The positive impact of McDonald’s on East Asia

DON BOUDREAUX at the site Cafe Hayek presents this post quoting a paper by Adrian E. Tschoegl that describes the positive impact of McDonald’s restaurants in Hong Kong, China, South Korea, and The Philippines.

They didn’t cite the negative impact–terrible food–but it’s worth seeing Tschoegel’s points. (I had to laugh at the improvement cited for South Korea.)

Matsuri da! (83): The iron chefs live!

LONG-TIME FRIENDS know that the Japanese can transform almost any behavior into an act of reverence at a Shinto festival, and here’s yet another example: Slicing and serving sushi.

The Sushikiri Festival (literally sushi-cutting) is held every 5 May at the Shimoniikawa Shinto shrine in Moriyama, Shiga, in supplication for a good harvest, health, and protection from disaster. It is now a national intangible cultural folk treasure.

Rather than professional sushi chefs, the slicing is done by two young men clad in traditional haori (half-coat) and hakama (divided skirt), as you can see in the photo. They use 20-centimeter-long metal chopsticks to hold the fish with their left hands while they carefully cut the fish with exaggerated motions using a 40-centimeter-long knife held in their right hands. (It is unusual to see metal chopsticks in Japan; most are wooden. The metal variety are more frequently seen in Korea.)

The fish on the menu every year is the funa, of which there are several varieties, none of which has a familiar English name (though many of them end in “carp”). The sushi is first cut for and served to the head priest of the shrine and the chairman of the local citizens’ association. In fact, they’re sitting in formal Japanese style directly across from the two men, though they’re not shown in the photo. (Try the second photo here to see them.) The fish is later distributed to the parishioners who’ve come to participate.

And this funa is not just the run-of-the-mill sushi; this treat has been fermented for three or four years before it’s served. The process originally came from China and has been used in Japan for about 1,000 years. The fermentation creates an odor that many people find unappetizing, but the dish has become a noted product of Shiga. (You can read more about it here and here. Those with a scientific turn of mind might find this to be of interest.)
　
The official story is that the festival, formally known as the Omi-no-Kenketo Festival (the sushi cutting is just one part of it) originated when funazushi was given to a divinity who drifted ashore to the banks of Lake Biwa on a raft 1,300 years ago.

But there are other stories too. Shimoniikawa is one of the six shrines in the country with Toyokiirihiko-no-Mikoto, the eldest son of the Sujin Tenno (emperor), as the enshrined deity. Some versions have it that the food was originally served to Toyokiirihiko, which would make the event closer to 2,000 years old.

Suijin is supposed to have been the 10th Tenno, but no one is sure that he actually existed. His reign years are given as 97 BC to 30 BC, which Japanese historians think is implausibly early. (His recorded life span of 119 years is just as implausible.) Accounts in the Nihon Shoki ascribe some of the same exploits to both the legendary first emperor Jimmu and to Suijin, which lead some to believe that the deeds of a Sujin who might have existed were attributed to Jimmu.

Incidentally, the Shimoniikawa shrine was in the news in March this year when it was confirmed that a Buddhist temple bell found in the storage area for the shrine’s mikoshi in May 2007 is the oldest example of a bell with both Japanese and Korean designs discovered in the country.

Cast in 1419, it is the sixth bell of this type to have ever turned up in Japan. Shown in the second photo, it is 40.6 centimeters tall, 23.9 centimeters wide, and weighs 11.2 kilograms. Reports say that it was used in the “Buddhist temple hall”, which suggests the shrine was once a joint Shinto-Buddhist facility of the kind that no longer exist, though that wasn’t explicitly stated. The Japanese decorations are the dragon heads at the top of the bell, while the Korean motifs are the plant and flower designs on the rest of the bell.

And that just goes to show: There’s no telling what you’re liable to stumble over when you start poking around in a storeroom in Japan!

Yasukuni soba

SOME PEOPLE VISIT the Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward to pay their respects to the Japanese war dead. Others make a point to see the Yushukan war memorial museum next to the shrine itself. And then there are those who go there for a bowl of soba.

On the shrine grounds is a gift shop that has a section where visitors can buy food and drinks. One of the menu items is the Yasukuni soba, which is so popular that nearby businesspeople, office workers, and taxi drivers are known to make a special trip for lunch.

The noodles in the Yasukuni soba contain mugwort, known as yomogi in Japanese, which has been traditionally used as a seasoning, food, and herbal medicine in China, Korea, and Japan. Other ingredients in the soup include egg that has been cooked and cut into strings, wild vegetables, shiitake mushrooms, pork, kamaboko (a sort of steamed fish paste), wakame (seaweed), and spring onions. Eating a bowl of soba with all those ingredients is somewhat like ordering pizza with everything.

A bowl of the shrine’s soba costs 800 yen ($US 7.65), which seems to be a fair price. If diners prefer, they can substitute the thicker udon noodles made with regular flour for the thinner soba noodles made with buckwheat flour.

If this is a gimmick, it’s been a rather successful one. The shop has been selling the dish for about 35 years, and during cherry blossom or festival seasons, they serve from 500 to 600 bowls per day. Visitors can also order yakisoba (fried soba noodles), curried rice, or other foods, but the company operating the shop says that most people pick the soba.

If you’re in the neighborhood and want to try some, the shop is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. No reservations or necktie necessary!

Chiburger to go

SOME CRITICS LAMENT that people are reading less fiction than they once did, but I think those concerns are unfounded. People read just as much fiction as they always have—it’s just that the sources of their literary entertainment have changed. Nowadays, readers get their fiction from news articles instead of from novelists.

For the skeptical, here’s a story as absurd as any comic novel and which includes characters and passages that could have been invented by Jonathan Swift or William Burroughs. The Associated Press reports that the McDonald’s hamburger chain has opened a shop in Hacienda Heights, California, that incorporates the principles of feng shui in its design.

Feng shui (風水, fusui in Japanese) is the ancient Chinese practice of utilizing geography and astrology to determine the optimum location and positioning of residences, commercial establishments, and farms to receive and retain chi (気, ki in Japanese), or natural energy, to achieve harmony with one’s surroundings.

Some people consider it junk science, but it is being viewed with increasing respect by Western architects and designers.

Here’s how Brenda Clifford redesigned the hamburger joint:

With the help of a feng shui master, the designers added details that…include positioning the doors in a way that would block out bad spirits while keeping good ones inside…
The eight rows of red tiles near the food counter are another symbol of fortune, because the number eight is considered auspicious…
Clifford said she made the nearly fatal mistake of putting 44 seats in the dining area, until she learned that feng shui followers consider the number four a symbol of bad luck. So she added an extra seat to make it 45.

The outlet’s owners say they decided to incorporate feng shui principles because there is a well-known Buddhist temple nearby, which brings good luck.

Another factor in their decision is what the author calls the large Asian (read: East Asian) population in the neighborhood. McDonald’s has recently been implementing a policy of modifying shop designs and products to appeal to local communities.

And of course there is an unspoken third factor: combining two items unlikely to be mentioned in the same sentence—namely, the Palace of American Junk Food and Chinese cosmology–creates a media magnet that will reap publicity for the store owners, leading to increased customer traffic and higher profits.

The scenario has grown more common in recent years: Westerners encounter Asian culture and use the shells while throwing away the nuts. Other examples include the exercise regimen known as “power yoga”, a classic contradiction in terms that is laughable from the traditional perspective, and the perversion of Tantric yoga into a form of sexual gymnastics.

The objective of feng shui is to generate positive benefits that result in health, harmony, and abundance. While the Chinese certainly use the principles to foster success in their business enterprises, it would be difficult to imagine anything less conducive to health and harmony than the merchandise produced and sold by McDonald’s.

But let’s take a look at the article, starting with the headline on the MSNBC website:

Do you want fries with that Zen?

American author William Burroughs was known for the technique of cutting up and rearranging words, phrases, and sentences to create a non-linear narrative. It was one thing for the drug-addled Burroughs to razor through unrelated bits of prose and recombine them for the pleasure of avant-garde cultists. It’s another matter altogether when journalists employ the same technique because they’re too lazy to look in an encyclopedia.

Feng Shui originated several thousand years ago in China and was a local attempt to formulate principles for coexisting with the environment that are both philosophical and practical. Zen is a Japanese word for a specific practice within Buddhism. It also exists in China, where it is called chán, and where it is thought to have been developed in the 7th century AD. The original concepts probably came from India.

Zen has about as much to do with feng shui as Stonehenge has to do with Jesuits. A published article by working journalists that assumes the existence of one means the presence of the other? Straight out of Jonathan Swift or Evelyn Waugh.

The satirists also could have created the character of the designer, Brenda Clifford.

Meanwhile, the metal sculptures of a crane and Koi fish adorning one wall represent fertility and prosperity, she said.

The crane is a traditional symbol of longevity in both China and Japan. Koi—the Japanese word for carp—represent strength and endurance in both countries. The bird and the fish represent fertility and prosperity in much the same way a Big Mac represents nourishment.

But back to the journalists of the Associated Press. They’re still using the Burroughs technique of cutting and pasting unrelated words and phrases to create meaningless sentences:

The designs were…also done in a way that would help all customers tap their inner Zen.

And the way they take a noun from a foreign language and turn it into a new verb is almost Shakespearean:

Brownstein said he and his partners chose to feng shui the restaurant…

Who needs fiction after reading this two-screen marvel? Feng shui, food that isn’t food, a dizzy designer, a “professor emerita” offering junk education, and reporters and editors at the Associated Press better qualified to flip burgers than to write about them.

That has all the ingredients of an epic satire.

Ekiben: An epicure’s delight for Japanese rail travelers

EVERYONE WHO’S EVER FLOWN COACH has had the experience of eating an in-flight meal so bland it’s hard to tell the potatoes from the plastic tray. They say the food in first class is a lot better, and I promise to let you know for sure if I ever fly anywhere first class. Maybe in my next life.

Those who’ve never traveled by train in Japan might be forgiven for expecting train station food to be as unappealing as airplane food, but they’d be in for a pleasant surprise. There’s a tradition in this country of serving fine carry-on meals made with local ingredients of exceptional quality. These meals are called ekiben. That’s a portmanteau word coined by combining the word eki, which is a train station, and the first syllable of bento, which is a pre-prepared meal served in a flat box.

Bento themselves are takeout meals sold for a variety of purposes and occasions. The quality can vary depending on the intended use, ranging from meals that are inexpensive and less appetizing than airplane food, to those made with the finest ingredients and costing rather more.

Ekiben are a topic of such interest that JR Kyushu has been holding contests every year since 2005 to improve their quality and to promote travel by train. In fact, the final judging and tasting in the Fourth Kyushu Ekiben Ranking for the ekiben sold at JR Kyushu stations was held on the 14th at JR Kyushu headquarters in Fukuoka City, and the results were announced yesterday. A total of 4,900 votes were cast by JR Kyushu passengers in a preliminary ballot from October to January to select the top 15 bento from among 50 candidates. Those 15 were further evaluated by a panel of judges, who were allowed to vote only for the one they liked the best.

The judges included essayist (and former magazine editor and newspaperman) Tsutsui Gankodo (on the right in the first photo), travel journalist Kobayashi Shinobu, local television personality Muranaka Minami, and JR Kyushu President Ishihara Susumu. The standards included flavor, the incorporation of local characteristics, the size of the servings, and price.

The judges said the decision was difficult because they were all delicious, but of course judges always say that. Ms. Kobayashi added, “The Kyushu ekiben servings are generous, and they are very flavorful. The opening of the Kagoshima leg of the Kyushu Shinkansen has resulted in the creation of more modern ekiben.”

The winner this year was a bento called Hyakunen Monogatari Kareikawa (The Hundred-Year Tale Kareikawa) from the Kareikawa Station in Kirishima, Kagoshima. It was the first time this 1,050 yen ($US 9.75) bento took top honors. It is made with bamboo shoots and shiitake mushrooms cooked with rice, and also includes a tempura dish made with satsumaimo (sweet potatoes) and other local vegetables called gane. Another feature that appealed to the judges was the bento box made with bamboo bark. This ekiben finished in second place last year and in third place in 2006, so perhaps this perennial favorite has gotten even better. Here’s what it looks like.

Meanwhile, second prize went to the Ayu-ya Sandai bento from the Shin-Yatsushiro station, which costs 1,050 yen. The ayu is known as the sweetfish in English, and the Shin-Yatsushiro station in Kumamoto is the northernmost station in the partially open Kyushu Shinkansen line. The Ayu-ya Sandai bento had been the winner each of the previous three years of the competition, so it must be good.

Third prize went to the Saga Mitsusedori Toro Bento from Saga Station, which costs 730 yen.

Other favorites that regularly win the acclaim of riders and judges alike since the competition began include the chirashizushi bento sold in bento boxes that are actually Arita ceramics at Saga Station in Saga, and the ebimeshi bento made with local shrimp sold at Izumi Station in Kagoshima.

For those people who don’t or can’t travel to these stations to buy the ekiben (and there are people in Japan who would), JR Kyushu is clever enough to promote their sale by opening a special shop in Hakata Station in Fukuoka City (the largest train station in Kyushu) called Ekiben Stadium. Travelers passing through the station can buy these ekiben from among a rotating selection until March 31. About 11 or 12 different ekiben are sold every day, and the selections change every week.

Unfortunately, I seldom take train rides long enough to warrant the purchase of an ekiben, but Saga Station is only a 10-minute drive away. If that prize-winning Saga ekiben includes both local chicken and toro (high-quality tuna) as I suspect, I’m going to have to buy a couple and try them out for lunch at home!

And get ready for it—there is a website devoted to ekiben nationwide! (Alas, in Japanese only.) It includes a list of the boxed meals available at train stations throughout the country, recipes, and links to ekiben sold by mail (the Ayu-ya Sendai ekiben is one of those available).

Here’s the Ekiben Room, an English site for the ekiben sold in East Japan. This is the link to the convenient website for the Ekiben Stadium shop in Hakata Station (also Japanese only), with a map showing the shop’s location in the station and the schedule with the dates of sale for all the ekiben.

And here’s a photo of one more I’d love to try—an ekiben from Oita consisting entirely of mackerel sushi, for 1,300 yen.

Postscript: Mr. Tsutsui also writes a feature on a Kyushu restaurant in the free monthly magazine available on the JR Kyushu trains.

The Emperor of Japan’s working ranch

ROYAL FAMILIES THE WORLD OVER can’t seem to make do with just a single palace in the capital city—they also require a few extra castles or country villas scattered about the realm for their rest and relaxation.

Japan’s Imperial Family is no exception. In addition to the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo, they have a palace and other estates in Kyoto, as well as villas in Nasu (Tochigi), Hayama (Kanagawa), and Suzaki (Shizuoka).

But few people are aware that among the residences of the Emperor of Japan is a working ranch known as the Goryo Bokujo, or what the Imperial Household Agency calls the Imperial Stock Farm.

Located about 13 kilometers to the northeast of Utsunomiya, Tochigi, the Goryo Bokujo is more than just a rustic retreat for the Imperial Family to get away from it all. It is a legitimate farm that produces the meat, vegetables, eggs, and milk consumed by the family members and served at palace functions. (Japanese readers: check the top on the milk bottle in the second photo.) It is also used to breed riding horses, carriage horses, sheep, cows, and poultry.

The carriage horses are used more frequently than for just a few formal occasions. All the foreign ambassadors to Japan meet the Emperor when they present their credentials, and they are given the choice of being taken to the Imperial Palace by limousine or by carriage. Most choose the carriage. (Wouldn’t you?)

The ranch is located on 252 hectares (622.7 acres) of land, an area twice the size of the Imperial Palace grounds. About half of the ranch is used for breeding the livestock and other animals. Its predecessor was a sheep ranch established in 1876 in Chiba on the present site of Narita Airport.

The Imperial Household Agency assumed responsibility for its administration in 1956, and when the plans for Narita were drawn up in 1969, the site was moved to its present location, which is a two-to-three hour drive from Tokyo.

The ranch’s various food products are collected three times a week for delivery to the kitchens of the Imperial residences and the other sites where they are used. Great care is reportedly taken in the food production. Visitors to the ranch have the bottoms of their shoes disinfected, and the ranch itself uses a minimum of agricultural chemicals.

And of course they use the food for parties held for dignitaries, celebrities, and other Imperial guests. The meats they produce get tossed on the grill for barbecues and yakitori at outdoor parties in the Akasaka Gardens.

All of which makes me wonder: What do the Emperor’s cowboys look like? And if they have a brand for the Imperial cattle, do they use the chrysanthemum crest?

Here’s the link to the Imperial Household Agency’s page for the Imperial residences (which also include two wild duck preserves). The agency’s website is on the right sidebar.

Australian media priorities

COLUMNIST ANDREW BOLT of the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper, blogs about the priorities of the Australian news media here.

He also explains to a young’un the meaning of “a hero’s welcome” here.

Yes, both are Japan-related!

It’s seaweed season in Japan!

LIKE CHOW MEIN AND PIZZA PIE, sushi has transcended its place of origin to become another mealtime option for people in many parts of the world. For example, there’s a large cafeteria in New York City across the street from Grand Central Station offering a selection of ready-to-eat food so varied it would please even the pickiest of American palates. One corner of the establishment is occupied by a Korean merchant doing a brisk business selling sushi. There’s the ironclad proof: the Japanese dish is now as American as a cheese enchilada, kielbasa, or sauerkraut.

There are several ways to prepare sushi, and one of the most common is called makizushi, in which the rice and other ingredients are rolled into a cylindrical shape kept intact by paper-like sheets of processed seaweed.

The word in English for the type of seaweed used is laver, but since that’s unfamiliar to nearly every native speaker, most translated material uses the Japanese word nori.

Everybody knows how food is grown even if they’ve never been on a farm, so it’s easy to picture in the mind’s eye what it would be like to raise an unfamiliar Japanese vegetable, such as the goya from Okinawa.

But it’s unlikely people outside of Japan have given much thought to how the nori that holds the makizushi together is grown and processed. For a start, look at the accompanying photo showing watermen in the Ariake Sea in Kyushu harvesting seaweed last month.

Though they’re dealing with a green plant, Japan considers this business to be part of the maritime industry rather than the agricultural industry. And an industry it is: the country produces more than 340,000 tons of nori a year, worth more than a billion US dollars, in more than 600 square kilometers (230 square miles) of coastal waters. The area with the highest production volume and the highest quality product is the same Ariake Sea shown in the photo.

It’s a profitable business, but those watermen earn every yen. The growing season starts in the fall and lasts throughout the winter, so they’re out on the water in boats working during the coldest part of the year. They’re also working in the water—the area shown in that photograph is no more than chest deep.

The ABCs of Nori Cultivation

Seaweed spores are placed on nets, which are fastened to poles sunk into the seabed. The nets are suspended vertically in the Ariake Sea, but in other areas of Japan they are laid out horizontal to the water’s surface. The first crop is harvested after about six weeks, and subsequent harvests can be taken from the same initial seeding in 10-day intervals. The watermen will work nearly round the clock for three or four months straight.

Those two men left before dawn in fishing boats from a small port in Kawasoe-machi to the beds about eight kilometers offshore. They don’t own the beds—they rent the space instead, and the sections they use are determined by lottery every year. After their arrival, they transferred to those work boats to haul in the seaweed. A few hours later, when the boat is full, they’ll take the crop back to shore for processing and then head out again. Most watermen will make two or three round trips during the course of a day.

The freshly harvested seaweed is taken to be processed, and many watermen and their families also handle that part of the job in large sheds built on their property. They use a pitchfork to shovel the raw seaweed into a hopper at one end of a series of machines that will clean, chop, press, dry, bake, and fold the nori in operations that take roughly two hours from start to finish. This results in folded bundles that are inspected and placed in a large wooden box for delivery to the local cooperative, which is responsible for the packaging and distribution.

This year, warmer temperatures in Kyushu delayed the initial placing of the spores, resulting in the latest first harvest in 40 years. The watermen waited because colder water produces nori that is both softer and more delicious.

Seaweed for the Rich and Famous

Just because you’ve seen one sheet of seaweed doesn’t mean you’ve seen them all. The Cadillac of local brands is Saga Nori Ariake-Kai Ichiban. The prefecture and the local fishing cooperatives choose no more than three sheets out of every 10,000 processed for this particular brand. Their asking price is 100 yen ($US 0.95) a sheet.

Now keep all that in mind as you read this article on nori the New York Times ran in their Dining and Wine section two weeks ago. It’s worth a glance for two reasons. First, it provides examples of how Western chefs creatively utilize nori as an ingredient to produce dishes unlike any served in Japan. Second, the tone and content of the prose are so pretentious they turn the piece into unintentional comedy.

For example:

In the West Village, Evan Rich whirs through 300 sheets of nori a week at Sumile Sushi — not counting what the restaurant’s sushi chef, Toshio Oguma, uses for maki — blending it with apples simmered in cider for a riff on pork chops with applesauce.

And:

Arnaud Berthelier, at the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead, in Atlanta, has stirred nori into black truffle-flecked risotto since discovering how well its iodine flavor goes with the earthiness of the truffle.

Or:

Ken Oringer, chef at Clio in Boston, sees it as a perfect opportunity to take diners out of their comfort zone…So he showcases nori’s distinctive crispness with a barely sweet caramel-nori croquant bent into a tubular shape and filled with sea urchin and a foam of wasabi and green apple.

Here’s my favorite:

Befitting a chef who orchestrates $400-a-head meals, Mr. Takayama even toasts it himself, something few chefs do. In his prep kitchen he waves the translucent, brownish-red sheets of untoasted nori over a steel disk set on a burner, letting them graze the surface until they turn the familiar dark green.

In other words, the chef to society’s upper crust “orchestrates $400-a-head meals” by doing something that every Japanese housewife does regularly in the home to make a quick snack.

Those tubular shaped caramel-nori croquants filled with a foam of wasabi and green apple will surely come to mind the next time my wife sends me to the shop down the street for some lettuce and tuna maki!

Turning up their noses at Chinese seafood

THE WORLD IS WELL AWARE that the Chinese are choking on the polluted fumes they spew daily into the atmosphere, and that the noxious gases they export with their manufactured goods are causing serious health problems, particularly for their neighbors.

Now, reader S.B. sends along this article from the International Herald Tribune, which explains the Chinese have developed a large fish farming industry that has created water pollution problems so severe as to prevent consumers in other countries from eating the exported fish.

The country has become a global fish farming colossus:

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug into the earth.

What has this accomplished?

The government hoped the building boom would lift millions out of poverty. And it did. There are now more than 4.5 million fish farmers in China, according to the Fishery Bureau.

They have gotten gloriously rich in the process:

The boom did more than create jobs. It made China the only country that produces more seafood from fish farms than from the sea. It also helped feed an increasingly prosperous population, a longstanding challenge in China.

Many growers here struck it rich as well, people like Lin Sunbao, whose 25-year-old son is now studying at Cambridge University in England. “My best years were 1992, ‘93, ‘94,” Lin said. “I only had one aquafarm, and I earned over $500,000 a year.”

That success has come at a heavy price, however:

But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.

“Our waters here are filthy,” said Ye Chao, an eel and shrimp farmer who has 20 giant ponds in western Fuqing. “There are simply too many aquaculture farms in this area. They’re all discharging water here, fouling up other farms.”

The problems are just as enormous as the industry itself:

More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water. The biggest lakes in the country regularly succumb to harmful algal blooms. Seafood producers are part of the problem, environmental experts say. Enormous aquaculture farms concentrate fish waste, pesticides and veterinary drugs in their ponds and discharge the contaminated water into rivers, streams and coastal areas, often with no treatment.

Now, no one wants to eat Chinese seafood:

Importers of Chinese seafood quickly caught on. In recent years, eel shipments to Europe, Japan and the United States have been turned back or destroyed because of residues of banned veterinary drugs. Eel shipments to Japan have dropped 50 percent through August of this year.

Do I need to tell you that some Chinese in the industry have found a way to be critical of Japanese behavior?

Some growers have lashed out at Japan, arguing that it keeps raising the drug residue standard simply to protect its own eel farms against competition.

Forgive the Chinese public; after years of government propaganda, they know not whereof they speak. Food safety—particularly for imported food products–is a matter of extreme public concern in Japan. According to an American source:

Japan has been developing the new regulations for more than three years…The new Japanese regulations are based on international standards established by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization to ensure food safety.

The same source notes that the American pork industry changed its behavior to protect its livelihood, and used the example of the Japanese ban on American beef as a cautionary tale.

Besides, Japanese domestic production of eel, beef, and pork is insufficient to satisfy domestic demand.

In fact, Japanese standards covered more than eel and pork, as this Xinhua report admits:

The new criteria involve 302 food products, 799 agricultural chemicals and 54,782 inspection criteria and is (sic) believed to be the world’s strictest by far.

Xinhua also notes that the standards have had the desired effect:

A ministry spokesperson has promised the ministry would follow Japan’s new criteria strictly so as to guide Chinese exporters. Since 2001, says the ministry, China has suffered 24 major trade and technical barriers hindering its exports of farm produce to Japan.

This is confirmed by Chinaview:

China has resumed exports of grilled eels to Japan after a four-month suspension triggered by reports saying banned drugs had been found in the products. Inspection and quarantine authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, the country’s leading eel exporter, said exports to Japan resumed in mid November…Chinese grilled eel products were taken off Japanese shelves in July amid concerns about the use of antibiotics and some banned substances, said Huang Weiming, Guangdong inspection and quarantine bureau vice director. He said Guangdong had not received a single order for grilled eel from Japanese importers over the past four months.

Some misunderstandings still remain, however:

Many Japanese love grilled eels from China. They make up about 80 percent of the market and are sold at prices 40 percent cheaper than similar Japanese products, Huang said.

Here’s how the first sentence should read: Many Japanese love the price of grilled eels from China.

Some Chinese are still blustering, as the IHT reports:

“Our market will expand in Russia and Southeast Asia, and the EU,” Wang said.

I wouldn’t count those eels before they’re hatched. Or at least before reading this from the Wall Street Journal:

The European Union said Friday that it will follow the lead of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which said it is stepping up scrutiny of Chinese farm-raised seafood.
EU authorities in Beijing are talking to Chinese authorities and conducting an investigation, said Philip Tod, an EU spokesman. They have already asked EU countries to increase their vigilance. “We will not hesitate to take action,” Mr. Tod said. “The same substances banned in the U.S. are also banned in Europe.”

Mr. Wang unfortunately has another view:

“In five or six years, as we transfer our export destinations, Japan will be begging us.”

I wouldn’t bet the fish farm on it.

Some observers think the Chinese will get it right eventually:

“Water is the biggest problem in China,” said Peter Leedham, the business manager at Sino Analytica, which advises companies in China on food safety issues. “But my feeling is China will deal with it, because it has to. It just won’t be a quick process.”

I wish I could be so optimistic.

Squid on the line

MID-WINTER WEATHER MIGHT MAKE IT DIFFICULT to hang the futon and the blankets outside for an airing—an excellent custom—but in some parts of Japan they follow another custom by hanging up the squid to dry instead.

As the photograph shows, freshly caught squid are hung out on the line to dry overnight, particularly in winter. This white curtain of cuttlefish is waving in the chill sea breeze in Minami-cho, Tokushima.

The woman handling this household chore is the wife of Noguchi Shusaku, the proprietor of a local restaurant and souvenir store. When the weather is good enough (and cold enough) she skewers about 100 of these 50-centimeter squid caught in Ishikawa on bamboo sticks and strings them up on a rope.

Mrs. Noguchi got started a few days before Christmas, which was about two weeks later than usual because of the warm weather this winter. She’ll continue until sometime in February.

Here’s the beauty of the technique: this is all the processing that needs to be done before they’re sold. I’ve bought this same type of dried squid hanging on a line at street stalls in Yobuko, off the Sea of Japan. Give them just a few hundred yen, and the ladies in the stalls will slap a few into a clear plastic container, snap a rubber band around it, and hand it over to you. Sliced and heated, they make excellent snacks!