep excellent records, and some of those dishes can be easily recreated. In fact, the folks in Fukui conducted a series of events this year in which some seriously old-fashioned home cooking was served to curious gastronomes. One of the events presented four varieties of Edo period mazegohan, or “mixed rice”. The four were: sakurameshi (literally, cherry rice), with thin-sliced octopus legs arranged to resemble cherry trees; taimeshi, using the sea bream, a symbol of good luck, as the mixed ingredient; and kibimeshi and awameshi, made with different types of millet.

The dainty dishes set before the Japanese diners surprised them for several reasons. First, the sakurameshi was eaten in the same bowl with strained miso soup, (though they were less surprised when they saw the octopus parts still twitching.) The two varieties with millet were also eaten with broth, and the ratio of millet to rice was 6 to 4 in favor of the millet. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call those dishes mixed millet rather than mazegohan.

The event’s organizers didn’t have far to go to find period seasonings. The Muroji company in Fukui City earlier this year brought back one of their old favorites — soy sauce brewed from a recipe dating from the Bakumatsu period, which was the very end of the Edo period in the mid-19th century. They didn’t have to do much digging to find the recipe, either. The company was founded in 1689, and the current president is the 13th in an unbroken line of descendants running the firm.

One of the selling points for this classic soy sauce is that it will satisfy even the most ideological of food purists. It’s made from Fukui soybeans, wheat, koji-kin (a mold for fermentation), yeast, lactic acid bacteria — and that’s all. No preservatives or additives are used. It’s also allowed to ferment for a year, in contrast to the three-month period for most of today’s commercial varieties. The company’s Japanese-language website notes that it has 300 constituent ingredients, including amino acids, vitamins, and minerals, and they also provide a list of its many health benefits. If that sounds like something you’d like to try, the company will sell it and ship it to you, if you live in Japan.

Muroji chose to market the product in a peculiar way, however: They gave it the name Bakumatsu Soy Sauce, with soy sauce written in the katakana alphabet based on the English pronunciation, rather than shoyu, the Japanese word. Few Japanese who used the product when it was first sold are likely to have known the term “soy sauce”.

It’s a mongrelized world we live in!

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The name of the group is Mazegohan and they’re performing a Japanese pop song (with a few English words for lyrics) that was recorded by Ray Charles. How’s that for mongrelization?

Japan and the TPP

Politicians can solve almost any problem — usually by creating a bigger problem.
- Thomas Sowell

DISCUSSIONS to create free trade agreements are always a bit like negotiating one’s way through a briar patch, regardless of the parties involved. The case for free trade isn’t easy to make, and appeals to our hard-wired tribalism often find a resonance whose amplitude far exceeds the input. Another complication is the natural tendency of countries to advocate the liberalization of those sectors in which they have an advantage and to get all huffy about industries in which they are at a disadvantage.

Those negotiations become more complicated when agricultural products are tabled for talks. When the crop being discussed is rice in Japan, it is next to impossible to separate the rhetorical grain from the chaff. It isn’t simply that rice paddies account for 56% of all Japanese cropland; there are cultural and spiritual dimensions to rice in this country that are difficult to explain to outsiders, assuming they’re interested in hearing an explanation to begin with. Despite declining consumption and the broadening of the diet, rice is still treated as the main attraction of any meal. Every other food is thought of as a side dish, both at the table and linguistically. And then there’s the dimension unique to Japan. The status of each new Emperor is affirmed in a state ceremony called the Daijosai. In this rite, the Emperor offers newly harvested, sacred rice to the divinities and then partakes of it himself. (Contemporary Japanese themselves recognize that the ceremony exemplifies the universality of the concept of You Are What You Eat.)

In short, to understand the role of rice in Japanese life, it might be useful to imagine how Westerners of an earlier age must have viewed wheat based on the line in the prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread”, and then multiply it by a power of three. Now imagine the response of some people in Japan when they learn that the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement, known as TPP, would eliminate all tariffs among member states in 10 years without exception — including rice.

All of these factors should be taken into consideration by anyone overseas who would report or comment on the debate in Japan over joining the discussions for the TPP, but that won’t happen with the Western media or its on-call stable of bite-sized quote generators in academia. Former Prime Minister Kan Naoto briefly glommed onto the idea in his Sisyphean search for a policy that would endow him with political legitimacy. But Mr. Kan soon fluttered over to some other issue — his priority was to prolong his survival in office, his interest in the matter was tepid and transitory, and even he knew he lacked the skills to either persuade or bulldoze the farming communities, the roughly 50% of his own party opposed to participation, and the agricultural lobby in the bureaucracy. His interest was so superficial, in fact, he carried out a Cabinet reshuffle after bringing up the issue of TPP participation and retained an agriculture minister opposed to the idea.

Now the new government of Noda Yoshihiko is eyeing the potentially poisonous fruit and wondering if it should take a bite. His government and the ruling DPJ will decide early next month whether Japan will take part in the TPP talks. (Mr. Kan was supposed to have decided early this summer, but the prompt execution of affairs is not the hallmark of DPJ governments in general or Mr. Kan’s in particular.) Their decision seems to be timed to coincide with the APEC summit.

Opponents offer the same protectionist arguments to be expected in any country, and chief among them is perhaps Nakano Takeshi, once a bureaucrat in the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy and now a Kyoto University professor. Mr. Nakano published a book this year called TPP Bomeiron, or TPP: On National Ruin. The knee-jerks might assume this is yet another example of Japanese isolationism, but Mr. Nakano himself would beg to differ. Also the author of a book titled Free Trade is a Trap, he claims his arguments are based on the economic nationalism of David Hume in Britain, Alexander Hamilton in the U.S., Friedrich List of Germany (the founder of the German historical school of economics), and even the neoclassicist British economist Alfred Marshall. (The inclusion of the latter is somewhat odd; Marshall has been described as “a firm but cautious adherent of free trade”, though he also advocated protecting new industries.)

Author and university professor Ikeda Nobuo has added TPP Bomeiron to his list of “books that must not be read” (either at the top or bottom, depending on your perspective). He dismisses it as a 200+ page rehash of two false arguments: (1) TPP is a de facto American FTA, and (2) The increase of imports in TPP will result in deflation.

Others who urge caution warn of being bulldozed in the negotiations by the United States. Superficially, it would appear they have a point; Japanese negotiators seem to be congenitally incapable of defending themselves against American pressure in any negotiations. Yet this argument ignores Japan’s partial ban on U.S. beef imports that has remained in effect since 2005 due to mad cow disease. Only meat from those cattle aged 20 months or younger is allowed in the country.

Meanwhile, DPJ member and former Agriculture Minister Yamada Masahiko is mobilizing opposition within the party. He also claims that half of the DPJ MPs are opposed to participation, and insists this is not an issue requiring urgent action. His estimate of half might have been too low. It’s now reported that he’s collected 191 signatures from party members in the Diet backing his opposition.

For an idea of the absurdities to which the obstructionists will resort, here’s a paragraph from commentator Yayama Taro, a TPP proponent:

Japan’s Ag Ministry bureaucrats, agriculture industry groups, and their allies in the Diet haphazardly oppose any attempts at liberalization without thinking of the future benefits. When the government wanted to liberalize banana imports, the apple growers of Aomori were fiercely opposed. They claimed they would no longer be able to sell apples. When the import of bananas finally was liberalized, the farmers made improvements to Aomori apples and were able to supply a greater variety. Today, they are exported to Taiwan and China, and domestic consumption has also risen.

It gets even worse:

An Oct. 12 meeting of DPJ lawmakers opposed to or skeptical about this proposal focused on issues related to the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.

At the meeting, senior executives of the Japan Medical Association warned that the deregulation of these industries resulting from Japan’s participation in the accord would cause the health-care system in Japan to collapse.

Foreign Ministry officials in charge of the TPP pointed out that a public health-care insurance program is not covered by the TPP negotiations, but the participating legislators refused to be reassured.

No one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the average politician. Then again, an intelligent person is unlikely to go into politics to begin with.

Japan’s Free Marketeers

Despite the broad unsupported assertions, verbal sand-throwing as a diversionary tactic, and superficial commentary, the Japanese public is being offered counter-arguments and is finding those arguments to be worth their consideration.

Asakawa Yoshihiro, the deputy editor of Nogyo Keieisha (Farmers’ Business) published Nihon ha Seikai Goi no Nogyo Taikoku (Japan is the World’s Fifth-Largest Agricultural Superpower) in February 2010. It ranked #2 on the Amazon non-fiction best-seller list for the year. (The copy I bought was printed in March 2011, and it was already in the 14th printing.)

Mr. Asakawa holds that the argument claiming Japanese agriculture is weak lacks a basis in fact. He claims that the Agriculture Ministry deliberately understates the agricultural self-sufficiency rate to maintain a crisis atmosphere among the public as a means to enhance its influence. He insists that the industry has successfully boosted production, that a decline in the farming population will not result in the waning of agriculture, and that Japan has enormous potential for becoming a food exporter.

This previous post summarizes an article in the September 2009 issue of Voice, which features an interview with Itochu Corp. Chairman Niwau Ichiro. Mr. Niwau also thinks Japanese agriculture can be internationally competitive, that it could thrive in markets that were completely open, and that even rice would be price competitive if the tariffs were removed. The key, he says, is to reform misguided government policy and amend current land use laws that encourage acreage reduction to prop up rice prices.

Kon Kichinori, the editor of the aforementioned Nogyo Keieisha summarized the view of the optimists in a recent article in Diamond Online. Here’s most of it in English.

*****
Japanese agriculture is often thought to be suffering from declining numbers of agricultural workers, the aging of the agricultural workforce, small-scale farming, and the lack of competition. The backdrop to these assertions is the historical view of an impoverished peasantry, in which farm households are poor and weak. This view still survives in the contemporary administration of agricultural affairs. But we have already developed a dynamic class of agribusiness entrepreneurs, and it is time for us to abandon the romantic historical view of an impoverished peasantry.

This view is based on the historical awareness of the meager harvests and famines of the Edo period when farm productivity was poor. Another factor is the hardships resulting from the high percentage of production confiscated in annual tributes, in which the public sector took 50% or 60% of the crop. This awareness has changed, however, as more research has been conducted into the original documents of the Edo period. Based on surveys from the 16th century, it has been shown that the public sector share of annual tributes fell to 30% to 40% as new technology for agricultural production was developed, and in some cases below that. In addition, the production of such highly profitable products (other than rice) of tea, mulberries, cotton, vegetables, and tobacco rose in tandem with urbanization.

The concept of postwar agricultural reform has been based on the theme of the liberation of the poor peasantry. Laws related to farmland and agricultural cooperatives designed to protect smallholding farmers are still on the books. The historical view of an impoverished peasantry has been the premise of the characterization of agricultural issues as the declining numbers of agricultural workers, the aging of the agricultural workforce, small-scale farming, and the lack of competition.

According to the 2010 Census of Agriculture and Forestry conducted by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the (Japanese) farming population fell from 3.35 million to 2.61 million, a 22.3% drop, in five years. Meanwhile, the average age of the farmers rose from 63.2 to 65.8

Farm households, however, are defined as those with at least 10 ares under cultivation (one are = 100 square meters), or with at least JPY 150,000 in sales of agricultural products. Thus the term “farm household” is a concept that represents households, rather than an occupation. It does not refer to the people who sell their agricultural products. Even those people who have retired from regular jobs and have begun to cultivate at least 10 ares of land to distribute the crop to their relatives as an old-age pastime are counted as agribusinessmen. (Slightly less than 10% of farming households who sell their products report no sales at all.) The average age of 65.8 does not indicate the advanced age of the farm households with people involved in crop production. Rather, it indicates nothing more than the advanced aging of society itself. Apart from the issue of aging, the decline in the number of farm households — even though it is a desirable change — is viewed as a problem, and utilized to proclaim the waning of agriculture.

Most of the households known as farming households in Japan are those headed by salarymen, in which one of the grandfathers grows rice on several dozen ares of land. They won’t stop growing rice even if they lose a lot of money — it’s become part of their lives as well as a pleasant avocation. But the productivity and technological level of the hobbyist rice farmers is of course declining. There are some exceptional producers among those associated with the agricultural cooperatives, but the rice produced by small scale farmers with such self-satisfaction is mixed in the drying facilities with the crop from the producers associated with the cooperatives. The result is a deterioration and variation in rice quality due to small production units and the inability to properly conduct cultivation. The declining labor productivity of the hobbyist farmer who has lost his sense of professionalism has caused the quality of Japanese rice to worsen.

The agriculture industry insists that Japanese rice will be overwhelmed by the foreign product if the high tariffs are eliminated. It is very possible that foreign rice will become dominant if foreign rice and Japanese rice are of the same quality. But the Japanese consumer will probably select Japanese rice from farm households that grow high quality rice with lower costs, even if it is more expensive.

It is undoubtedly true there are aspects to agriculture that cannot be explained just from the industry perspective, which claims that it has maintained rural settlements and transmitted culture. Those people involved with agriculture who use that as a reason to cling to the historical view of an impoverished peasantry are preventing innovation in Japanese agriculture that exceptional agribusiness entrepreneurs are achieving. If they continue to insist on the fragility of Japanese agriculture, it is because they can harvest the benefits of protection through their defeatism.

We have already developed a dynamic class of agribusinessmen. If we abandon the romantic historical view of an impoverished peasantry, we will begin to see the great potential in Japanese agriculture and agricultural villages.

(end translation)

Former Finance Ministry bureaucrat and current university professor Takahashi Yoichi supports Japanese participation in TPP. Here’s the English version of a brief article that appeared in J-Cast on the Web:

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The liberalization of trade has long been a matter for debate. In the end, liberalization is desirable for Japan’s national interest. The logic that trade liberalization is desirable has been demonstrated for the past 200 years in the field of economics. This wisdom is also the shared heritage of the world.

While there are of course negative aspects to trade liberalization, we know the benefits will outweigh these over the long term. Specifically, the trial calculations of the Cabinet Office finds the losses of joining the TPP to be about JPY 8 trillion, but the benefits to be more than JPY 11 trillion. The negative aspects would be borne by the domestic producers in agriculture, while the benefits would be enjoyed by consumers and exporters.

While there is some variation in the calculations depending on the preconditions applied, there is no change in the conclusion that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. Even the economists, who are always mocked for their divergence of opinions, agree that trade liberalization will result in benefits.

It is the job of politicians to determine how to make adjustments and redistribute the positives of trade liberalization to the negatives. This could create a situation in which no one in Japan suffers. The politicians opposed to TPP have abandoned the original intent of their jobs.

The principles that have survived throughout history demonstrate there are more than a few errors in the many arguments opposed to TPP. There is the argument that TPP will destroy Japanese agriculture. But the claim that opening the market will kill agriculture is incorrect. This is clear from the example of the liberalization of American cherry imports.

When the import of American cherries was allowed, some were opposed and claimed it would destroy the Japanese cherry sector. In fact, however, domestic cherry growers differentiated their product by upgrading the quality. The value of production soared by 1.5 times from 1977 to 2005. During the same period, the producers who avoid liberalization and cling to protection — rice — have become moribund. It is a fact that the producers who improved their strengths while having to compete due to liberalization — cherries — have grown.

There is even the extreme view that TPP will inevitably lead to the end of all tariffs. But there are always exceptions in international negotiations. Even in the original TPP talks with four countries, about 10% of the categories were exempted. Besides, the tariffs would not be eliminated immediately, but in stages. Long-term liberalization of more than 10 years has been sought by Chile for milk products and New Zealand for textiles and footwear.

Some argue that once Japan enters negotiations, it will have to participate. No international agreements and frameworks, however, have content that is determined from the start. That content is always determined through negotiation. There are many instances of countries entering negotiations and then not participating. There are also instances of countries that have compromised in negotiations and then not participated because they could not receive the approval of national legislatures.

At any rate, the arguments opposed to TPP are banalities that have been presented throughout the world over the years. At the same time, they provide people with important information: It enables them to clearly understand just who has the vested interests. No matter how much they say it is good for the people, if we carefully examine their claims, we will understand who has the vested interests, and who does not want to lose those interests. This is valuable information, so we must be always vigilant.

One thing we should keep in mind is that the high yen will minimize the advantages of TPP, making adjustment difficult. The government must work toward a lower yen to maximize the benefits of TPP.

(end translation)

*****
It is no surprise that the free marketeers are the positive optimists who treat their audience as sentient adults, while the political class still talks down to them as children. Here’s an example: Japanese prime ministers distribute what they call an “e-mail blog” in both Japanese and English. Earlier this month, one e-mail sent out under the Noda name promised a new agricultural vision for the country. It starts this way:

Yesterday (the 10th), in order to obtain some insights into the revitalization of agriculture, I observed agricultural areas in Gunma Prefecture where people are engaged in leading-edge efforts such as the production of premium brand rice and the operation of direct-sales storefronts. Under the penetrating clear autumn sky, I was able to feel the fruitful nature of autumn throughout my entire being.

Yes, that clumsy translation was not rendered by a native speaker, but the original Japanese is just as dweeby and unlikely to have been finished by most of the people who received it. At the end of the note, the aide who wrote the post for Mr. Noda asks:

In what ways can the national government assist in order to revitalize agriculture and transform it into a growth industry?

The best way to assist is to get out of the way. Events on the ground are providing support for the people who think Japanese agriculture has the potential to be a growth industry without government help. The Diet relaxed the regulations on farmland rental in December 2009 (a step little noted at the time, which at long last puts one in the plus column for the DPJ). Since then, there have been, or will be by next year, 120 instances of companies from other sectors leasing land to grow crops.

One of them is the railroad company JR Kyushu, one of the six companies spun off from the 1987 privatization of the state-run railroad. They started by growing nira, or Chinese chives, on 0.4 hectares in Oita Prefecture last year and harvested 20 tons for use in their restaurant chain in China or sale on the market. They expanded their area of cultivation to 3.5 hectares this year and project JPY 10 million in revenue. Their initial efforts have been so successful, JR Kyushu’s agricultural subsidiary plans to diversify into citrus fruit, cherry tomatoes, and chickens. Their target is JPY 1 billion in revenue in two or three more years.

Also in Kyushu, the Saibu Gas utility is growing lettuce, the retailer Yazuya is growing strawberries and melons, and Kyudenko, primarily engaged in providing electric power facility engineering services, is growing olives. Other companies are producing tea, onions, shellfish, and organic vegetables.

On one side of the debate is the private sector, convinced that Japan can become an agricultural superpower, and that they can get gloriously rich by feeding the nation and helping to feed the world. The people standing in their way are those who always block progress everywhere. They are the romanticists who cling to a vision that was never real to begin with, and the wolf-criers who thunder about a foreign takeover that never occurs. (If it didn’t happen after the postwar Allied occupation, it ain’t going to happen.) Then there are the Ag Ministry bureaucrats protecting their turf, and the beetle-browed politicians who pander to them all to justify their existence when everyone else knows their most productive contribution would be to disappear.

What is likely to happen? As always, it will be a minor miracle if the sensible people win. If Japan joins the TPP after negotiating a treaty that it believes is fair, and the politicians can be prevented from spending everyone else’s money to buy off compensate the small farmers (particularly without Diet redistricting that gives those regions more seats than they deserve) it will be a miracle of Lourdesian proportions.

*****
Here’s a different look at the benefits of open markets in the Taiwanese mod/trad group A Moving Sound’s performance of the Market Song. Note the American man playing the moon lute, a Chinese woman playing the cello, and the use of the electric bass to present a fresh take on an old sound.

Mikan liquor-ish

ONE of the classic scenes of Japanese domestic life in the winter is a family seated around the kotatsu (a low wooden table with a futon around the sides and a heat source underneath), drinking green tea and snacking on the tasty citrus fruit known as mikan. As easy to peel as a tangerine but with more heft, the mikan is sometimes known as the mandarin orange or Satsuma orange in English. It is by far the mostly frequently eaten citrus fruit in Japan; statistics for 2006 show that per capita consumption of oranges was roughly 585 grams, while that for mikan was 4.55 kilograms.

Its ancestor came to Japan from China centuries ago through the port at what is now Yatsushiro, Kumamoto, but it’s generally accepted that the variety now grown and eaten in Japan is a hybrid created in Kagoshima. That’s based on the research of the late Prof. Tanaka Chozaburo, who spent his life studying the mikan, and who identified 159 seed varieties in the same genus. Mikan groves are most likely to be found in Shikoku and Kyushu, with Wakayama accounting for 19% of the national production, but there are orchards as far north as Kanagawa and Chiba, both of which border the Tokyo Metro District.

Mikan are most often consumed raw or in juice, but with overall consumption declining, the city of Arida, Wakayama, started looking for ways to boost demand for their local variety. It took two years, but local growers and processors working with a Nagano winery succeeded in developing a wine and a liqueur made from the fruit.

One of the people who worked on the project was Takano Yutaka of the Japan Sommelier Association. Mr. Takano said it was difficult because mikan have less sugar than grapes. They froze the juice first in the same process used to make ice wine, extracted the part with the high sugar content, and let it ferment for six months. The beverage is said to retain the fruit’s original aroma and tartness, as well as being thick and very sweet. Tipplers can down it straight, with ice, or with carbonated water, and all of this is starting to sound as if it’s being marketed primarily to young females.

The Wakayamanians have produced 1,500 bottles of wine, called Himekibana, priced at JPY 3,150 yen, and 3,000 bottles of the liqueur, known as Kahorikibana, sold for JPY 1,050 yen. If you’re in Japan, you can buy it at the larger Aeon stores and on the Internet. And if you read Japanese you can roll on over to the mikan page of JA, the agricultural cooperative, as well as the page of the Japan Sommelier Association.

I don’t think I’d be interested in drinking it more than once, but it does seem to have the potential for becoming a nice sherbet, doesn’t it?

*****
Speaking of mikan, sweetness, and females, you get a chance to see and hear Morning Musume — the daughters of the morning — perform the song titled “Mikan”. Child love!

Those whose default attitude toward Japanese pop culture is stuck on “snide” should read this and adjust your metric accordingly.

Onigiri Olympics

THE campy cooking battles staged for the television program Iron Chef, in which visiting chefs faced off against members of the Gourmet Academy of Chairman Kaga Takeshi in his castle’s cooking stadium after the allez cuisine signal to start, are perhaps the best-known Japanese food competition. There are other, less flamboyant events, however.

One of those was recently held at Hisata Gakuen Sasebo Girls’ High School in Sasebo, Nagasaki: The Fifth Onigiri Olympics. It was pleasantly goofy rather than being over the top. Onigiri are triangular or oval-shaped rice balls made by hand, sometimes wrapped in processed seaweed and always filled with one of several tasty ingredients. It would be fair to consider them the Japanese equivalent of a sandwich.

This year’s Onigiri Olympics featured 50 participants facing off in two divisions. One was the Design Division, in which the contestants had to create rice ball designs on the theme of Sasebo. The competition in the other division was to create onigiri of the same weight as a sample.

Nine teams participated in the Design Division contest, and the winner was a mother-daughter team called Gachapin’s. All the teams used white rice mixed with saffron rice in a 5-1 ratio. Salmon was used for the pink colors, umeboshi for red, sesame for flesh tones, and processed seaweed for green. The creations were arranged on a 40-centimeter plate to depict such local items as the Sasebo burger (read more on those by using the search engine on the left sidebar) or the Saikai Bridge.

I’m sure everyone had a grand time, especially as they admired each other’s creations, but they saved the best for last — after all the work and the judging, no one went home hungry!

Here’s a photo of the Saikai Bridge. Imagine using rice balls to depict that.

And here’s Sada Masashi singing a paen to hometowns everywhere in a song called Sasebo. The accompanying photo display is well done, and Oda Kazumasa helping out on the chorus is a bonus.

Ichigen koji (54)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

The new Noda Cabinet has taken office. On the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the decline in the Nikkei accelerated on the news of the Cabinet composition and closed at 8950, down 110 from the previous day. One can only say that, rather than celebrating, the market rendered a harsh judgment.

…(The Chinese) are said have a dish called niqiuzhandoufu, which combines dojo (the fish to which Mr. Noda compared himself) and tofu. Live dojo are placed in the pot, and the water is brought to a boil. The tofu is then added. The dojo cannot withstand the heat, so they flee into the cold tofu. They are then boiled together with the tofu.

If they are subjected to the fierce, concentrated fire of the mass media and the opposition parties, none of the dojo ministers will be able to endure it. They will likely flee into the cold tofu of the bureaucracy.

The governmental concept of the Democratic Party of Japan two years ago was the bolting together of “disassociation from the bureaucracy”, “political leadership”, and “no tax increases for four years”. It seems this bolt has already been loosened. Thus, there is no means to prevent the DPJ Cabinet from assimilating with the cold tofu — the Kasumigaseki bureaucracy.

When former Prime Minister Ohira Masashige proposed the introduction of a general consumption tax, he boldly dissolved the Diet and took the question to the people. If Prime Minister Noda is truly convinced of the necessity for a tax increase, he should immerse himself in the people, not in the cold tofu. Without that resolve, Prime Minister Noda should be fully aware that he will be unable to create a consensus for a tax increase.

- Nakagawa Hidenao, lower house member from the LDP, and former party secretary-general

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Aqua vitae Osaka style

IF YOU had trouble wrapping your head around the concept of “designer jeans”, wait until you read this: The city of Osaka is selling its tap water in PET bottles.

Or this: The water won a Gold Quality Award in the 50th Monde Selection awards this May. Monde Selection describes itself this way:

Founded in 1961, Monde Selection’s mission is to test consumer products and grant them a bronze, silver, gold or grand gold quality award. This quality label, awarded by a totally independent professional jury, offers the consumer and the producer numerous advantages. No less than 2830 products, coming from over 80 different countries, are tested each year.

See, it's true!

It’s the first time any municipality that produces and sells water in PET bottles has won an award. That’s not as surprising as the fact that there are municipalities that turn on the tap and fill bottles to compete with the likes of Evian to begin with. To be sure, the city says the beverage is regular tap water that has been rigorously purified. They launched sales of the product in 2007 to encourage more people to drink tap water, and flog 500 millimeter-bottles for JPY 100 yen ($US 1.30). It’s sold under the name of Honmaya, which means “It’s true” in the Kansai dialect, and it’s available in convenience stores and anywhere finer beverages are sold.

If you had trouble wrapping your head around that concept, try this one: They’ve sold well over a million bottles in four years. It’s not surprising at all that the city is thrilled to receive international recognition of the safety and taste of its water. Now that it has legitimate cachet, they’ll probably start plugging it as Gold Label H2O. Honmaya!

Not so long ago, they used to warn travelers to certain countries not to drink the water. They don’t have to worry about that in Osaka at all.

Speaking of which, teachers and dance folk might enjoy this video presenting a new technique for bilingual dance instruction in English and Chinese. Heck, I’d study Chinese with that schoolmarm, and bring her anything she wanted to drink in lieu of apples.

Tomato bread

A NOVEL combination of the staple foods of East and West is bread made with rice, which is available in every Japanese supermarket. (Rice bread wasn’t on American supermarket shelves when I left in 1984, and I don’t know if it is now.) Rice bread tastes a lot better than the plain white variety made with cardboard and library paste — what doesn’t? — but whole wheat bread is still my preference.

Tomato bread its own self

“Why stop there?” must have been the inspiration for the Bon Ohashi Bread Co. in Nagaoka, Niigata, and a research group at the School of Agriculture at Niigata University, because they’ve jointly developed a new type of bread made with both tomatoes and rice. They’ve applied for a patent on the production method, and three of the company’s directly operated outlets in Niigata City began selling the tomato bread earlier this summer.

The research group was studying ways to process ultra hard rice. That’s unsuitable for rice bread, but it is effective for preventing diabetes and obesity. After working on the method for about a year, their Eureka moment arrived when they decided to let the rice germinate and cook it without milling it first. Adding raw tomatoes to the dough reportedly gives it a rich aroma and limits the amount of active oxygen. Bon Ohashi makes four kinds of tomato bread and sells it for 268 yen a loaf, which is a bit steep.

Even though I’m not a loafer too lazy to slice tomatoes for sandwich use, I’d try the tomato rice bread if I lived within shouting distance of Niigata. It looks fine in that photo. I wonder how it toasts?

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Speaking of rice bread, one of the hit products in Japan last year was Sanyo’s rice bread baking machine. My wife has borrowed one from a friend a few times, and it does produce tasty bread.

Here’s a description of that product from Reuters. It contains one of the most ignorant statements I’ve ever seen in a newspaper article, which is saying something, even for Reuters:

Though a Sanyo spokeswoman said she thought novelty was behind the machine’s popularity, food analyst Hisao Nagayama attributed it to changing eating habits — a trend toward more Western food and busy lives that make it harder to find the time to cook rice, consumption of which has gone down.

Finding the time to cook rice should never be a problem, no matter how busy anyone is. I speak from experience, because I often make the rice at home. It takes five minutes at most to put the rice in a bowl, rinse it off several times, put it in the rice cooker, add water, close the lid, and press the button. Add 15 seconds if you make it the night before to eat the next day and set the timer for starting the cooking process.

Most Japanese eat white rice, and that takes 30 minutes of unsupervised cooking. We usually eat brown rice, and that takes 90 minutes. Our cooker also has a function that speeds up the cooking if we’re in a hurry. In contrast, the rice bread machine my wife borrowed requires three to four hours of preparation time and unsupervised baking from start to finish.

“Busy lives that make it harder to find the time to cook rice”? Snort. Nagayama Hisao is a he rather than a she, but knowing about modern rice cookery is unrelated to sex or food analyst certification — it takes about a week of living in a Japanese home.

Another real possibility is that Reuters took it upon themselves to add the part after the dash (or after the phrase “Western food”) in the quoted excerpt.

Either way, if the industrial mass media can’t get something as basic as this right, they can’t be trusted to get anything right.

*****
The backup singers were brothers named Bret and Bo Terre.

Letter bombs (19): The names have been changed to protect the guilty

READER Camphortree lives in California. She sent this note to the Comment section, but I thought it deserved a wider audience:

*****
My husband’s friend owns a small business near Shenzheng (深圳), China. Many things still astonish him.

One industrial park manager was campaigning hard to change the name of a Chinese village into one from the U.S.A.

China has already changed some of the old names of their towns into the names of Japan’s prefectures and towns. Then China patents those new names and exports their products to the U.S.A. and the rest of the world.

For instance, Aomori (青森), the prefecture of the famous Fuji apples; Akita (秋田), the prefecture of the top rice brand (Akita-komachi), and Sanuki, a town famous for Japan’s traditional udon…

I have seen the kanji 青森 printed on cardboard boxes in my Albertson’s supermarket. I asked the store manager where those products came from. He replied, “China ma’am. Everything’s from China. Hahaha!”

Who knows how many more names of Japan’s prefectures and towns have been stolen in China?

*****
Ampontan addition: The South Koreans have done the same thing, but not with place names. They have a beverage called soju that is similar to the Japanese shochu. Koreans registered the name shochu and sold soju in the United States as shochu. The situation was resolved, but it required the Japanese to spend some money.

Why they would have bothered, unless they thought shochu was the superior product?

Ichigen koji (42)

一言居士
- A person who has something to say about everything

The true form of Kan politics is a fight between stray dogs. He just randomly barks in the direction of whatever enemy happens to be in front of him. Now he’s going to die (a political death) in the ditch, like a stray dog. That is a fitting end for Mr. Kan.

- Watanabe Yoshimi, president of Your Party. The description of politics as a fight between stray dogs originates with Kan Naoto.

They say it’s like a Grade B gourmet contest, but that’s an insult to Grade B gourmets. Instead, they should say it’s a Grade D gourmet contest for failures.

- Watanabe Yoshimi again, this time on the people mentioned as likely candidates for the post of DPJ president to succeed Kan Naoto.

Grade B gourmet contests have become popular in recent years. Rather than luxury food items, they feature inexpensive and popular dishes often eaten in the home.

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Safe as milk

THE STORY is old enough to have curdled, but it’s news to me. MSNBC-Reuters reported in June:

Scientists at China’s Agricultural University in Beijing announced that they had produced human breast milk from genetically modified dairy cows and expect supplies to be available in supermarkets within three years. Employing technology once used to produce the sheep “Dolly,” researchers created a herd of 300 modified cows, which yielded milk that was reported as “sweeter” and “stronger” than typical cow milk.

Whatever for?

The Brits get more upset about GM foods than the Yanks, so while the American reports were filed in the Weird News section, the British newspapers were Very Concerned. There’s a wealth of detail in the Telegraph article in addition to the justification for the research:

Human milk contains high quantities of key nutrients that can help to boost the immune system of babies and reduce the risk of infections.

The scientists behind the research believe milk from herds of genetically modified cows could provide an alternative to human breast milk and formula milk for babies, which is often criticised as being an inferior substitute.

They hope genetically modified dairy products from herds of similar cows could be sold in supermarkets. The research has the backing of a major biotechnology company.

I’m not opposed to scientific research that pushes everyone’s envelope — I’m a progressive, after all — and there are so many ignorable whining weenies among the environmentalists and other variegated Nature Activists it’s easy to discount whatever it is they’re banging on about this week, but I thought the spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals got it right:

“Why do we need this milk – what is it giving us that we haven’t already got.”

Professor Ning Li, the scientist who led the research, unwittingly makes another important point:

“As our daily food, the cow’s milk provided us the basic source of nutrition. But the digestion and absorption problems made it not the perfect food for human being.”

He’s right, and many Health Activists (including the late Jack LaLanne) argue that milk is not intended for human consumption, much less as a daily food. (Disclaimer: I like ice cream and yogurt!) In fact, LaLanne once said:

Milk is for a suckling calf. How many creatures still use milk after they’re weaned? Man.

Most mammals become lactose intolerant as they grow, but it’s thought humans became lactose persistent due to a mutation on a chromosome resulting from the pastoral lifestyle in both Europe and East Africa.

Then again, LaLanne didn’t eat beef either.

Oh, one last thing (to channel Colombo): The China Agricultural University is a state school under the control of the Ministry of Education. Its president is appointed by the Chinese government.

Is this a case of Chinese tax yuan at work, or is the research funded by the premiums Uncle Sam pays to those who purchase his bonds?

*****
Probably the only worthwhile song this group ever did, but then Graham Gouldman was the one who wrote it.

And now for something completely different…

REUTERS reports that South Korean scientists have created a dog that glows:

South Korean scientists said on Wednesday they have created a glowing dog using a cloning technique that could help find cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, Yonhap news agency reported.

A research team from Seoul National University (SNU) said the genetically modified female beagle, named Tegon and born in 2009, has been found to glow fluorescent green under ultraviolet light if given a doxycycline antibiotic, the report said.

That brings up the obvious question: If people eat glowing dogs, will they glow too?