It was only twenty years ago, after many years of trials, that an Okinawan man called Mekaru finally developed a technique to farm umi budo on land, growing it as the kind of filling of a sandwich of one-metre-square rubber nets suspended in the sea water, and fed with fish food. The idea was that this new industry would give older Okinawans less physically demanding work to do compared to traditional farming or fishing, but initially it could only be farmed during the winter when the water was cool enough – which is where the deep sea water comes in. This production plant, which opened on Kume-jima eleven years ago, is the only place where they can harvest year round, because it pumps in that chilly deep-sea water during summer maintaining an optimum 25°Celsius in the tanks.
‘I see it every day so I don’t eat it very often,’ Nakamachi laughs when I ask how he likes to eat it. ‘It’s great with just a little shikuwasa juice [a tiny, mandarin-like fruit indigenous to Okinawa].’
As we talk, I notice a wall of photographs of dignitaries who have visited the plant, including the Emperor and Empress and the former US ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK.
‘I tried to stop Mrs Kennedy eating it before we had cleaned it,’ says Nakamichi, looking at the photo. ‘But she said she had a strong stomach, and took some anyway.’
I understand her impatience. Standing here, surrounded by tons of glistening, fresh umi budo, larger and more bulging and vital than any I have seen before, it is all I can do to stop myself scooping up handfuls of it and cramming it into my mouth. Sensing this, Nakamichi-san prepares a plate piled high with umi budo, plus some sachets of ponzu to accompany it.
The texture is almost startling – slippery bubbles resist slightly before popping against the roof of my mouth, releasing their intense ocean flavour. Umi budo has huge potential as caviar’s vegan cousin, a new, rare seafood delicacy to rank alongside bottarga or sea urchin. I tip back my head and shove great handfuls into my mouth, all notions of decorum cast aside.
Who knows how long it will be before I get the chance to taste umi budo again, I think to myself, and reach for the plate once more.
Chapter 4
Awamori
I shall never set foot in Australia, the wildlife is just too homicidal. You probably feel the same way. That’s sensible. Best leave it to the Australians. It is odd, then, that I feel so relaxed in Okinawa as by all accounts it too is infested by poisonous snakes. Odder still, then, that my family and I are about to enter a dark, dank underground limestone cave, thirty metres deep, whose entrance is overhung with trailing vines that all but scream ‘Lair of the giant serpent!’
The snakes of Okinawa are called ‘habu’. A particularly aggressive type of olive-brown pit viper, habu resemble rattlesnakes but without the rattle and can grow up to eight feet long. With the exception of a couple of the smaller islands, they are found throughout Okinawa and, according to the websites I read open-mouthed and appalled before we left, they love dark, damp underground-type abodes precisely like this.
A habu bite can be fatal if untreated. A couple of hundred Okinawans get bitten every year, although only one or two die as a result. There is a bounty on the snakes on many of the islands. As one local put it to me, ‘If you see a habu, you have to kill it.’ A while ago someone hit upon the idea of releasing mongooses in a campaign to reduce the habu population, the Rikki-tikki-tavi solution. The problem is, the snakes are nocturnal while the mongooses sleep at night. Now, they are dealing with the twin problem of the snakes and a rampant mongoose population.
The last time we were in Okinawa we met several people with snakebite scars and encountered dead snakes ourselves in irabu jiru, snake soup, a memorably unpleasant dish with all too readily identifiable chunks of snake floating in it (they even left its skin on, all black and scaly). There were also dried snakes on sale in the market in Naha, dead ones squished on the roads, and, most creepily of all, we also saw dead habu coiled and poised as if about to strike in the bottom of bottles of the local spirit, Awamori. They looked like medical specimens in a veterinarian training school, but I had been curious ever since about what the snakes’ presence in the bottles of alcohol actually contributed to its flavour.
Awamori came to Japan in the early fifteenth century not from China or Korea – the route by which most culinary and farming innovations arrived – but from Thailand, where they still make a similarly potent rice liquor, often home-made, moonshine-style, called Lao Khao. Long ago, when the production and sale of sake was strictly controlled by the Ryukyus’ royal family, awamori offered Okinawans an alcohol fix which bypassed taxes and restrictions.
I had always vaguely assumed that awamori was just another form of shochu, the other, more popular, clear Japanese spirit, originally Korean and primarily produced on Kyushu from barley, rice or sweet potatoes. Both awamori and shochu are cheap and strong, and though awamori is indeed often classified as a shochu, it is a completely different drink. In fact, many awamori connoisseurs claim it to be the superior of the two on account of its richer, more complex flavour although, equally, others wrinkle their noses at its earthy aromas and sometimes medicinal flavour.
Awamori is still made from long-grain indica rice imported from Thailand. The rice is washed, steamed and fermented using koji, a type of fungus (Latin name: Aspergillus oryzae) used in the fermentation of several Japanese foodstuffs like sake, miso and soy sauce. Awamori uses black (‘kuro’) koji as opposed to the yellow koji used for sake, or the white koji more typically used for shochu, and the rice is crushed rather than polished, as it is with sake. These may seem like minor differences, but rice polishing is extremely important when it comes to the flavour and quality of sake; meanwhile, the black koji ferments better with the non-glutinous long-grain rice than yellow koji would. The ageing of awamori traditionally takes place in ceramic pots though more often these days it happens in metal tanks and, in a new innovation, sometimes in oak barrels, usually for around three years, often for much longer.
I had assumed the inclusion of a snake in the bottles of awamori was a tourist thing but in this, as I was to discover during a week in Okinawa in which I diligently tasted numerous brands of the drink, I was only half right.
Back to the cave. The opening is at the end of a narrow concrete path behind an electricity generating station. Old leaves cover the top steps and tree roots push through the rocks around us, lending it an abandoned mine-shaft feel. A metal staircase spirals steeply down between the jagged limestone walls into the darkness.
Emil leads the way followed by Asger, Lissen and me, our guide, slightly worryingly, following behind. For the first few steps, I focus on my feet and the main sensory input is the sound of dripping water, but as my eyes adjust to the light I can see that the walls are filled with shelves lined with bottles. Each bottle is covered in a thick layer of dust and has a postcard-sized white label dangling from its neck, like the O-mikuji, the fortune-telling notes written on pieces of paper and tied outside Japanese shrines and temples.
The cave is the storage facility for the Kin Awamori Distillery where, our guide tells us, they keep fourteen thousand bottles, the oldest of which has been here for twenty-eight years. Asger notices some of the labels bear the names of Japanese cities – Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo and so on. ‘It is a tradition for people from around the country to buy a bottle of awamori for a new-born child and leave it here until their twenties,’ explains our guide. She tells us that the caves have always been used to store awamori because they maintain a steady temperature of around 18°Celsius.
During World War II the bottles were joined by the local population. Up to three thousand Okinawans sheltered here during the American bombing raids. ‘One time, a baby was born down here,’ she says. ‘So three thousand people came down, and three thousand and one people left.’
Occasionally, amid the racks of bottles there are also locked, mesh-fronted cupboards stacked with white plastic tubs. These contain the notorious fermented Okinawan tofu, ‘tofuyo’ – firm
tofu fermented using a red koji – which I had had the misfortune to encounter on our last visit to the islands. Tofuyo is a noxious, cheese-like substance usually served in sugar-cube-sized chunks with a toothpick on the side. You are only supposed to taste tiny morsels using the toothpick but, unaware of this, on my first encounter with tofuyo I had taken a whole cube in one go and instantly regretted it. It was a frightful mouthful, with a throat-burn akin to a Roquefort which has been left too long on its own in a warm cupboard.
I had wondered whether the caves imbued the tofu with special bacteria as happens with Roquefort, which is also stored in limestone caves, but clearly the plastic tubs would prohibit this. The real reason they are kept here is, as with the awamori, the caves provide a steady chill away from the subtropical heat above ground. The tubs usually remain underground for six months to a year, our guide tells us, but tofuyo can be aged for longer, for years, even. From the seventeenth century until 1868, the Ryukyus, as they were still known, had stronger ties to China than they did to Japan and tofuyo has obvious links to the still popular Chinese fermented, or ‘stinky’, tofu. Oddly, the practice of fermenting tofu doesn’t seem to have caught on much elsewhere in Japan (although they do have a tradition for something similar in Kumamoto, a prefecture on Kyushu), perhaps because for a long time the technique for making it was kept secret among a few people here.
Understandably, given my previous encounter with tofuyo, I am a little wary about trying it again when our guide offers us a tasting in the Kin Distillery store after our (in the end, snake-free) tour of the caves but, eaten in the correct manner in dainty morsels using a toothpick, it is really not bad at all, with a miso-like, sweet, fermented flavour – perfect for accompanying awamori. Not everyone agrees with me on this.
‘It is pure evil,’ grimaces Emil when he tastes some. ‘Like a mouthful of evil.’
‘It tastes like the devil’s poo,’ adds Asger.
The next stop on our awamori exploration is the Zuisen Distillery in Naha, the capital of Okinawa’s main island. Zuisen is perhaps the most famous of all awamori makers with a history going back over a hundred years – it is probably not a coincidence that the Thai honorary consulate is on the premises.
The sweetly cloying aroma of distilled rice fills the air as we pass the red porcelain dragons on the gateposts outside and are met by Gaku Sakumoto, the company’s CEO, who shows us the black koji used for his awamori – it looks like mouldy black rice – and explains the special ‘couth’ method they use during the ageing process by which evaporated awamori is topped up with the previous year’s batch, similar to the way grappa is made.
Sakumoto has kindly arranged for me to try a few of their awamori.
The three-year-old has what I believe oenologists would call an ‘aggressive nose’ (it stank). Those aromas dissipate when awamori is aged in the traditional, porous clay pots but the fatty acids responsible for the smell tend to be trapped in the new-fangled steel tanks and glass bottles. The six-year-old awamori is still a little rough for me; it is as if someone has taken the water left over from cooking white rice and used it as a vodka mixer. But the ten-, and seventeen-year-old awamori are progressively better, until we reach the twenty-one-year old, which is lovely, smooth and chocolatey, rather like a single-malt whisky.
Asger is keen to hear more about the mystery of the habu and why Okinawans put them in bottles of awamori, but Zuisen doesn’t use them, Sakumoto says. The snakes are indeed a tourist thing, it turns out, aimed specifically at Chinese visitors – the usual nonsense to do with phallic potency. According to Wikipedia, a habu’s mating habits make even Sting’s sessions seem a bit premature, lasting for up to twenty-six hours. The Chinese believe that if one drinks a spirit infused with habu, their sexual stamina is transferred to the drinker.
Only around half a dozen of the islands’ forty-six awamori producers add snakes to their bottles to make what is technically known as ‘Habushu’. It is quite an uncomfortable process for the snakes. First, they are starved for a couple of months to purge their intestines, then they are killed and gutted before being pickled in the alcohol, although in some places they freeze the snakes while alive to render them immobile, remove their intestines – again while they are still alive – and then sew them up. When the snakes revive they are understandably none too happy about this turn of events and die in an aggressive spasm – the pose the awamori habushu producers are aiming for as it looks nice and dramatic in the bottle. Whichever method is used, the snakes are then placed in pure ethanol for a few weeks to preserve them and neutralise any remaining venom, before being added to bottles of a special awamori with added ‘medicinal’ herbs and honey. Several thousand habu end their lives in a bottle of awamori each year, apparently.
By this stage it has become apparent to me that researching awamori provides a legitimate excuse for drinking during the day, so I arrange for one more stop on our awamori familiarisation tour: a date with yet more Okinawan royalty, this time the Awamori Queen.
We meet Miyu Oshiro, as she is also known, at the offices of the Okinawa Awamori Distillers Association in an industrial zone of Naha City. She has kindly put on her ‘queen’ outfit for us: a pink skirt, peacock-patterned jacket, matching pillbox hat, Miss World-style sash (proclaiming her awamori royalty status) and white gloves, all made from polyester. She looks not unlike a 1970s Cathay Pacific air hostess and is presumably highly flammable.
She was chosen, Oshiro-san says, because of her love of awamori and her knowledge of its history. ‘I want to tell more people about how wonderful it is,’ she tells us, smiling. ‘It is usually thought of as a man’s drink but there has been an awamori queen chosen every year for the last thirty years.’
Awamori is experiencing a decline due to competition for younger drinkers from beer and wine, as well as the dreaded rival, shochu, from Kyushu (our next stop). The Distillers Association’s response has been to promote awamori cocktails; Oshiro-san recommends one featuring coffee. She also says that the richer, funkier flavours of aged awamori are becoming more appreciated. ‘And awamori is usually cheaper,’ she adds. ‘I drink it almost every day!’
It is time to go. I enjoyed some of the awamori I had tried on Okinawa but I still have a suspicion that it might be one of those location-specific alcoholic beverages which foster fuzzy memories when you taste them on holiday but perhaps don’t travel all that well, like that bottle of limoncello bought in Amalfi after a gorgeous meal on a terrace in Ravello but which tasted like bubble bath once I got it home, or that bottle of ouzo, so lovely in a beach-side taverna on Chios, but which was not much better than rheumatism tincture a thousand miles north.
KYUSHU
Chapter 5
Pork
The main island of Okinawa had more than lived up to our happy memories from that first visit and, on Kume-jima, we found that rare thing, an idyllic subtropical island which still felt like an authentic, everyday kind of place. I suspect I could spend several happy years pottering around Okinawa’s smaller islands, especially as some of them don’t even have any snakes. But it is time to move on. A live volcano, the world’s weirdest (and most wonderful) amusement park and the best pork we’ve ever tasted awaits us just an hour’s flight north on the island of Kyushu.
We land at Kyushu’s southern city of Kagoshima, which is also the capital of Japan’s pork industry. The prefecture’s Kurobuta black pigs – a cross between Japanese black pigs and Berkshires – are famed throughout the land and, increasingly, beyond.
While the rest of the world associates the Japanese with raw fish and, perhaps, bits of chicken grilled on sticks, pork is by far the most popular meat in Japan. The Japanese eat almost more pork than beef and chicken combined, in among other things tonkotsu ramen (the soup made by boiling pork bones, with a slice of chashu, braised pork, on top), or gyoza (Chinese-style pork-filled dumplings), or tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets), all of which, from what I have seen over the last ten years, are only increasing in populari
ty.
From around the eighth century and the introduction of Buddhism to Japan, up until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese sup-posedly did not eat any meat. This is the common perception, at least, but it isn’t true. Though virtually no one openly ate beef, wild game continued to be hunted and eaten throughout the centuries, and in Kyushu and Okinawa in particular they never stopped eating pork (even in Tokyo pork was sometimes prescribed, as per my grandmother’s late-night Scotch, ‘for medicinal reasons’).
The Asian black pigs came to this part of southern Kyushu – then known as Satsuma – about four hundred years ago from China via Okinawa. The region’s ruling Shimazu clan, which also governed Okinawa at the time (to this day, Kyushu is viewed as a former colonial power by many in Okinawa), were a notoriously combative bunch. Its leaders early on recognised the importance of protein in the diet of their warriors, and a herd of pigs would accompany their armies wherever they fought. The fact that the Satsumas called pigs ‘walking vegetables’ perhaps indicates that they still felt some sensitivity about eating meat, but eat them they did and Kagoshima has been Japan’s pre-eminent pork prefecture ever since. Today, Kagoshima Prefecture is the porcine equivalent of Kobe and its beef (although ‘Kobe beef’ is just a brand, and the cattle are raised elsewhere).
The modern-day Kurobata pig supposedly evolved when a Berkshire pig was sent to Japan as a gift from Queen Victoria’s Windsor estate in the nineteenth century. It probably entered Japan via the port of Nagasaki in north-western Kyushu, and ended up pairing off with the local Asian black pigs. (Someone really should write a biography of that pig.) The island became Japan’s main pig-breeding region because there was more land for raising animals here compared to mountainous Honshu, Japan’s main island, and the climate was perfect: warm enough for piglets to flourish, cold enough in winter for their fat to accumulate. For the same reasons, southern Kyushu is today also a prime region for raising chickens (‘Satsuma chickens’ are also a major brand in Japan, the equivalent of Poulet de Bresse in France).
The Meaning of Rice Page 3