Japan’s back pages

THE Japan that emerges in stories printed below the fold and in the back pages of newspapers, or on less frequently accessed news websites, is a different place than that presented in the industrial mass media. Here are some stories that demonstrate why.

Water business

The phrase “water business” in Japan is usually a euphemism for the enterprises conducted in entertainment districts at night, particularly drinking establishments.

But most people outside the region are unaware that Japan is a global leader in another sort of water business — that for the technology used in water supply and sewage systems. In fact, a paperback was published a few months ago with the premise that Japan is the global leader in water technology systems. Whether that claim is true or not, several entities in the country have established a reputation for expertise in the sector, and they are working to expand their operations.

For example, the Fukuoka City government recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, for joint research in water supply and treatment.

The Kyushu city developed the technology for reusing waste water from the necessity to deal with its own chronic water shortages. They became so successful that they now want to make a paying business of it. Fukuoka City was also the first municipality in Japan to process waste water for use as water in the toilet, and they also are known for building a network of tunnels that carry off the water from the heavy summer rains to prevent flooding.

Meanwhile, the growth of the economy and the population in Vietnam strained that nation’s water systems infrastructure, and they chose to look to Japan for help. In fact, the city of Haiphong is already working with the city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka City’s neighbor, to prevent leakage from their water supply systems.

Kitakyushu has been active in this sector in Cambodia for some time. As of last December, they were serving as the technical consultants for water technology in nine Cambodian cities, and last month they began helping two other cities in that country to expand their water supply systems.

Fukuoka City is also involved in the water business in Burma. The Water Department dispatched a technician to Rangoon last month to conduct surveys and provide guidance, and they’ll send a full team later. The Burmese government also sent one of their technicians to Fukuoka City for training.

Apart from altruism, one objective is to increase the opportunities for local businesses to receive contracts from the Southeast Asian countries for infrastructure improvements. The Fukuoka City project in Burma is being conducted in tandem with the UN Habitat Fukuoka office. That organization is particularly interested in water purification and desalinization systems.

Rare Earth

The temporary Chinese suspension of rare earth metal exports during the standoff over the Senkakus in the fall of 2010 certainly got the attention of Japanese industry.  They wasted no time to start looking for new sources for the metals that couldn’t be used as a political weapon. For example, it was announced earlier this week that imports of rare earth metals would soon begin from India. Also, Mitsui Mining and Smelting Co. and Kurume-based Shibata Sangyo have teamed to launch the world’s first business for recovering and recycling the rare earth metal tantalum from discarded electronic products. Tantalum is used primarily as a material for condensers in PCs and Smartphones, but all of it is imported. The Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry estimates that recovering the tantalum from products discarded in Japan in a year would yield about 64 tons, accounting for 14% of the amount used here annually. Fukuoka Prefecture and Mitsui plan to commercialize the recycling technology and to create a structure that enables electronics parts manufacturers to procure the metal without concerns of interrupted supply.

More than a year ago, Japanese researchers announced they had produced the first artificial rare earth metal, an alloy similar to palladium. That metal is essential for making electronic parts, and is also used as a catalyzer to clean exhaust gas. While their method is not feasible for the commercial production of palladium, the researchers intend to apply it to create other alloys as rare earth substitutes. They say they’ve begun joint research projects with automobile manufacturers, but are keeping the details under the hood for now.

Power

A ryokan, or Japanese-style inn, in Yufuin, Oita, will generate electricity from the hot springs on the site using a 70 kW generator that Kobe Steel put on the market last fall. They plan to sell some of the power generated to Kyushu Electric Power through the system for the sale of renewable energy at a fixed cost that will begin in July. Kobe Steel says that if the power is sold at JPY 20 per kW, the spa could recover the costs by 2015.

Space

Japanese astronomers using a Hawaii-based telescope said last month they had discovered a “proto-cluster” of galaxies 12.72 billion light-years away from Earth. They claim that’s the most distant cluster ever discovered, which would also make it one of the first structures formed by the Big Bang.

“This shows a galaxy cluster already existed in the early stages of the universe when it was still less than one billion years into its history of 13.7 billion years,” the team of astronomers said in a press release.

But the discovery may already have been superseded.

Researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have previously announced the discovery of a possible cluster of galaxies around 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, but that has not yet been confirmed, the Japanese researchers said.

Vanity

What Japanese women call with a smirk the “bar code” — the hair style created by follically deficient men, otherwise known as a combover in the English-speaking world — may, along with toupees and implants, be obsolete a decade from now:

Japanese researchers have successfully grown hair on hairless mice by implanting follicles created from stem cells, they announced Wednesday, sparking new hopes of a cure for baldness.

Led by Professor Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science, the team bioengineered hair follicles and transplanted them into the skin of hairless mice.

The creatures eventually grew hair, which continued regenerating in normal growth cycles after old hairs fell out.

The process has the potential for applications greater than flattering oneself in the mirror, however:

Tsuji and his researchers found hair follicles can be grown with adult stem cells, the study said.

“Our current study thus demonstrates the potential for not only hair regeneration therapy but also the realisation of bioengineered organ replacement using adult somatic stem cells,” it said.

Stop the snickering, ladies — before long another recent discovery in Japan might produce more satisfying answers when you interrogate the mirror about the fairest of them all.

Two different teams of university researchers have found the gene that causes freckling and skin blotches after exposure to the sun. One team was from Osaka University (working with cosmetics manufacturer Kanebo), and the other team, using different methods, combined researchers from Nagasaki and Kumamoto universities.

Both groups focused on ultraviolet hypersensitivity, a rare condition of which only five cases are known in the world. The condition was first identified in 1981 in Japan, but little effort was put into treatment because the only problem it causes is sunburn. The Osaka-Kanebo group inserted mouse chromosomes in the nuclei of cells from two patients with the condition to determine which would provide better protection to ultraviolet rays. Exposure to the rays would prevent multiplication of the cells, which would die after six weeks, but cells with the new chromosome were resistant to ultraviolet rays.

Crab computing

Here’s a story that made a lot more sense after spending the past week trying to make sense of the functions on my new PC:

A team of scientists from Japan and England have built a computer that uses crabs as information carriers, to implement basic circuits of collision-based computing.

The explanation:

Researchers at Japan’s Kobe University and the UK’s University of the West of England, Bristol, found that when two swarms of soldier crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities. This behaviour means that swarms of crabs can implement logical gates when placed in a geometrically constrained environment.

And:

The swarms were placed at the entrances of the logic gates and persuaded to move by a shadow that fooled them into thinking a predatory bird was overhead. Results closely matched those of the simulation, suggesting that crab-powered computers are possible.

The experiment builds on a previous model of unconventional computing, based on colliding billiard balls.

That set the author of the article to wondering:

The paper’s authors did not say whether public money was used to fund their experiments.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem as if the experiment would be so expensive that a university couldn’t fund it on its own. The author might be suggesting that futzing around with crab-powered computers is a frivolous enterprise with no apparent application, but there might be some there there.  Explains Josh Rothman:

What’s the point? Increasingly, computer scientists are interested in the ways that natural systems solve computing problems. Often, they do so in surprising (and surprisingly effective) ways. Other researchers have investigated the ways in which honeybees compute the most efficient route through a field of flowers (see a well-reasoned take on that research here); one of the crab-computer researchers, Andrew Adamatzky, has been exploring the possibility of slime-mold computing. Future generations of computers, they argue, may well be inspired by nature.

Kampai!

The Moji Customs Office in Kyushu reports that the value of beer exported through the Port of Hakata in 2011 totaled JPY 1.225 billion, an increase of 6.3 times from the previous year. The volume of exports totaled 10,960 kiloliters, a year-on-year increase of 9.2 times. That set a record, and it was the first new record in 10 years. South Korea accounted for 57% of the exports, and there’s a story behind that. Premium Japanese beer has become popular in that country, which is closer to the Port of Hakata (also in Kyushu) than to Tokyo. Sapporo also established a sales company in South Korea last June. And don’t forget that the Japanese built the first breweries on the Korean Peninsula to begin with when the two countries were merged a century ago.

Does this mean tastes are changing in South Korea? The mass market beer in that country may be even weaker and thinner than the adult soft drink that pretends to be beer in the United States. That’s perhaps due to the robust and hearty nature of Korean food, with its industrial grade spices. It would make sense that people preferred something less intense to wash it all down with.

Hand grenade hotline

To conclude, here’s something I’ll bet nobody expected. The Fukuoka police became the first police department in the country to institute a hot line for tips on hand grenades. They’ll pay JPY 100,000 for each hand grenade found or confiscated as a result of a tip.

Concerns have been growing lately over the use of hand grenades to attack companies or in gang fights. Hand grenades were used in six incidents in the prefecture last year, the most in the country. Rewards will also be given for the discovery of homemade bombs. They’re serious — the police have printed 2,000 posters and 5,000 flyers.

They’d better be serious if gangs are bringing grenades to a gunfight.

Afterwords:

This clip of an English-language news report provides further info on the changing Joseon tastes for beer. They mention that 60 brewpubs have been established (by then) in South Korea since laws were relaxed in 2002. Pardon the goofiness with the Youtube link.

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Considering (a) that microbrewing had already taken off in Japan at that time, and (b) the substantial but largely unacknowledged influence that Japan still has on Korean culture, it is quite possible that the Korean laws were changed after the Koreans sampled some of the Japanese beverages.

Not that they’d ever admit it.

*****

Here’s another change: When I arrived in Japan in 1984, most funerals were still conducted in the home of the deceased. Now, however, they’re usually held in funeral parlors.

I attended a funeral in one of those establishments a week ago today for a pleasant man who passed away at the age of 86. I’ve been to enough of them by now to be familiar with the customs, but I was intrigued when I recognized the song the pianist was playing just before the service started: Hana (Flower), by Okinawan roots rocker Kina Shokichi. It is interesting to reflect on which things eventually become accepted as part of the common culture. No English translation can do the lyrics justice, so I won’t even try, but the song works in that context.

Here are three different versions spliced into one video.

 

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.”

—————–
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.”

*****
And don’t forget Okinawa!

Matsuri da! (121): Hanging the sake balls

EVERYONE who’s seen a movie whose action takes place aboard a naval vessel knows the phrase, “The smoking lamp is lit”. It originated in the era of wooden sailing ships, when preventing fires was the first order of business and permission to smoke was signaled by lighting a lamp hanging at the forecastle.

Years ago, the sake establishments in Kyoto had a similar signal that must have been more eagerly awaited by landlubbers and swabbies alike. The proprietors of those establishments hung a ball made of leaves from the Japanese cedar to announce that a new batch of sake was finished and ready to be poured down the hatch.

Nowadays all that’s required is to look for a tavern where the exterior lights are still on and the noren (shop curtain) is suspended over the door, but the custom of leaf ball hanging still lives at the Matsuo Taisha, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto. In fact, a male parishioner put up three last week — one at the main building, one at the administrative office, and one at the storehouse where the mikoshi, or portable shrine for the deity, is kept.

This is a Shinto event, after all, so of course they’ve maintained the liquor connection. The balls are hung from the eaves with care as part of the Jo’u Festival held at the shrine every autumn in supplication for the safety of the sake brewers. As every devout worshipper knows, the first commandment for getting righteously ripped is divine protection for the brewers.

The sake/Matsuo Taisha link is a very long one. A shrine was first established on the current site in 701 — note the triple digits — though they didn’t settle on the Matsuo name until 1950. It’s associated with the Hata clan, a prominent immigrant clan whose origins are in China and who are thought to have come to Japan from Korea in the 3rd Century. According to the barroom scuttlebutt, one of the jewels of continental culture the Hatas brought with them was sake brewing techniques. The shrine’s association with grog in the popular imagination is at least several centuries old: It’s mentioned in that connection in a kyogen comedy from the 16th century.

In an interesting turnabout, the ball of leaves was originally hung as part of the festival to denote the start of a new sake batch, rather than its completion. The heavenly spheres are about 60-70 centimeters in diameter, and they’re made from the trees in a grove at nearby Nantan. The festival itself has been expanded to include the manufacturers and wholesalers of other fermented food items, such as soy sauce and miso paste. This year, representatives of about 50 companies showed up to receive their blessings.

What do they give in return? Take a look at that wall of sake barrels in this brief video to see.

Hashigo in Hakodate

BAR-HOPPING is a casual affair for most people — they meet at one joint and when the spirits move them, they decide where they’ll hop next. Most Japanese boozers make their choices the same way, but here they don’t hop from one place to another. They climb the ladder — the expression used is hashigo-zake, hashigo being a ladder.

Up north in Hakodate, however, they’ve turned liquor ladder climbing into an official event, with a schedule and a pre-determined itinerary. The logistics are made easier because there’s a district in town called Bar-gai, where many eating and drinking establishments are concentrated. Groups throughout the country thought that was a splendid idea, so the Hakodate Bar-gai Executive Committee decided to hold the first national Bar District Conference on Saturday for everyone to share their experiences. Roughly 100 people from 18 different regions showed up, including Fukuoka City and Itami, Hyogo.

The meeting included a panel discussion, during which the representative from Itami reported that their 2009 event, Itami Machi Naka Bar, sparked similar expeditions in 23 other locations in the Kinki region. Another participant was Ide Osamu, the director of Idea Kyushu-Asia, a non-profit involved in activities to promote tourism. One of those activities is Barwalk Fukuoka. Said Mr. Ide: “It’s important to maintain the quality and community spirit of bar districts.”

I’ll say! It’s also important to maintain your balance so you don’t fall off the ladder during a Saturday night of bar-hopping! The participants at this conference had a more sober outlook, however. After the morning meeting, everyone went out for lunch instead of out ladder climbing.

The idea of an organized bar-hop in general, and a non-profit sponsoring an evening of bacchanalia in particular, will make a lot more sense once you’ve seen a video of the 2008 Hakodate barwalk. No sawdust, peanut shells, or air hockey tables here. They even chose a nice place for the customary ramen shop stop on the way home.

And of course Idea Kyushu-Asia has a Japanese-language website.

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?

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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.

The barstool philosopher

READER Camphortree wrote in this week to suggest that incipient Alzheimer’s was one possible explanation for Prime Minister Kan Naoto’s behavior. While that’s possible — nothing can be ruled out with Mr. Kan, after all — my suspicions lie in the direction of a long, lush life of alcohol consumption.

Consider, for example, what a columnist in the Nikkei Shimbun reported him as saying in the Diet on 20 July:

The earth has passed through 4.6 billion years of history, but we have relied on nuclear power for only a few dozen of those years. Therefore, I do not think it holds that we must rely on it for eternity.

Doesn’t that sound like the sort of wisdom you might hear dispensed with a solemn, authoritative air by a slightly gasping and swaying geezer with purple veins in his nose and gravy stains on his lapel, sliding over a few bar stools to strike up a conversation?

The sort of fellow who would seize on any comment you made, no matter how brief or noncommittal, to expound on his liquid insights in a different direction altogether? Such as this one the prime minister belched forth at a public meeting in Nagano, which was reported in the press on 1 August.

The old men (おじいさん) who went to the mountains 200 or 300 years ago to gather wood were able to manage everything with that firewood or whatever. All we have to do is to convert that into a new technology, and that is completely possible.

Don’t forget, he was awarded an engineering degree from a reputable university. It brings new meaning to the word “technocrat”.

It’s a mystery why guys like this never seem to have to go to the bathroom so you can move to another part of the bar (or another bar altogether) before they get back. The amount of fluids they consume combined with the size of their prostates should mean their frequency of head calls would be higher instead of lower.

My favorite is this one from the same speech:

We can’t take a risk even once that would destroy the planet, even if there’s just a one-in-one hundred million chance.

It has to be the liquid courage that gets him out of bed and out of the house every day to defy the odds that the earth could split open at any moment and swallow him up right there on the sidewalk!

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Here’s another speaker three sheets to the wind who leaves his audience in tears.

Extraordinary

THE CURRENT political situation in Japan can only be described as extraordinary. Prime Minister Kan Naoto, a man whose distinguishing traits are amorality, powerlust, and a conviction in his vindication by history, long ago lost what little claim to a mandate he ever had. Nevertheless, he has leveraged the structural flaws of the Westminster system and the endemic character flaws of politicos everywhere (a desire to retain their plush make-work positions and a fear of the electorate) to operate a de facto dictatorship within a democracy. While not an anticipated result of a Kan premiership, neither is it surprising. In his book on politics, Mr. Kan offered the novel thesis that democracies were just time-limited dictatorships.

Kan and wife: Kissin' cousins and drinkin' buddies

When stuck in a not dissimilar mess, the Romanians had a simple solution: They stood Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife next to a wall and shot them. That is not an option the Japanese would or should entertain, however, and so they are stumped.

While I continue to work on a post about last week’s events in Nagata-cho, this excerpt from the current issue of the weekly Shukan Post should give you an idea of the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing Mr. Kan inspires in his countrymen.

To set the stage: He attended a meeting of all the Democratic Party MPs on the 28th. The gathering was not going well for him; indeed, the Asahi Shimbun reported that he was jeered by some in attendance. In response, he flashed a threat to dissolve the Diet and call an election that none of them want to contest — this is his own party, remember — and then left early, pleading the demands of public affairs. (He did have a meeting with South Korean legislators, but it was not scheduled to begin for a while yet.)

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“If you think you can do it (call an election), why don’t you try? The Democratic Party will of course be slaughtered, and Mr. Kan and his associates will be the first to go down. They will probably never appear on the political stage again. But a man whose thirst for power is so strong is unlikely to have the guts to take that gamble.

“Former DPJ President Ozawa Ichiro dismissed the bluff with a curt comment, ‘There’s no way he’s capable of it.’ But many DPJ Diet members think he is all too capable of it. They’ve taken his threat so seriously that they’ve backed down. As a result, this crowd, which has no confidence of receiving any support from the people, is permitting Kan to stay in office.

“It is absolutely the same for the opposition parties, including the LDP. Party head Tanigaki Sadakazu has cold feet: “It wouldn’t make any sense to dissolve the Diet right away.” Considering the circumstances of the people in the areas affected by the earthquake/tsunami, of course it would be best not to create a political vacuum, but we’ve already got a political vacuum now, haven’t we? For the people as well, starting over with a general election is by no means a bad idea. In short, the LDP has no self-confidence either.

“The prime minister who has been abandoned by the people is now out of control. The responsibility for the inability to stop him lies with the other 719 members of the Diet. There is a well-known Confucian expression that people who fail to act despite knowing what they should do have no courage. The first thing both the ruling and the opposition parties should do is stop mouthing such trivialities and simply make Kan quit. They should try to do the job the people unquestionably want them to do.

“Some Diet members justify the failure to perform their duties with the excuse of ‘(the people in) the distressed areas…’, but we wonder if any of them have ever been there. Most of the people there who have talked to reporters from this publication told them they want Prime Minister Kan to quit as soon as possible.

“If it is the case that we have a collection of 720 fatheads on our hands, we voters must also reflect on our own errors. In the coming election, talk of past accomplishments or connections will be irrelevant. Our only choice is to select politicians capable of acting in accordance with the will of the people. The current Diet members are running away from an election because they find it frightening, and all of them are worthless.

“’How about that’, laughs the Empty Kan Prime Minister as he empties one can of beer after another, ‘the people hate me, but you’re all afraid of the voters too!’.

Just who is responsible for this period of a do-nothing government?

(end excerpt)

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The publication gets one thing wrong in the above excerpt, unfortunately. Japan’s Diet has a proportional representation system, which is a form of legal vote-rigging, so current Diet members could lose their seats by the most lopsided of margins and still keep their jobs if the party puts them at the top of the PR slate. Those seats are decided separately by percentage of party vote.

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Some American readers might have done a double-take at the line about the prime minister and his beer, but few in Japan will. They already know he’s got a head start on the embalming process — compare his recent photographs with those of the latter-stage Boris Yeltsin, for example — and in these matters the Japanese eschew the puritanical hypocrisy of the Yanks.

The same article in the Shukan Post describes a guided tour of the prime minister’s residence that Mr. Kan’s wife Nobuko recently gave to a group of friends and associates. Here’s another excerpt:

“What caused the eyes of the invited guests to bug out during the tour was the stack of empty beer cases in the kitchen.

“When she was asked who drank that much, Mrs. Kan raised her voice and laughed.

“’It’s not easy for us to go out for a drink, you know? So we buy it in bulk from a nearby liquor store. Kan and I drink it ourselves.’

“Beer, shochu, or wine, anything is fine with Kan Nobuko. Even if her husband is passed out drunk in a corner, she’s been known to ignore him and keep drinking and chatting away. There are well-known stories that when their sons were still children, Mr. and Mrs. Kan would take them along to a small counter bar in the Golden-gai district of Shinjuku. They occupied a corner and knocked back drinks one after another.

“Having a taste for liquor is one thing, but the person who related the story of the beer cases added, ‘It wasn’t an amount that they could have drunk in a month or two.’”

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One of the essential chapters to Friedrich Hayek’s essential work, The Road to Serfdom, is titled, Why the Worst Get on Top. Hayek’s focus was on the totalitarian societies of the left in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, but some of his argument is applicable to other contexts as well.

More to come.
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Set ‘em up, John Lee.

White lightning in Northeast Asia

IN THE WEST, the primary consumers of sweet alcoholic beverages are usually either young people slightly above or below the legal drinking age, unaccustomed and ill-disposed to the taste of the real thing, or women a few years older. (Southern Comfort was the liquor of choice for the well-known juicehead Janis Joplin.) I’ve never seen an adult male drink a rum and coke. Daiquiris might be an exception, but they’re more tart than sweet. And I’ve never seen anyone drink a mint julep at any time other than the first Saturday of May — Kentucky Derby day.

Sweetness seems to be more to the taste of northeast Asians in their tippling traditions, however. While there are both sweet and dry varieties of Japanese sake, the original beverage was probably sweet. The Japanese version of white lightning, doburoku, is sweeter still. That’s a milky white form of sake that isn’t fully pressed from the fermenting rice solids, which are left floating inside.

Nongju

Sweet white lightning made from rice is another of the many elements Japanese and Korean culture have in common. The Korean analog is called makgeolli, and it shares several attributes with doburoku: It’s just as white, just as sweet, and just as likely to cause those who consume it to wake up the next morning convinced there’s an axe embedded in their forehead. The background story says it was originally brewed for farm workers to drink instead of water while in the fields, which might be the reason Korea has never been an agricultural superpower. It was originally called nongju, a name that translates as farm liquor. Japanese will recognize it from the kanji: 農酒. Both doburoku and makgeolli are 6-8% alcohol by volume, slightly more than local beers, but less than sake.

There are an estimated 40 different kinds of makgeolli, and rice is not the only farm product used to brew it. When then-Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio visited South Korea in October 2009, President Lee Myong-bak used makgeolli for the toast at the state dinner. That variety, however, was made from a purple variety of sweet potato known in Japan as satsumaimo. The Kagoshimanians of Kyushu use it to make their own hairy-chested version of shochu, which isn’t sweet in the slightest. This particular satsumaimo was created by cross-breeding the Japanese and Korean types. Using that beverage on that occasion was a brilliant idea, and whoever in the Blue House came up with it deserves a toast in their honor.

Most of the doburoku in Japan sits in a corner of the liquor store shelf gathering dust, while the South Koreans have succeeded in turning makgeolli into a popular commercial beverage, as we’ve seen before. Sales have gotten high rather quickly. A year or so ago (there was no date on the article), a Korean outfit called GS25 analyzed liquor sales at 3,700 convenience stores nationwide as of August and found that makgeolli ranked fourth, behind beer, shochu/soju, and whiskey, and one slot ahead of wine.

Those rankings might be a reflection of the type of customer likely to shop for grog at convenience stores. A survey conducted by the Lotte department stores in South Korea of liquor sales at their own outlets for a recent July-September period revealed that makgeolli was in third place behind wine and whiskey, and ahead of beer and Japanese sake. The ranking the year before was whiskey, wine, beer, sake, and makgeolli. Of course, you don’t need to see the stats from the marketing survey division to know that women do most of the buying at department stores. Another factor is seasonal and cultural—chusok, the Korean version of o-bon, falls in September, and makgeolli has become a popular choice for gifts.

Soju distiller Jinro ignited the boom by producing more marketable versions of the beverage. (There’s a good video with details at the link above.) Suntory is trying to do something similar in Japan, as they’ve brought out a slightly carbonated version in a can they call Seoul Makgeolli. It’s safe to assume Suntory thinks the foreignness of makgeolli will hold more cachet for young women than the familiarity of doburoku, the choice of hayseeds.

But before you hard guys snort with derision and reach for something more manly, get a load of this: A team at the Korean Food Research Institute announced last month their discovery that makgeolli has anti-carcinogenic ingredients in quantities up to 25 times greater than beer or wine. Specifically, they mean farnesol, which is also one of the critical elements that add aroma to wine.

The team made a point of examining liquors commonly sold on the market. The amount of farnesol in makgeolli tested out at 150-500 parts per billion, 10-25 times the 15-20 ppb of beer and wine. Their research showed the cloudiest parts of the beverage had the greatest amount of farnesol, so it was best to shake up the sediment before drinking it.

These tidings of good cheer come with the chaser of some bad news, alas. The head of the team said that a real effect would be achieved by drinking three or four cups about twice a week. I had that much one evening in Busan (and a similar amount of doburoku that I bought in Nagasaki and broke out at a party), and I’ll stick to other health maintenance methods. As Voltaire is said to have replied when declining a second invitation by the Marquis de Sade to another orgy after he’d enjoyed the first one: “No thanks. Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.”

That research team seems to have performed their task with single-minded devotion. There’s only a small amount of farnesol in makgeolli, which is 90% water, so it was difficult to extract and analyze. They had to develop new technology just to perform the analysis. Now for the unfortunate news: They used the announcement of their discovery as an opportunity to let their Korean little man complex out of the closet for some fresh air:

“Through this research, we developed for the first time the technology to analyze the farnesol from the traditional alcoholic beverage makgeolli. We thus obtained the basic technology enabling the scientific verification of the superiority of South Korean makgeolli.”

Use your new technology and run the tests on doburoku before you say that, guys. It’s the same stuff, after all.

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The Japanese and South Koreans also share a cultural taste for a more sedate beverage — tea, which some of them are using to further cross-strait ties. Chomu-kai (朝霧会), a tea ceremony group in Yame, Fukuoka, (a noted tea production area) last week welcomed the “tea culture research group” Unnim Chahue (雲林茶会) from Gwangju, South Korea, to celebrate 10 years of friendship. The chairman and six members of the Korean group hopped over to Yame for two days of tea parties and planting.

The Yame group was formed to promote interest in local tea using the tea ceremonies of the five major Japanese schools. Bak Guang-sun, the husband of the Unnim Chahue chairman, found out about the group when he taught at nearby Kurume University. He thought hanging out with them would be an excellent way to pursue his study of the tea culture in Japan.

The tea bushes they planted together will take four or five years to sprout drinkable leaves, and when they do they’ll have a friendship party and savor it together. Maybe as the night wears on they’ll switch to makgeolli/doburoku and conduct some research into rice culture while they’re at it!

Those who don’t want to wait that long to conduct their own research can analyze this previous post about a Shinto festival with doburoku, or this one about doburoku ice cream.

Here’s how Jinro is plugging makgeolli on Japanese TV. I’m tempted to buy some and invite the ladies over for a pajama party. That game looks like fun.

Meanwhile, Suntory imported Jang Geun-seok from South Korea to pitch Seoul Makgeolli, as you can see in this ad. The company’s choice in models shows they know exactly which market segment they’re trying to capture. Isn’t he precious? Isn’t that earring just darling? And what an adorable hairstyle!

If you’ve worked up a thirst after all this talk about booze, maybe it’s time to get on the ladder—i.e., go bar-hopping in Japanese—with Sabor de Gracia from Spain as they set fire to a few themselves.

Bar-hop far enough, and you might walk into this joint in England. (That’s a flash file.) Whether you walk out again in one piece is a different matter.

Good for what ales you?

Píme pivo s bobkem, jezme bedrník! Nebudeme stonat, nebudeme mřít!
Let’s drink beer with bay laurel, let’s eat pimpernel! We won’t get ill, nor will we die!
- A Czech expression about beer

THE EVENTS in Japan over the past month have been enough to drive a man, or a woman, to drink. The findings of a scientific paper published in August 2005, however, suggest that might not be such a bad idea in the circumstances.

One of the authors of the report, Monobe Manami, was a graduate student at the time at Chiba University. She was participating in the research conducted jointly by the National Institute of Radiological Sciences and the Tokyo University of Science. Now affiliated with the National Institute of Vegetable and Tea Science, Ms. Monobe explains what happened:

“I drank some beer one night at a gathering, and the following day, after they took some blood for the experiment, the results made us sit up and take notice. That’s how it started.”

The experiment involved exposing blood samples to radiation and studying the reaction. Usually, Ms. Monobe didn’t drink on the day before her blood was taken, but this time she had a glass or two just to be sociable. “It wasn’t a lot, and six or seven hours passed before they took the sample, so I thought it wouldn’t be a problem. What happened was that there were fewer abnormalities in the blood chromosomes than normal.”

Surprised at the results, they repeated the experiment—as if they needed more incentive—and the results were the same. The abnormalities had been reduced by as much as two thirds. The group began to think they were on to something.

They set up another experiment with lab mice, and divided them into four groups. Each group was given a different liquid refreshment: beer, a saline solution, ethanol (alcohol), and non-alcohol beer. (They finally found a use for that last one.) The mice on the real beer diet lived the longest.

Ms. Monobe cautions that the noble brew will not prevent radiation poisoning. “The effect differs depending on the type and the dose of radiation. Randomly drinking beer in these circumstances isn’t going to protect anyone.”

Their curiosity piqued, Japanese journalists began to conduct their own research—in libraries, of course—and discovered corroborating evidence. Akizuki Tatsuichiro, a doctor who treated hibakusha after the Nagasaki atomic bombings, found that alcohol limited the harmful effects. The same phenomenon was observed among those exposed to the radiation of Chernobyl.

A poll conducted last week found that roughly 80% of the respondents thought people shouldn’t get carried away with the traditional Japanese practice of self-restraint; i.e., refraining from holding or participating in celebratory activities after unpleasant events.

Maybe all the business and finance mavens urging people to go about their lives normally should use this paper to buttress their argument!

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Here’s a previous post about Japanese scientists using all sorts of hooch for research purposes. Thanks to 2CSM for the link to this Japanese story.

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This song, written for an Orion beer commercial in Okinawa, was the Rinken Band’s first big hit. The tune’s a lot better than the beer. (Sorry, Okinawans…)

A scientific application for C2H5OH

MUSICIANS AND ARTISTS have long looked to the grape to inspire their muse, and esoteric religious philosopher/entertainer Alan Watts maintained that having a few belts before meditation could advance one’s spiritual progress by six months. In fact, Watts would drink so much before his lectures that he sometimes zoned out at the podium. His adoring but unsuspecting listeners patiently waited for him to return to Earth because they thought the Zen cosmonaut was exploring the farthest reaches of inner space.

Liquor, however, has not been thought to be conducive to the rigorous exactitude demanded of scientific experiments–until now:

Yoshihiko Takano and other researchers at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan were in the process of creating a certain kind of superconductor by putting a compound in hot water and soaking it for hours. They also soaked the compound in a mixture of water and ethanol. It appears the process was going well, because the scientists decided to have a little party. The party included sake, whisky, various wines, shochu, and beer. At a certain point, the researchers decided to try soaking the compound in the many, many liquors they had on hand and seeing how they compared to the more conventional soaking liquids.

Sounds as if they would have been right at home at my college fraternity. After some of our parties, I was convinced that I too had become a certain kind of superconductor. (Ethanol, by the way, is the name of the type of alcohol used as a recreational drug.)

No, I am not making this up. In fact, here’s the summary of their paper:

We found that hot commercial alcohol drinks are much effective to induce superconductivity in FeTe0.8S0.2 compared to water, ethanol and water-ethanol mixture. Both the highest zero resistivity temperature of 7.8 K and superconducting volume fraction of 62.4% are observed for the FeTe0.8S0.2 sample heated in red wine. Any elements in alcohol drinks, other than water and pure alcohol, would play an important role to induce superconductivity.

Red wine far outperformed ethanol and water, which could achieve a superconducting volume fraction of just 15%. Even shochu kicked the numbers up to 23%.

The more one thinks about it, the more potential applications of this variant of the scientific method arise. Wouldn’t a great place to start be the Chicken Littles of the anthropogenic global warming movement? After all, they were converted into an esoteric religious cult long ago!

Pass that bottle to me

IT’S ONLY the first bottle that’s expensive, goes a French aphorism about wine, and that’s one universal insight we can all drink to. The Japanese have a saying of their own: Sake ga sake o nomu, or the liquor drinks the liquor. In other words, once you work up a head of steam, it’s time to clear the tracks.

Bacchanalians in both American and Europe have taken a shine to the traditional Japanese beverages of sake and shochu in recent years, as these statistics show. Now they’re also beginning to get hip to the fact that the Japanese can mash it up with Western grog as well.

For proof, Minoh Beer Imperial Stout, made by the A.J.I. Beer microbrewery of Minoh, Osaka, was named the World’s Best Stout earlier this month. In a British beer contest. For the second straight year.

The organizers of the World Beer Awards said the stout is “silky textured with a sweet rounded malt opening”, and perhaps that’s better understood after you’ve got one or two Minohs under your belt. Here’s a quick look at Minoh and some other winners at the World Beer Award 2010 website. The page also features the best brews by region, and Japan is well represented here too, with awards for different beer varieties in the Asia division.

That’s not even the best part of the story. The World’s Best Stout is brewed by the Oshima sisters—Mayuko and Kaori—whose father was a liquor store owner and got them started in the business. Who could ask for better in-laws than that? Here’s a detailed report in English by a beer-loving gent who visited the brewery in person and took plenty of photos. (The dude really likes production equipment.) There’s also a cutout of a newspaper photo that shows a third sister, Nozomi.

This site has a nice English-language interview with Kaori, who is identified as the brewmistress. It also has a photo of the world’s best stout poured out in a glass, and yes, it does look tasty, doesn’t it? Finally, the Minoh beer website has plenty of information about all the beer they make and where to buy it, but only in Japanese.

If there’s anything better than a pleasant surprise, it’s two pleasant surprises, and here’s the second. Japanese vintners, aided by Ernest Singer, have begun attracting attention among overseas oenophiles by turning koshu—the local version of Sneakin’ Pete—into an upmarket white wine that the New York Times says “could become the first Asian wine to draw international recognition”.

In yet a third surprise, it turns out that the New York Times is also capable of excellent journalism, albeit in the Dining and Wine section. Their article on the development of koshu wine is very readable; it’s rich, full-bodied, and smooth on the palate, with only subtle hints of snoot and condescension.

Mr. Singer was a Tokyo-based wine importer who became intrigued with the potential of koshu when he drank an experimental batch of dry white wine made using koshu grapes, which are grown mostly in Yamanashi. The article describes how he leased some land and came up with the concepts for using the grape to make some top drawer tipple. (The heavy rains of summer and fall mean that Japan is not the ideal place to grow grapes for wine, though the grapes grown for eating are quite good.)

A group of Japanese koshu producers and Mr. Singer have formed Koshu of Japan to promote the beverage overseas. Here’s their English-language website, and here’s a page that provides some information on the history of the koshu grape in Japan. (It’s been around since the 8th century.) Finally, here’s the Japanese-language website of one of the leading Japanese producers. They go by the name of Grace Wine in English, but Chuo Budoshu (Central Wine) in Japanese.

They make more than koshu in Yamanashi, by the way. The Sadoya Winery in Kofu is holding a special sale of 100 bottles of 50-year-old wine, one red, one white, made with European grapes from their own vineyard. The crop was particularly good that year, as the vines were recovering from a typhoon the year before and rainfall was light. If you’re in Japan you can stock your wine cellar by calling the winery direct at (055) 251-3671, but be prepared to pay JPY 15,000 a bottle.

Grape stompin' in Hiroshima

Nothing goes better with wine than women and song, so it’s about high time we got to that part. Not long ago the Miyoshi Winery of Miyoshi, Hiroshima, held their annual fall wine festival. One of the attractions was a wine-pressing dance performed by 10 ladies from a local ballet class stomping on 200 kilograms of merlot grapes in a four-meter-diamter tub, though in the photo it looks more like a plastic wading pool for adults. They created the dance themselves based on their observation of traditional European wine-stomping methods.

Of course they’re barefoot! (And keep your foot fetish fantasies to yourself.)

It was so much fun, the reports say, that some kids jumped in spontaneously and began dancing on their own. One second-grade girl interviewed admitted it was a little painful at first, but after a while she started to enjoy the lumpy feeling on her feet.

What the heck—a little toe jam probably enhances the bouquet.

UPDATE:
Now Japan has the world’s top whiskey as well:

Suntory Liquors Ltd.’s Suntory Single Malt Whiskey Yamazaki 1984 has been awarded the top prize among some 1,000 entries in an international liquor competition held in London…

Not only was it the best among 300 whiskies, it was also named the Supreme Champion Spirit among all the prize winners in every category.

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And now for the song! If you’re a beer hound, you’d better drink it while you can, because there isn’t any in heaven, assuming you’re sober enough to head in that direction. In Heaven There Is No Beer is originally a German tune that’s often performed as a polka, but if the three Oshita sisters of Osaka can make the world’s best stout, then surely Flaco Jimenez can perform the song Norteño style, singing both in English and Spanish. The embed code isn’t coming up for some reason, so here’s the straight YouTube link. Don’t let that stop you from clicking.

For those who prefer the grape to the hops, Sticks McGhee proves that no one outfunks wine drinkers by performing Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee. It isn’t the most exciting video around, but that’s by far the best version of one hot song that put Atlantic Records on the map. Hoy hoy!

And what better sums up the spirit of today’s post than this traditional Chinese song whose title translates to Liquor Crazy. Despite the name, it’s rather elegantly performed on the ruan, or four-stringed moon lute. It sounds like the sort of tune the late John Fahey would have liked, but then he was liquor crazy too—particularly about bourbon.

Kampai!

Matsuri da! (112): Festival of the phantom publicans

IN ONE SCENE of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Jack Nicholson walks into the bar of the hotel where he’s working as the winter caretaker and is served a drink by an apparition.

Meanwhile, at the end of May every year in Tsuruoka, Yamagata, apparitions or phantoms (bakemono in Japanese) serve drinks to people lining the street to watch the Tenjin Matsuri (Festival). The festival is also known locally as the Bakemono Matsuri. Give them credit for a good idea: Isn’t blaming a ghost as good an excuse as any for coming home with liquor on the breath?

Most Japanese festivals are as old as the hills, and that would likely prove true for this one, too, if it were possible to use carbon dating for events. It’s sponsored by the Tsuruoka Tenman-gu, a Shinto shrine that moved to its current site in 1674. The enshrined deity is Sugawara no Michizane, a leading scholar, poet, and political figure who lived from 845-903. He was falsely accused of plotting against the throne and banished to Kyushu. According to legend, his followers wanted to offer each other a bit of the rice wine to drown the sorrows of parting, but felt compelled to disguise themselves to prevent their discovery by the authorities.

One of the festival highlights is a parade that includes a recreation of the Michizane procession to Kyushu. During the parade, the local phantoms, wearing the amigasa headgear knit from reeds and with tenugui, or hand towels, covering their faces, pour free sake, soft drinks, or tea for thirsty people along the parade route. In addition to the procession, there are dancers performing in traditional and contemporary styles, and children carrying mikoshi, or portable shrines.

Legend has it that a person’s wishes will be granted if they can disguise themselves as a phantom for three consecutive festivals without being recognized. Anyone would be ready to accept a challenge with that payoff, but I’m 198 centimeters tall, so the chances of being rewarded with a harem of my own would be mighty slim. The city’s Department of Tourism helps make the dreams of standard-sized people come true by lending costumes to the streetside publicans—some of whom won’t be recognized at all, because they come from out of town just for the fun. The city does make allowances for modernity in the bakemono apparel, however. People were unlikely to have disguised themselves by wearing sports shoes in Michizane’s day.

Here’s a YouTube video with plenty of scenes from the different events. There aren’t any French maid costumes, robot weddings, rent-a-friends, or geeky otaku wearing doofus shirts. All they could manage to fit in the video instead were normal Japanese people enjoying themselves on a weekend afternoon in the spring doing what they’ve been doing in Tsuruoka for several hundred years now.

What a radical idea!

Mango makgeolli: Another Japan-Korea love match

Makgeolli is a very healthy drink, it is a good addition to one’s diet, and it has been used by women to enhance beauty.
- South Korea President Lee Myung-bak

IF YOU THOUGHT the mango beer presented in a post last week was an unusual combination for an alcoholic beverage, wait until you read about mango makgeolli!

Makgeolli is a hyper-sweet, milky-looking liquor made from rice that’s traditionally drunk from bowls. Part of its charm is the fermented rice solids floating in it, so it’s usually shaken or stirred before it’s poured. The popular conception of makgeolli has long been one of hooch for hayseeds, and in that sense it might be considered the Korean version of white lightning. Every one of these aspects makes it an analog for the Japanese drink doburoku, which you can read more about here.

Lately, the Koreans have been devising ways to turn makgeolli into an upmarket beverage, and these include adding fruit flavors and pitching it to women. Enter stage left a Japanese businessman from Noshiro, Akita, who worked with a Korean makgeolli brewer to develop a mango makgeolli creation suited for the Japanese market. The entrepreneur, Tsukamoto Tamio, operates a business hotel in Noshiro where he first sold the drink.

It’s 20% pure mango juice, so you can imagine how sweet the combination must be. It contains no artificial coloring or aromatics. Enough people discovered and enjoyed it for him to launch sales on this Japanese-language website since last month. It’s also available at mass merchandisers in Noshiro and Akita City, and eating and drinking places in Noshiro.

The nature of the drink has made it popular among women, and they’re a market segment always appreciates a low calorie count. Mango makgeolli has 19.4 calories per 100 milliliters, compared to 40 for beer, 75 for wine, 110 for sake, and 135 for shochu. Another number that some might appreciate is the 8% alcohol by volume.

It costs JPY 735 (about $US 8.16) for a 750 ml PET bottle, and JPY 420 for a 300 ml glass bottle, which is shown in the photo. The one on the right has been sitting on the shelf undisturbed, while the one on the left has been shaken.

Mr. Tsukamoto is importing it through the Port of Akita, and he’s set up a two-way commercial enterprise by selling local items to South Korea over the Internet. Akita currently enjoys a high name recognition in Korea because it was one of the locations where the big-budget, blockbuster television series Iris was filmed. The espionage thriller was wildly popular last fall in South Korea, and it generated a surge of Korean tourism to Akita. The same phenomenon in reverse had Japanese visiting the shooting locations for such Korean TV dramas as Winter Sonata. (Iris is now being broadcast on Japanese television.)

These two YouTube videos present an interesting contrast. The first is a Korean video in English promoting the new varieties of makgeolli. It’s well done–perhaps too well done in places. One of the supposedly casual customers interviewed on camera is a young woman attractive enough to be a model whose blouse color just happens to match the color of her drink.

The second is a video of a doburoku festival filmed in Shirakawa-go Gifu. The environment is quite different from the first video, but just as fascinating. It’s easy to see the resemblance between the two drinks–even down to the October date of their respective festivals. It also reminds me that I’ve been negligent writing festival posts recently!

The Japanese aren’t adding fruit syrup to doburoku, but here’s a post about a company that came up with the bright idea to make doburoku ice cream.

Notice all the connections between Japan and South Korea in this story? None of them will particularly surprise the people of either country. To quote once again a South Korean speaking in Japanese that I heard on a live NHK radio program broadcast from Seoul a few years ago, the only ties between the two countries that aren’t flourishing are the political.

Japanese food: More than just raw fish

WHEN THE JAPANESE apply their fertile imaginations to cook up new food creations, there’s no telling what delights they’ll discover.

Scratch that—there is telling! Here’s a look at what’s cooking (and brewing) in kitchens lately across the country.

Goya dumplings

Michifude Hiroshi was a successful challenger in one of the televised Iron Chef programs several years ago (in the Chinese food category). Fame begets fortune, so it was natural for the agricultural co-op JA Okinawa to sign a consulting agreement with the chef to provide advice for the development of processed foods using local produce and livestock. In return, his photo and name will be displayed on the packages of any products that result from their association.

The former Iron Chef’s first suggestion was to use vegetables that otherwise would be thrown out because their irregular shapes disallow them from being sold commercially, their esculence notwithstanding. His idea was to use the ugly vegetables as filling for gyoza, the Japanese name for the vegetable- or meat-stuffed dumplings often known as pot stickers in Chinese restaurants in the United States. JA Okinawa now plans to sell 12 different varieties on a seasonal basis, including those filled with rakkyo (an Asian scallion) or karashima (mustard greens).

First out of the box were the goya dumplings, with a package of 12 selling for 500 yen. The goya is a bitter green vegetable that’s quite popular among health conscious Japanese, particularly Okinawans. It’s slightly smaller than an American cucumber with a soft, knobby skin. Like a green pepper, it’s hollow on the inside, with some pulp and seeds. The goya is so nutritious the Western vegetarian might be tempted to turn it into an object of religious veneration.

One of the JA officials thinks they have a winner:

These non-standard products that can’t be sold commercially are reborn in popular food products. That has two advantages. It’s environmentally friendly because it reduces waste, and it boosts the income of farm families.

Katsuobushi cookies

Every 10 years, the city of Makurazaki in Kagoshima holds a fish cuisine competition to celebrate their incorporation as a municipality, a blessed event that occurred 60 years ago. The Makurazakians held their once-a-decade fest earlier this year, and the Grand Prize winner was a 16-year-old high school girl who created three varieties of katsuobushi cookies. Katsuobushi is dried, fermented, and smoked skipjack tuna that’s been shaved into flakes. It’s usually used to make soup broth.

Katsuobushi cookie winner with Mom

If you think fish cookies sound unappetizing, consider this: The reports say the girl’s creations were the overwhelming favorite of the judges. They had 133 entries to choose from, including hamburgers made with aji (horse mackerel) and vegetables instead of beef. She pocketed JPY 50,000 (almost $US 550) in prize money.

The cookies are made by mixing okara (high fiber soy pulp, also as healthful as the dickens) with the katsuobushi, and flavoring with ginger and soy sauce. She deliberately kept the use of butter and eggs to a minimum, which means they’re unlikely to appear on the shelves of your neighborhood convenience store anytime soon.

She also had incentive—she kept working to refine the recipe because her mother entered the same contest and she wanted to prove her chops. Mother and daughter still get along fine, however, as the photo shows. Perfecting the cookies did require some effort, as she later admitted it was difficult to get them to turn out soft and plump. She’s glad everyone likes them and thinks they might go over well as a snack in drinking establishments.

Soy yoghurt beverage

When Prof. Yanagida Fujidoshi, the head of the Institute of Enology and Viticulture in Yamanashi, downed a soy milk beverage made by Hakushuya Mamekichi of Hokuto at a food fair last July, the proverbial light bulb went on over his head. He contacted the beverage company, and together they developed a yoghurt beverage made from soy instead of milk, using wine yeast. All the ingredients—the soy, the natural spring water, and the wine yeast—are local products.

The professor and his creation

The beverage tastes so much like the real thing it’ll fool yoghurt fans despite the absence of milk. The company says the fermentation of lactic acid causes an unpleasant aroma, and conventional yoghurt products mask that aroma with milk products and fruit flavors in the later processing stages. That’s no problem with their product, however, because it’s soy and nothing but. Brewing one bottle requires about 30 soybeans, or 150 grams.

The company also claims the use of wine yeast doubles the production of lactic acid and increases by 1.7 times the amount of succinic acid, which provides the umami . They suggest selling a bottle for JPY 150 (about $US 1.63), though they won’t make an issue over it. The beverage is currently available in local supermarkets and michi no eki (literally, road or trail stations), which are rest stops along Japanese highways. Most have shops that sell local goods. There are 871 nationwide as of the moment.

The company is planning a full lineup of soy yoghurt beverages with local fruit added. It’s going to be called the Yanagida series and feature the professor’s picture on the label.

Who knows? The professor might become as well-known a celebrity as the Iron Chef.

Blueberry udon

The Japanese have been slurping down udon noodles since the Asuka period, which ended exactly 1,300 years ago this year, but the blueberry udon recently created in Asago, Hyogo demonstrates there are still some new things under the sun after all.

Udon is soup with noodles that tend to be as thick as a chopstick, but chewier and fluffier than spaghetti. The broth is usually either miso- or fish-flavored, and all sorts of varieties can be created by adding different ingredients and spices.

An Asago park well-known for its wisterias has been staging a festival for the past month and a half, and they came up with the idea of publicizing the event by creating a new dish in which blueberries are added to the flour-and-water udon noodle mix. The resulting purple noodles, color coordinated with the wysteria, were served with tempura-fried vegetables, including a type of green onion local to the area and mushrooms. This in turn was placed on wisterial petals and placed in a bowl. Reports say the tartness of the blueberries enhanced the flavor of the other ingredients.

There were plenty of blueberries available because the local chamber of commerce and industry has been growing them and looking for something to do with the surplus crop. The festival ended just last week, and during that time they planned to sell 100 bowls of blueberry udon every day for JPY 500 (about $US 5.45) each, which is not a bad price, as well as take-out meals for two or three people at JPY 450 yen each, an even better price. The producers are going to look at overall sales and make a decision on whether to commercialize the product.

Lotus ice cream

The lotus is mentioned in the Kojiki of 712 (Record of Ancient Matters), which means the Japanese have been growing the plant for as long as they’ve been eating udon. There’s more to it than the beauty, however—the lotus is a big deal in Buddhism, whose theorists have used it to symbolize the human condition. The plant is rooted in the mud of a pond, but it rises above the water to bloom and attain enlightenment.

My sweet tooth says I want to, but my wisdom tooth says no

And if you’re in Minamiechizen-cho, Fukui, anytime soon, they’ll enlighten you with some lotus ice cream, which they’ve given the name Hasukoro Inpact. That’s one prime example of the many visual treats in the written Japanese language, by the way. It’s rendered はすコロＩＮパクト, which combines the two Japanese alphabets of hiragana and katakana and the Roman alphabet.

Speaking of treats with multiple ingredients, the Somoyama hot springs resort in Minamiechizen-cho created the lotus ice cream (actually soft ice cream) to sell on the premises. Instead of the usual crunchy cone, they use one made with cornet bread that has ground lotus leaf mixed in the dough. Don’t miss a trick, do they? The outside is crisp, but the inside is chewy. To make the confection, they start with regular vanilla ice cream and add some raspberry sherbet mixed with another sherbet made from lotus wine. The local epicures say it’s a delectable combination of the sweet and the tart. The spa is selling it until the end of June at their restaurant on the premises for JPY 380 (about $US 4.14). The reports say it will be sold after that for JPY 450, but didn’t specify how or where it will be sold.

If you’re in Japan, though, you can always call the spa at (0778) 47-3368 and ask.

Socho curry

The pictures of Chef Michifude and Prof. Yanagida adorn the labels of the products they helped develop, but Prof. Oike Kazuo of Kyoto University got his photo on the package of Socho Curry mix just because he happened to be the president (socho) of the school when the product was created.

The curry was jointly developed in 2005 by the Kyoto Broadcasting System and the Kyoto U. Co-op with the idea of making then-President Oike, the 24th, more familiar to the students. It was intended to be sold only at the campus cafeteria and in nearby shops. But it became an instant hit with the students, so they decided to produce it as a retorted curry rice product and flog it on the market for JPY 630 apiece. They’ve sold so many they’ve earned an aggregate of JPY 100 million (about $US 1.09 million) in revenue to date.

There’s no word why it’s been so successful in Japan’s crowded curry market, albeit in just one part of it, but then again college students aren’t known to be finicky eaters as long as the price is right. Nevertheless, the Socho Curry success story has got the Co-op so excited, they’re planning to develop more products.

Now for the hard stuff—here comes the hooch!

Mango lager

Hideji, a microbrewery in Nobeoka, Miyazaki, wanted to create a special beer using something distinctively Miyazakian. That was the inspiration for brewing mango lager, mangoes being a special product of the prefecture. Don’t get the wrong idea—some, but not all, of the yeast used to ferment the beer is been made from mango rinds, and some of the fruit is used in the mix. That’s why it’s classified as a happoshu (“sparkling spirits”) for Japanese tax purposes rather than beer, because it has less than 67% malt by content.

Mango lager

Theirs wasn’t an overnight success—it took three years worth of product development to come up with something they were willing to sell. The pluses include the fresh spring water the brewery uses near its location at the foot of a mountain, a slightly sweet flavor, lightness, and fewer calories. It has just 25% of the sugar content of regular beers. It also has plenty of malic acid, which is said to have energy-enhancing and anti-aging properties. In other words, it builds you up and tears you down at the same time.

Still others will appreciate the 5.2% alcohol by volume.

The Hideji brewery is so pleased they’re going to work with Miyazaki University to examine the possibility of creating other microbrews with 80 different types of yeast, including those made from such local citrus fruits such as the hyuganatsu and the kumquat. Now that’s a lab I wouldn’t mind working in.

They’re selling the beer in 330 ml bottles for JPY 600 apiece, which is a bit steep, but it is a microbrew after all. It’s available at the gift shop in the Miyazaki Airport and at the local michi no eki shops. What the heck, if you’re in Japan and the beer and mango combination has whetted either your thirst or your appetite, give the brewery a call at (0982) 39-0090 and ask if they’ll ship you some.

Firewater

Beer in all its forms has far and away the highest sales of any alcoholic beverage in Japan, but some people unfamiliar with national alcohol consumption habits might not be aware that sales of the distilled beverage shochu, which resembles vodka or gin, top sake sales in some years. Way down south in such prefectures as Kagoshima and Okinawa, shochu far outsells sake, and Kagoshima doesn’t even have a sake brewery.

The word shochu is written with the Chinese characters for “fiery liquor”, which literally makes it firewater. I can testify that if you drink too much, it just might start some spontaneous internal combustion.

Fighting fire with firewater

The head of the volunteer fire department in Kajiya-cho, Kagoshima City, is naturally concerned about fire prevention, so he hit upon the idea to create his own shochu and call it Hikeshidamashii, which means “fire extinguishing spirit”. No, not spirits–spirit, as in demon, and no, not demon rum, either! The distinguishing feature of his brand is that the label has a fire prevention message—it reminds people of the law requiring smoke detectors to be installed by the end of May 2011. He developed the drink with another volunteer fireman who works at a liquor wholesaler. Another reason for the choice of the name is that volunteer firefighters like to wear t-shirts with hikeshidamashii written on them.

So, to put it all together, a fireman in a city renowned for its firewater has a burning desire to prevent fires, so he creates a new kind of firewater called Fire Extingushing Spirit to remind the people drinking spirits to install smoke detectors.

Try saying that without stuttering after a few shots of shochu.

If that inflames your curiosity, and you live in Japan, give the shop a call at 099-224-4531 to see if he’ll sell you some. A 1.8 liter bottle sells for JPY 1,800, which is a reasonable price for shochu.

Microbeers making a comeback

Microbeers took off in a macro way in Japan with the amendment to the tax law in 1994 that made it financially more feasible to brew and sell them. But Japanese will be the first to tell you that boomlets there quickly skyrocket and just as quickly fizzle out. That’s what happened after the middle-aged drinkers switched to the recently developed, and much cheaper so-called “third beers” made with such ingredients as pea protein, soy protein, or soy peptide instead of malt. (Yes, I agree. Ugh.) In addition to the bargain prices, the taste is much lighter than that of the real thing.

But the Japan Craft Beer Association (see link on right sidebar) reports that microbrews began making a comeback three years ago, primarily among younger people. That year, 28,800 kiloliters were brewed, double the total from 2005. A spokesman for the association said:

Most new customers are people younger than 40 who don’t have any preconceived notions about beer.

He added that they tend to view the high-quality brews as they would wine, an outlook they share among microbrew aficionados in the West. Another reason this is a welcome trend for brewers is that national consumption of all types of beer has been trending downward recently. Year-on-year sales were down 3.2% in April, the fourth consecutive monthly decline. That was the second-lowest April total since tracking of the statistic began in 1992.

Spotting an opportunity, the Kansai region’s microbrewers held the first microbrew festival in Kyoto on the 23rd last month at a shopping mall favored by young people called Shin-Puh-Kan (That’s a groovy way to spell shinpu, which means new wind.) A total of 20 breweries participated and presented 40 brands, selling their wares for JPY 300 a glass. Said an organizer:

With overall beer sales declining every year, the resurgence of microbrews is a trend both old and new. I hope we can reestablish ourselves in the Kansai area.

Judging from the following YouTube video, the mall seems to be enclosed with an open courtyard, making it an excellent site for people to mill about and drink without disturbing the neighborhood. (Don’t worry about the narration if you don’t understand Japanese–it’s just standard PR.) The mall also vaguely resembles the view of the neighborhood from Jimmy Stewart’s apartment in the Hitchcock film, Rear Window, a perennial favorite in Japan. Coincidence?

Here’s an idea: The high school girl from Kagoshima could provide the Craft Beer Association with her katsuobushi cookies to sell as snacks at the microbrew festivals, and after polishing off a few rounds of mango lager, everyone could stop off for a bowl of blueberry udon on the way home!

Japan’s cultural kaleidoscope (3)

JAPAN MAY OR MAY NOT become the world’s next cultural hegemon, but the daily parade of cultural phenomena in this country is too immense and diverse to keep track of it all. It’s better just to let it wash all over you and enjoy whatever you can whenever it flows by.

Here’s a baker’s dozen of rivulets from the recent flood.

Bigfoot

The Nio guardian statues stand guard as sentries at the entrance gate of temples. As the Buddhists have it, they are emanations of Vajrapani Bodhisattva that represent the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, birth and death. It takes two to guard the gate, one with mouth open, and the other with mouth closed.

But just like the rest of us, the alphas and the omegas need something to cover their bare feet. The solution in some places is supersized waraji, or straw sandals. That’s no exaggeration–Kataoka Tsuneo in Echizen, Fukui, recently made a pair more than two meters long. Or to be precise, they were 2.1 meters long, 85 centimeters wide, and 14 centimeters thick. At 6 feet 10 inches, they’re longer than most people are tall. They also weighed between 40 to 50 kilograms each.

To be even more precise, Mr. Kataoka didn’t make them by himself. “It’s an impossible job for one person when they’re this size,” he admitted, so he called on two apprentice cobblers to help. It took the trio a week to put the sandals together.

This isn’t the sort of thing that people regularly do, even in Japan. Said Mr. Kataoka, “It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve made any sandals that big.” He made a one-meter pair for some smaller Nio last year, but said, “Orders for something like this don’t come around all that often. Even if I wanted to make some, it’s hard to find the time.”

He gave them to a temple in Yamagata this month after he applied the finishing touches.

Hotfoot

Every alpha has its omega, and even the strongest of straw sandals wear out eventually after standing sentry duty at the temple gates for so long. But when those waraji are no longer usable, they can’t just be tossed out in the trash. Many Japanese believe that inanimate objects have a spirit, and that goes double for objects that require specialized skills to make and were used at a religious institution. They’ve been invested with a lot of ki, after all. Disposing of them requires a special ceremony.

The most famous giant straw sandals in the country are the pair used at Senso-ji, a Buddhist temple in the Asakusa district of Tokyo. That’s the oldest temple in Japan, and you can read about its origins here.

The practice of hanging waraji at Senso-ji started in 1941 when lower house MP Matsuoka Toshizo donated the first pair as a symbol of national defense. They’ve been replaced once every decade since then. The sixth pair was 4.5 meters long, 1.5 meters wide, and weighed one ton each. They were donated in 1998 and hung on the Hozomon (gate). This particular pair was made by a resident of Murayama, Yamagata—Matsuoka Toshizo’s hometown—and they’ve been on display in that city since being returned in 2008.

But all good things must come to an end, so they were dispatched in a rite called the Otakiage. After an initial Shinto ceremony, about 50 Murayamanians took them apart by removing the wires holding the straw in place. A fire was then lighted to burn the straw, during which a Buddhist mass was conducted. And since it would have been a shame to waste that nice bonfire, the 200 or so people who showed up to watch were given mochi rice cakes, which they stuck on the end of bamboo sticks and roasted.

If that ain’t the alpha and the omega, I don’t know what is.

Since many Japanese believe that inanimate objects have a spirit, no one was surprised when the chairman of the event said:

形も崩れず、今まで頑張ってくれた大わらじにお疲れさまと言いたい

I’ll be darned if I can come up with a satisfying English translation that does justice to the original and is still comfortably readable. Let’s try this:

“The sandals didn’t lose their shape and did us the favor of making every effort to hang together until now, so we want to thank them for their service.”

Regardless of how it sounds in English, that sounds perfectly natural in Japanese.

The world’s largest lawnmower?

Streetcars still run in some Japanese cities, including Nagasaki City and Kagoshima City. Several years ago, Kagoshima City planted turf in between the tracks to ameliorate the heat island effect and add some greenery to the city at the same time.

But as anyone who has a lawn knows, that grass grows and it has to be cut. Hiring students part-time and sending them out with a fleet of lawnmowers wouldn’t cut it on the streetcar line.

So the Kagoshima City Transportation Department and the Osaka Sharyo Co. recently began trials of what they think is the world’s first grass cutting train, with the objective of putting it into regular service at the end of the month. The train also is able to water the grass, if only to make sure they have something to cut. Either that or it’s a make-work project for the railroad workers union.

The first trial was run on a stretch of track on which the grass wasn’t high enough to cut—it doesn’t grow so fast in winter down south in Kagoshima. They just wanted to test the all the equipment to see if it functioned.

Function it did, so the next day they switched to a track where the grass had grown. Everything worked quite well, though there was one drawback. The train moved at a speed slower than a human walks, and that caused a lot of strain on the driver. Maybe they’re not unionized after all.

One thing the reports didn’t mention—what are they going to do with all those grass clippings? I can’t imagine the Japanese just leaving them there on the street.

The crop’s not for eating

They were also cutting some plants down to size out in the country last month.

Last month some more plants were cut down to size. Instead of cropping grass, the farmers in Ogimi-son, Okinawa, were harvesting their crop of futoi, or what the dictionaries say is called zebra rush in English.

Whether in Japan or the Anglosphere, however, the use of the plant is the same—it’s for decoration. Urges one English-language website, “Add authenticity to your backyard wetland habitat by planting zebra rush.”

Backyard gardeners are now recreating authentic swamps? I’ve been away for longer than I thought. But wait, it gets better:

“The distinct alternating green and white stripes of the Zebra Rush instantly add pattern, density, and vertical drama to your backyard paradise.”

I’ll stick with the humdrum azalea bushes and dogwood trees.

The plant grows three feet tall, or as the website would have it, “narrow spiked stems tower 3 feet tall”, but that’s too big for its Japanese use. Here it’s employed as a prop in flower arrangements, where it presumably lends drama to the art of ikebana. Do the farmers in the Kijoka district of Ogimi-son, the national leader in futoi production, consider it so dramatic? They probably don’t care as long as they can make a buck at it.

By all accounts, the winter crop in Kijoka was a bumper harvest because of the warmer weather in that part of the country this year. The farmers rushed their zebra rush to the closest JA cooperative, which by now must be blase to all that drama. They collected it, bunched it, and sent it to auction markets throughout the country.

White lightning

After all that work, it’s about time to knock back a drink, don’t you think? As they say in the U.S., it’s bound to be 5 o’clock somewhere in the world, and whaddaya know, a quick look at my watch shows it’s just now chiming five in Zanzibar.

It’s not out of the question that the mochi roasters in Yamagata, the grass-cutting train operators in Kagoshima, or the futoi farmers in Okinawa chose to relax with some doburoku, the Japanese version of homebrew for the mass market. Doburoku is a milky white, sweet type of sake that hasn’t been fully pressed from the fermenting rice solids, which are left floating inside.

Not just anyone can make the hooch, however—the 131 breweries producing it need a special license and they have to be located in one of 91 designated districts around the country. But unless one has a special taste for it, most people think of it as that funky stuff over there on the next shelf that they might buy once every few years for a change of pace or out of nostalgia.

The members of the Sakebunka Institute in Tokyo had a big idea, however. They decided to hold the Tokyo Doburoku Festival 2010 in January, which they claim was the first event of its kind. One of the institute’s stated objectives for the festival was to spread the sake culture. Since Sakebunka means “sake culture”, they’re just doing what they were organized to do. And since this is a cultural kaleidoscope, we’ll pitch in and do our part.

The institude asked all the producers in the country to submit entries, and they received 75. The liquor went through two rounds of judging. For the first round, the institute formed five groups of 30 people each, who swilled 15 different types. They voted, some sober assistants tallied up the totals, and those in first and second place moved on to the finals.

The judges in the second round consisted of five specialists—including sommeliers—and five regular folks. Seven of the beverages were awarded grand prizes, with one chosen as the primo stuff and two others chosen as pretty dang good. The brewers in Iide-machi, Yamagata, were excited that their Iide Nakatsugawa doburoku, shown here, was chosen as one of the seven grand prize winners. It didn’t finish in the top three, but its aroma and flavor lifted it up into the upper 10% of all the entrants. Others favored its slight sweetness, fruitiness, and good balance.

The Iidenians had good reason to be thrilled–the district was designated as a doburoku producer in March 2004, which means they’re still relatively wet behind the ears. This particular brand is known for using 100% sake rice and a lot of rice malt.

Cultural mavens and liquor lovers who read Japanese can see the results on the Sakebunka Institute page here. Those interested in reading about a more righteous doburoku festival at a Shinto shrine can do so here.

Drinking like a fish

You’ve heard of lushes who drink so much they get pickled? Well, in the same Iide-machi doburoku district, they use the booze to pickle the fish—specifically, the seem fish, or yamame in Japanese. The pickling project was conceived and launched last year by employees at the local Shirakawa-so ryokan. The idea was to create a new product using local fish, the local doburoku, and the local cold weather.

The fish are soaked for 15 hours in a special sauce made from the doburoku and tamarijoyu, a soy sauce made from refined soy. Then they’re dried for three days in the cold air. They process about 3,000 fish specifically for the guests at their ryokan. Those who’ve eaten the sake-soused fish say it has a unique and rich flavor. The pickling work ended in mid-February, so all that’s left is the eating.

It’s not every product that would receive attention from sommeliers and gastronomes at the same time, but the Iide Nakatsugawa seems to qualify.

The antidote is in the poison

There’s more you can do with sake than to get high or to get pickled. The Shurei sake merchants of Naha, Okinawa, have developed and are selling an awamori-based medicinal herb drink called Genkoku. They’ve acquired a patent for their manufacturing process after a wait of seven years.

Like doburoku, awamori has a different legal classification. That’s because it’s made only in Okinawa with a different kind of yeast, and some varieties still use rice from Thailand. Awamori is a form of shochu rather than Japanese sake, but of the many distillers in the Okinawan islands, only one produces what is legally called shochu. The rest make awamori.

Genkoku has nine ingredients, including local turmeric, eucalyptus, gardenia, and safflower. You can make up your own mind whether that’s a waste of good shochu or a waste of good medical herbs. The president of the distillery created the product by idly mixing herbs brought by a friend into his awamori. The result is an amber liquid with a mild taste that is said to be very drinkable. It’s now sold in specialty stores and some supermarkets with little or no advertising. They charge JPY 4,200 yen (about $US 46.50) for a 720 ml bottle, which is about 40 proof according to the U.S. definition. They sell about 7,000 bottles a year, 70% of it to people outside Okinawa. Fans of the beverage say it makes them feel better or sleep better.

The herbs must cover the first part. Most any hooch will take care of the second.

A southern fish burger

Now that we’ve had the aperitifs, it’s time for dinner, and the first selection on the menu is the Minami burger. That’s a culinary creation by the Minami-cho Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Tokushima using local finfish and shellfish. They’ve already conducted a trial by selling 100 Minami burger meals with the main course made from fried ribbonfish, or tachiuo in Japanese. A Minami burger consists of fried fish, lettuce, cucumbers, and tartar sauce. That sounds pretty tasty, and you can’t beat the JPY 200 price ($US 2.21). The Tokushimanians came up with the idea because novel burger-type sandwiches are all the rage, and local fishermen catch a heap of ribbonfish.

They chose the tachiuo to start because it is caught nearly year-round, and ribbonfish fry is popular in local restaurants. It’s been so successful they’ve been mulling the creation of more new burgers upscale epicures using Ise ebi and turbin shells (sazae). If sales go well at the local Ise ebi festival, they’ll try to get shops in town to make them.

Burgers on the sly

If stealth food is more to your taste than ribbonfish, you might be tempted to try the Ninja Burger cooked up by students at Konan High School in Koka. Shiga. As part of their studies of dietary habits and health, the students were asked to create 11 new products for a food stall in a parking area of the Shin-Meishin Expressway, and that’s how the Ninja Burger snuck into the menu. The sales outlet chose that dish to sell because it can be served five minutes after ordering, it was more efficient to make, and it uses an old strain of local rice with ninja connotations.

The students replaced the bun with a fried combination of black rice, mochi rice, and white rice. That’s filled with chicken, cabbage, and lettuce, and this burger sounds tasty too, doesn’t it? The shop sells it as part of a set with a small salad and soup for JPY 500, but offer only 10 servings a day. Whether it was because of the ingredients, the scarcity, or the ninja cachet, the product took off. One diner interviewed said the aroma and the sweetness of the chicken were a good match.

Koka is the home area of ninjutsu, and the ninja were said to fancy the black mochi rice. Perhaps that’s because it contains anthocyanin, which improves the vision. Some of the other ideas the students came up with were a black rice parfait, in which the rice is powdered and mixed with ice, and takoyaki (octopus balls fried in batter) using local beef instead of octopus.

Make mine the ninja burger!

Zaasai’s the limit

Zaasai is what the Japanese call zha cai (搾菜, or pressed vegetable), a Chinese dish that is the pickled stem of a species of mustard plant, first made in Sichuan. The plant itself is related to mustard greens, which are eaten as funky food in the southern U.S.

The Chinese salt, press, and dry the stem, rub in red chili paste, and allow it to ferment in a process similar to that for kimchi. The result is spicy, sour, and salty, and is said to have an aroma similar to sauerkraut with chili paste.

The Japanese variety is not spicy and only slightly sour. It is most often cut into small pieces and eaten as a topping on rice. My wife and I often ate it until my wife decided not to buy any more food coming from China, and apparently she was not alone. Most of the zaasai consumed in Japan is grown in China, but sales have taken a hit in recent years. The demand is still strong, however.

That inspired a research group consisting of 34 farming volunteers in Takahata-machi, Yamagata, to start a three-year project to grow the plant themselves. Before the planting, they held discussions with farmers in Tsukuba, Ibaragi and Miura, Kanagawa, who also grow the crop. It turns out that cultivation is not much different from that for other green vegetables. It also can be grown in greenhouses. As you can see from the photo, they’ve already harvested some. In addition to the parts used to make zaasai, they’ve sold the unused parts of the plant to companies and Tokyo Chinese restaurants.

Good luck to them. I liked it myself, and if they can come up with a viable Japanese version, maybe my wife will start buying it again.

Pucker power

After feasting on doburoku, minami burgers, and ninja burgers, the next thing we’ll need is some mouthwash to freshen up the breath. Fortunately, there’s something new in those lines, too.

We’ve already had a post about the terrifically tart shiikwasa fruit, or hirami lemon, native to Okinawa, that is used to put capital letters on otherwise simple flavors and as a health drink. Now Tennen Kobo of Okinawa City, which develops and sells aromatherapy products, has found another use for the citrus fruit. It recently began sales of Clear Gift, a mouthwash made using shiikwasa extract. The juice works to harden the proteins and oils in the mouth, making them easier to remove and improving the breath. The product contains no surface activating agents, artificial fragrances or colors, or preservatives. The extract is combined with xylitol and four tea extracts.

Tennen Kobo is promoting its use for older people and children who don’t like mint and have trouble brushing their teeth. The company sells it through dental clinics and hopes to move 10,000 bottles the first year. If the idea appeals to you, it’s also sold on the net for JPY 3,700 yen for a 500 ml bottle. It took a year of work with the sales agency Ryubi Sangyo of Naha to come up with the product.

I can see how it would be effective. Shiikwasa are so tart any bacteria that wanted to survive would flee its presence.

New wine in old bottles

Eat, drink, and be merry, goes the saying, and right about now it’s high time for the merry part. With gagaku, though, you’ll have to find your merriment through quiet contemplation rather than cutting the rug.

One form of gagaku is an ancient music that originated on the continent which gradually took on a Japanese cast and became associated with the Imperial court. It’s still performed by musicians working with the Imperial Palace, which makes it the longest continuous stage art in the world. But there are also gagaku groups that play music written by contemporary composers in the classical style. The foremost of those groups is Reigakusha, which is shown here performing in Fukushima in January. The concert was held to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the establishment of Music from Japan, an organization that performs contemporary versions of traditional Japanese music around the world. Shortly thereafter, they traveled to New York City and Washington D.C. to present the first performances of two new pieces. The group frequently appears in New York, and they are actually funded in part by the New York state government. Last month they performed at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, and no, I don’t want to know how a concert hall admitting the general public (or should I say pubic?) wound up with that name.

Here’s a minute-and-a-half taste:

Venus de Jomon

For the devotees of wine, women, and song, we’ve had everything in this post but the women. But the last shall come first, says the Christian holy book, and nothing comes more first than a hot babe!

Now I ask you—is she hot, or is she hot!

There are two types of figurines among the ancient cultural treasures in Japan, the doguu and the haniwa. The former come from the Jomon period, while the latter, which are much better known, come from the kofun or burial mound period.

All the doguu are females. While scholars say it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the sex of the doguu, there is no mistaking the gender of some male haniwa. There was an exhibit of the former at the Tokyo National Museum last month (right sidebar), which presented 67 in all, including some designated as national treasures.

The old saw about some artists having to go abroad to find fame and recognition before being recognized in their homelands might work for cultural artifacts, too. The Cultural Affairs Agency sponsored this exhibit in the British Museum in London from September to November last year, and it went over so well they decided they might as well show it to the Japanese themselves.

There’s no mistaking the sex of the doguu shown here. She’s familiarly known as the Jomon Venus, probably because of those heavy hips. Now that’s a lot of Ponderosa! She’s only 27 centimeters high, and hails from an archaeological site in Chino, Nagano. She’s also known as the Detchiri Doguu, and no one will be surprised to find out the first word is a Japanese creation that means protruding butt. She also seems to be pregnant. Were women built like that in Japan in those days, or is that just Jomon cheesecake?

Most of the doguu date from 2,000 – 1,000 BC, and they are thought to have been fertility symbols. Well, flash a protruding butt in front of any male at any time in human history and what do you think’s going to happen?

That brings to mind a comment of one of the world’s most famous living lechers, former President Bill Clinton of the U.S. During a visit to view “Juanita”, a recently discovered Incan mummy displayed at the National Geographic museum, he commented, “You know, if I were a single man, I might ask that mummy out. That’s a good-looking mummy.”

They’re going to have to erect Nio guardian statues to keep that man out of the National Museum on his next visit to Tokyo!

Afterwords:

Speaking of inanimate objects having a spirit, here’s a story: I recently bought a used nine-volume set of the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, the premier English-language reference work on the country. I already had the single-volume version, which itself is probably second on the list, but there’s nothing finer than the full set.

I spent an hour or so in the used bookstores of the Kanda district in Tokyo last October looking for it, and finally discovered a set on sale for JPY 100,000 (about $US 1,100). That’s expensive, but I was still willing to pay the price–the reference is that good.

Just before spending the money, however, I spoke to a woman whose husband died a couple of years ago. He had a set of his own. I asked her about the possibility of buying it, and she was more than happy to let me have it. She knew I really wanted it, and said that her husband would have wanted me to have the books. She added, “Besides, the books will be happy too.”

I don’t think it’s weird at all.