Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (2)

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

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

Firefly festivals

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

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

Lightning bugs!

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

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

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

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

Hatsukiri

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

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

Seaweed cutting

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

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

Sea goya

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

Tastes as good as it looks!

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

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

Nara ayu

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

Some sweetfish just for you

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

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

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

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

Contributing to the delinquency of minors

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

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

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

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

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

Shochu collector

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

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

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

Now there’s a man with discipline!

Miko class

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

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

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

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

The declaration of the eisa nation

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

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

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

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

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

Ain’t nobody gonna steal my miso natto roll!

SOME PEOPLE THINK Japanese schools stifle the imagination of their students, but you can’t prove that by me. I’ve associated with Japanese school-age children for the better part of a quarter of a century, and I’ve found them every bit as imaginative as the children I knew growing up in the United States, if not more so.

Scrumptious!

Now a group of students at the Yonezawa Commercial High School in Yonezawa, Yamagata, are displaying a creative imagination above and beyond that of some adults who get paid to do it for a living.

The members of the Research Club at the 107-year-old school delight in creating new food products. One of their past triumphs was cookies made with powdered locusts. They named them inagoma cookies, combining the word for locust, or inago, and sesame, or goma.

But they’ve outdone themselves this time. In March, their faculty advisor assigned this year’s research theme, which was to create something new by using the wisdom of the past. So the students, mostly 11th-graders, came up with the idea of making two different kinds of rolled cakes: one with miso and the other with natto.

Miso is a traditional seasoning made most often by fermenting rice and soybeans with salt to create a paste used in a variety of dishes. Most people outside of Japan are familiar with it as the base for the stock in miso soup, or miso shiru. Soldiers in Japan ate it as part of their rations several centuries ago, so that aspect fulfilled the requirement for the wisdom of the past.

While fewer foreigners know about natto, it’s the type of food one never forgets after a close encounter. It too is a fermented soybean, using a smaller type of bean with a special bacteria that results in a distinctive odor and a sticky consistency. Pick it up with chopsticks and you’ll see translucent gummy strings holding it together. There are several ways to eat it, but it’s usually spread over rice. Most people have trouble with the odor in the same way that some cheeses in Europe and the Middle East cause problems, though its smell is not as intense as that of limburger cheese, to cite one example.

Students at the school used to sell natto in the 1920s and 1930s to raise money for their tuition, so that also dovetailed with their research theme.

The rolled cakes are five centimeters (about two inches) in diameter and 13 centimeters long, with the miso and natto mixed into the cream. The students said they found it difficult to maintain a balance of tartness and sweetness with the miso roll. The natto is not in bean form, but a paste. The trick with that ingredient was to keep the odor in check but to retain the stickiness.

A local confectionary produces it for them, and you can imagine what the bakers must have said to each other when they found out what they would be making. The students got the last laugh, however; they took 60 rolls to a local event, offered them for JPY 500 ($US 5.19) apiece, and sold out completely. If they’re that good, it won’t be long before local beaneaters with a sweet tooth beat a path to their door. But the idea is not as unusual as it might seem; several traditional Japanese pastries are made with sweet bean paste (and are quite good).

Said 16-year-old Takahashi Shiho:

“We wanted to make products that weren’t sold anywhere else.

And they succeeded, too!

“Those are unusual combinations, but they have a rich taste.”

If the idea of miso or natto in a confection doesn’t sound appealing, think of it as a health food. Both of those ingredients are seriously nutritious, packed to the gills with protein, vitamins, and minerals. Natto is also said to be good for preventing blood clotting, and therefore heart attacks and strokes.

That’s my justification for eating natto every day, even though I didn’t care for the smell at first, either. My wife, for whom natto is a daily culinary event, found a clever way to get around my reluctance. She heard that the odor and the stickiness are minimized somewhat if the natto is mixed with grated daikon radish. After about a year of eating that combination I got accustomed to it. Then she decided it was too much trouble to keep grating the daikon every day, but by that time I was already housebroken and didn’t notice any more!

The pictures of Japan inside your head

WALTER LIPPMAN ONCE OBSERVED that the popular conceptions of people, places, and events outside the range of our direct experience are informed by pictures inside our heads, and that these pictures are often created by journalists incapable of seeing beyond the pictures in their own heads.

As long as we realize that the objective of the print and broadcast media has always been more to entertain than to inform, the damage will be no greater than that caused by the stories we habitually tell ourselves in our daily lives anyway. The problems arise when the journalistic drones start believing the pictures they create and cause real trouble by spreading falsehoods among people without the means to educate themselves otherwise.

While this phenomenon exists in the print and broadcast media everywhere, it is endemic in the overseas English-language media dealing with Japan. The pictures in their heads amount to a full-blown hallucination.

Here are brief descriptions of three newspaper articles that appeared today, all about the preparation of food. What sort of cognitive dissonance is created with the pictures in your head when you read them?

Japanese cooking school in Seoul

Shunted off to the side of page 11 in the Nishinippon Shimbun was a brief article covering the announcement that the Nakamura Culinary School of Fukuoka City will open a Seoul branch in September to provide instruction in the preparation of Japanese cuisine and Western confections. Licensed chefs in both fields will teach the classes assisted by Korean interpreters.

The school will offer two courses—one for prospective chefs, and one for professionals already working as chefs. The course for the pros will be limited to 24 students, and will include 132 hours of instruction over a six-month period. In addition to the school’s regular instructors, food preparers at well-known Japanese hotels, ryotei (traditional Japanese restaurants, very expensive) and patisseries will also be used as teachers for the course.

The Nakamura Culinary School thinks it sees a business opportunity because there has been a surge of popularity in Japanese food in South Korea over the past few years. More than 1,000 South Koreans came to Japan last year alone to learn how to prepare Japanese food at local culinary institutes.

But the sharp depreciation of the won caused attendance to dip this year. School head Nakamura Tetsu decided to offer instruction in Seoul to make it cheaper for the students. It’s also easier for the students to learn from courses conducted in the Korean language. (Instruction at cooking schools in Japan is of course entirely in Japanese.)

The article notes this is the second cooking school to open a South Korean branch, after Osaka’s Tsuji Culinary Institute.

Now how does this—and the many other similar stories I’ve presented here—clash with the pictures in the heads of people who have been entertained with tales about how the Koreans and the Japanese just hatehatehate each other?

Incidentally, the Fukuoka Asian Urban Research Center conducted a survey by questionnaire in February and March of residents in the major cities of South Korea to determine the city’s name recognition and its image in those areas. The survey found a name recognition of greater than 80% for their sister city in Busan, South Korea. That percentage soared to 95% for Busan women in their 20s and 30s.

The reason cited by the center for that stratospheric percentage among young Korean women was the frequency with which they or their friends hop across the Korean Strait to go shopping in Kyushu.

That doesn’t surprise me at all, but then I live near Fukuoka City, have seen and met many of those same young women, and know how easy it is to travel between the two cities because I’ve done it myself. Forgive me for believing the picture inside the dim cave of my own head.

The reggae izakaya

Takeo in Saga is a town of about 50,000 people roughly midway between the two slightly larger towns of Saga City and Sasebo, Nagasaki. It takes about a half hour to get from Takeo to either city, and an additional hour or so to travel to either Nagasaki City or Fukuoka City.

Buried even further in the back of today’s Nishinippon Shimbun was a blurb about a new dish being served at a “reggae izakaya” in Takeo called Nuf Nuf. (An izakaya is a traditional Japanese eating and drinking place.)

Nuf Nuf is run by 36-year-old Koga Manabu. The photo accompanying the piece showed a man with a genial smile and a knit tam covering what appears to be an impressive growth of dreadlocks.

Mr. Koga created a new dish that his customers think is quite tasty. He started with Sicilian rice, added wild boar meat, and used locally grown lemongrass as a flavor enhancer. He said he slices the boar meat very thin to neutralize its distinctive odor.

He offered it first at a trial tasting party on 31 May, and it went over so well he put it on the Nuf Nuf menu. He serves it with soup on the side and charges JPY 800 ($US 8.14), which sounds reasonable.

I’ve never been to Nuf Nuf, but I know people who have—including a Jamaican woman who enjoyed living in Saga for several years. She told me Koga Manabu was a nice guy and the food was good.

But aren’t the Japanese supposed to be xenophobic islanders turning even more inward and nationalistic? What’s this about some guy in dreadlocks in a town in the middle of the sticks creating new recipes using Sicilian rice? He’s going to ruin all those pictures in your head of Japanese who can’t abide foreigners or bear to put any kind of rice past their lips other than the plain but pure white variety grown on the islands.

Robo-chefs to take over Japanese kitchens

That’s what the headline in the New Zealand Herald said, and who are we to quibble with a source chosen as the Best Media Website in 2007, 2008, and 2009 in the Qantas Media Awards?

Here’s the first sentence in the article:

“They’ve got ones that clean, and others that pour drinks, so it was only a matter of time before Japanese inventors came up with robots that can cook.”

Just out of curiosity, have you seen one of those robots cleaning a house or pouring your drinks anywhere?

Neither have I.

But the best media website for three years running says it was just a matter of time before those robot-mad Japanese inventors came up with robot chefs.

Various prototype robo-chefs showed off their cooking skills at the International Food Machinery and Technology Expo in Tokyo, flipping “okonomiyaki” Japanese pancakes, serving sushi and slicing vegetables.

When did machines start to have “skills” instead of functions? And when did either machines or people start to “flip” okonomiyaki? Is poetic license the reason they’ve won that string of awards? It certainly isn’t because the person who wrote that article has seen anyone make those “Japanese pancakes”.

The real story here is that the Japanese have a knack for automating different types of labor that the biens pensants once lamented as dehumanizing, particularly on assembly lines in auto plants.

Robots are also efficient, dependable, show up for work sober and on time, and don’t have labor unions that demand retirement packages preventing the company from making a profit on the cars they manufacture. Ask the management personnel who used to work at General Motors, assuming you don’t have to chase them down on the golf course while they enjoy their severance packages.

“We all know that robots can be very useful. We want to take that utility out of the factory so that they can be used elsewhere,” said Narito Hosomi, president of Toyo Riki, manufacturers of the pancake-cooking robot.

Well, why not? Isn’t this just a logical progression from machines that mix carbonated water and flavored syrup in on-site dispensers at restaurants to give customers the soft drinks they order? Or the machines at any other plant the world over that manufacture and package food products in processes that are almost entirely automated?

Take a few seconds to think about it, and it turns out to be just the normal course of events in the development of any kind of technology. People come up with different ideas, spend the time and money to make them a reality, and see if they fly in the marketplace. If their ideas are useful, they make a profit. If not, they might be able to apply the new technology to different fields. It makes the world turn around that much more smoothly, and it’s even worth an article in the daily paper.

But how much more entertaining it is to create pictures in peoples’ heads of Robo-Chefs Taking Over Japanese Kitchens to flip okonomiyaki, presumably leaving the human Japanese to march around their rabbit hutches plotting new ways to conquer the Korean Peninsula! This time for sure! Taking an occasional break for sex with their inflatable dolls, of course.

If the media thinks they have to provide fictitious images to their consumers for the sake of entertainment, when the real information is much more entertaining, more enlightening—and much less dangerous—that’s the business model they have to live with.

But it’s too bad for them the soaring number of media bankruptcies and disappearing ad revenue isn’t just a picture inside their own heads.

Wasabi–the mouth-watering, nose-running condiment

ANYONE WHO’S EVER EATEN nigirizushi knows about wasabi—the green, horseradish-like paste spread between the fish on top and the rice on the bottom. Yet few who’ve eaten it realize all the trouble people went through to get that condiment on the sushi to begin with, and to keep it fresh once it got there.

For one thing, the wasabi is purposely placed between the fish and the rice to preserve its pungency. The paste quickly loses its distinctive flavor and aroma when exposed to the air. In fact, just about everything involved with the cultivation and preparation of wasabi takes time and trouble. Take a look at the accompanying photo, for example. It shows Murakami Takeo and his wife Torae, both in their 80s, harvesting their wasabi crop last week.

The Murakamis grow their wasabi in the shallows of the Tani River that flows behind their home in Tanabe, Wakayama. There are two types of wasabi, and the kind the Murakamis cultivate is called sawa wasabi. That variety must be grown in pure, constantly flowing water—the colder the better. The couple planted this crop two years ago in the sandy river soil, around which they’ve built a stone wall.

They have to harvest the plant by hand, pulling out the main root from the earth and removing the leaves and smaller hairy roots. They’ll put two kilograms of the roots in a specially built wooden box to ship to market, because the roots also go bad quickly. Some of their wasabi will be sold at shops in the city that purchase produce directly from the farmers.

Wasabi grows wild in Japanese stream beds and mountain river valleys. The Japanese themselves think they’ve been eating it since the Nara period, which occurred during the 8th century, but the plant is so difficult to cultivate they didn’t successfully farm it until 800 years later in what is now Shizuoka City. The story goes that some was given in feudal tribute to Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of Japan’s last shogunate in 1603, and the great man loved it so much he forbade its use outside his castle. It began to be used for soba and sushi during the Edo period, which ran from the early 17th century to 1868. Today, Nagano is the top wasabi producing prefecture when the crops of both the sawa variety and the soil-grown variety are combined.

The distinctive spiciness is due to allyl isothiocyanate, and inhaling the vapor from the plant has been shown to have an effect similar to smelling salts. In fact, some Japanese researchers are trying to use the wasabi odor to create a smoke alarm for the deaf, as you can see from this site, which includes a BBC report. Researchers conducted experiments by spraying canned wasabi extract into a room in which people with hearing impairments were sleeping. It woke 13 of the 14 test subjects up within two minutes—one of them in just 10 seconds.

Indeed, some think that wasabi has numerous health benefits as well. This website makes the case for its ingredients being effective in both preventing and treating cancer. They claim it is also an antioxidant, an antibiotic, an anticoagulant, and an anti-inflammatory agent. Even more, it is said to promote bone calcification.

There’s only one problem: They don’t tell us how much of it we have to eat to reap those benefits, and how much havoc it will wreak on our mucous membranes until that amount is consumed!

Fatsos = fast eaters?

AFTER MOVING TO JAPAN in 1984, my first trip back to the United States was a two-week stay three years later. I discovered that the only thing that had changed significantly during those three years was me. Very few observable changes had occurred in the U.S. in that three-year period, but I did have one recurring thought throughout those two weeks: Where did all those fat people come from?

They had been there all the time, of course, but I didn’t notice them until my perceptions had been recalibrated by living in Japan.

Those memories floated to the surface again after seeing this blog post by the New York Times Economics Editor, Catherine Rampell. She includes a graph in the post for this reason:

I’ve plotted out the relationship between time the average person in a given country spends eating and that country’s obesity rate (as measured by the percentage of the national population with a body mass index higher than 30).

It wasn’t surprising to see that Japan has one of the lowest obesity rates in the developed world (Korea’s is slightly lower) and one of the highest rates for minutes spent eating per day.

Guess which country is at the peak of the obesity axis and at the low extreme of the eating time axis.

Ms. Rampell is quick to point out that correlation does not equal correlation, and her graph bears this out. The French spend more time with their food, but their obesity rate is triple that of Japan’s; the New Zealanders also take more time for meals than the Japanese, but have an obesity rate roughly five times that of Japan.

Here’s a thought: It’s possible to obtain a different perspective for that same graph by substituting native language for time spent eating. Notice that the primary language is the same in those countries with the highest obesity rates. In contrast, the countries shown with the lowest obesity rates are Japan and Korea.

Yes, I know that linguists classify the Japanese and Korean languages into two different groups, but anyone familiar with those languages also knows just how closely related they are.

Here’s another thought: Despite the relatively low percentage of blubberbutts in Japan, obesity is much more common here than it was when I first arrived 25 years ago. If the statistics for a quarter of a century ago exist, would anyone be surprised if they showed that the Japanese spend less time per day eating now than they did in the past?

As is the case with most other broad surveys, I don’t fit into any of the categorizations here. I’m an American whose time spent on meals is much closer to other Americans than to Japanese, but I’m not even close to being obese. That’s probably due to dietary habits that closely resemble the Japanese of 40 years ago, as well as regular daily exercise. (In fact, the time I spend on eating and exercise combined is slightly more than the time the Japanese spend on eating alone.)

One final thought: I assume by Korea they mean South Korea. What would be the point of including North Korea with the other countries when comparing obesity statistics? Is there more than one fatso in that country to begin with?

Wetting your whistle the Okinawan way

FOLKS WITH A THIRST TO QUENCH in Okinawa can choose among many unique local products that produce a wide range of effects. Several new beverages recently released on the market have widened that range of choice even further.

Those who are parched and looking for something stiff could try the liqueurs created by local distillers using awamori, the Okinawan form of the alcoholic beverage shochu. Awamori actually has a separate legal classification in Japan because it is made with a different kind of yeast, and some varieties still use rice from Thailand, where shochu is said to have originated. Of the many shochu distillers in the Okinawan islands, only one produces what is legally called shochu. The rest make awamori.

The Okinawa Awamori Distillers’ Association is getting antsy about declining alcohol consumption among young people, so they came up with the idea of combining the awamori with locally grown fruit and brown sugar to create the liqueurs. That not only fills up their own coffers, it also provides a fillip to agriculture in the islands. They’ve also lowered the alcohol content to make it more drinkable and appeal to the health conscious. The drinks are a relatively low 10% alcohol by volume, which means they are 20 proof by American standards and 17.5 proof by British standards. The target demographic is younger women, and the distillers hope to get the girls started on the habit of downing a glass or two as if it were a cocktail. The new liqueurs cost about 1.5 to 3 times more than awamori itself, but many customers are happy to fork over the extra cash because they like the distinctive flavors.

One example is the awamori coffee liqueur launched by the Kumesen Distillery of Naha last October. They started selling the drink exclusively in gift shops, but when they saw that initial sales were double their projections, the distillers decided to offer it through mass merchandisers and make some real money.

Zuisen Distilleries, also of Naha, have produced an awamori ume liqueur with brown sugar, and more recently developed a liqueur made with local mangoes. They’re searching for sales outlets now. Meanwhile, the Seifuku Distillery in Ishigaki makes a tropical fruit-flavored variety.

The distilleries association recommends that the liqueurs be drunk before meals or, for those posing as worldly sophisticates, at a bar. But they also suggest that serious drinkers stick with the regular awamori. It’s their bread and butter, after all.

Those looking for something more healthful might prefer Ucchin Soda, which the originator Origami promotes as the King of Okinawa Soda. It’s a carbonated soft drink made with turmeric and the shiikwasa citrus fruit and sells for 500 yen a 330-milliliter can. The Soda King has been on the Ryukyu throne since March.

The king of Okinawan soda

Turmeric, called ukon in Japanese, has become increasingly popular in various forms in this country. One of its uses in Okinawa is as a tonic, and the commercial beverage Ukon no Chikara (The Strength of Turmeric) is sold in convenience stores and supermarkets nationwide as a hangover preventive/remedy. Turmeric thrives in areas with tropical temperatures and buckets of rainfall, and that description fits Okinawa to a T. It’s used for dozens of food applications, is said to be good for the liver, solves digestive problems, and is rubbed on the skin as an antiseptic. The critical ingredient is curcumin, which is also used in sealants to stop car radiator leaks. There’s got to be a common connection there somewhere.

The beverage is made with both spring and autumn ukon from Miyakojima and the main Okinawa island. The local shiikwasa citrus fruit was added for sweetness as a contrast with the bitterness of turmeric. It incorporates both the juice and the pulp from the squeezed rinds, which means it has plenty of vegetable fiber. Where else but Okinawa could you get roughage from soda pop?

Ucchin is sold mostly in a Naha market frequented by local shoppers and tourists, and Origami projects sales of 30,000 cans or bottles this year. The company plans to market the beverage as a product for those with discriminating palates who appreciate off-the-wall refreshments in the hope it creates passionate fans and long-term sales.

They also suggest it can be used at bars as a mixer for cocktails. After that, the next question comes naturally: How well would it blend with awamori?

There’s nothing quite like those Okinawan drinks—they build you up and tear you down all at the same time!

Seaweed for the emperor

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

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

And then Bill Clinton had Monica Lewinsky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You just know Mao and Kim would have!

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

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

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

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

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

The grapes of the sea

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world’s first whale soy sauce

THE JAPANESE TAKE PRIDE in using as much of a whale as possible to eliminate waste when converting it to food products. One example is their creation of a canned paste of sorts made with whale cartilage and placed as a topping on rice in the same way natto beans are eaten.

Now Yamaka Shoyu, a soy sauce brewer in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi (the home port of the whaling fleet), the National Fisheries University in the same city, and a local council for promoting the development of new food products announced they have developed the world’s first soy sauce made using whale meat. The whale varieties used are the minke, caught during the government whaling expeditions in the South Pacific, and the sei whale. They’re not putting prime cuts into the sauce—the company uses scraps that were previously discarded by a local food company when processing the meat for market.

The product contains only the soybean and wheat base used to make soy sauce, salt, and whale meat. Those who have tried it say it isn’t as fishy tasting as other fish-based soy sauces and has strong umami characteristics. The ingredients are mixed, stirred daily for a month at a constant temperature, and then allowed to ferment for a month.

Yamaka plans to launch sales of the product in June in Yamaguchi in department stores and at retail outlets at tourist sites (in other words, they want to turn it into a “special local product”). There are also plans to sell it in Tokyo. One bottle will set you back 600 to 700 yen (US$ 6.50 to 7.60).

Does the whale soy sauce have potential or is it being made and sold for its novelty value? Koizumi Takeo, a professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture noted for his adventuresome approach to food, has given it his imprimatur. “Not only is it delicious,” he said, “but it’s also good for you.”

Well, what more can you ask for? Just make sure to transfer it to a plain bottle or server when sensitive foreigners come to dinner!

Gone fishin’ for sweetfish

MANY FISH BITES, the old song goes, when you got good bait. That’s always been true, but sometimes the clever fisherman doesn’t need bait. The Japanese figured out a more relaxed way to catch sweetfish several centuries ago without worming any hooks at all. They just put something in their way!

Ayu a sweet fish?

The use of the name sweetfish is no hyperbole, incidentally. That’s what all the dictionaries say is the English term for the ayu. No, I’d never heard of sweetfish before I came to Japan either, but somebody somewhere must call them that. They’re certainly very tasty, but “sweet” is not the best way to describe their flavor.

The Japanese have always liked the ayu; in ancient times, they appeared as a good omen in stories. Maybe that’s why they sometimes name girls after them.

Has anyone ever used “my little sweetfish” as a term of endearment, I wonder?

Back to the story, the photo shows a traditional fish trap for catching the ayu that come barreling downriver every year to mate. It was placed on the Hidaka River in Ryujin-mura, Wakayama. (Ryujin means “dragon god”, by the way, but that’s a different kettle of fish.)

The trap is supposed to be quite simple. The fisherfolk stretch ropes across the river and tie straw to the ropes at regular intervals. This blocks the passage of the ayu, who dislike obstacles. Now that makes sense–if you were swimming downstream to mate with someone particularly sweet, you wouldn’t want anything to get in your way, either. It’s assembled in such a way as to guide the frustrated little guys into a sack-like area, where they’re scooped up. Some of the more energetic fishermen use nets instead.

A little research turned up still another way to catch ayu. The fish aggressively protect their turf—or should I say surf—and will pugnaciously try to drive out any other creatures foolish enough to fin their way into their territory. The fishermen take advantage of this trait in a technique called tomozuri, or decoy fishing. The ayu fall for the bait every time. Except there isn’t any bait to fall for.

These traps look effective, but alas, the Hidaka River Fishing Cooperative reports the ayu aren’t all that interested in coming downstream this year. Not enough rain.

Now who would have guessed that it took rain to get a sweetfish into the mood?