Kyushu’s Kurobuta breed almost died out after World War II because they required too much time and effort to raise during what were straitened times but, slowly, as Japan grew more prosperous, the market for a super-pork grew and, over the last decade or so, strict rules for the raising of pigs that carry the Kagoshima Kurobuta label were defined and regulated. The pigs are slaughtered at around 250 days, weighing about 80kg; by comparison, in Europe, factory pigs are slaughtered at around 180 days, yet can weigh 115kg. Should you ever need to, you can identify an authentic Kurobuta pig from their six white patches – one on the tail, one on the nose and one on each hoof. Breeding, combined with unique feeds (often sweet potatoes, apples, or, in the case of one particularly avante garde Kyushu pork farm, strawberries), and a freedom to roam, has created a superior swine, its sweet, juicy, tender flesh boasting unusually high levels of tasty amino acids. Kagoshima pigs are also said to have a higher pH level which makes for darker, more delicious meat and a higher melting point for the fat, which in turn gives a purer flavour.
While we are in Kagoshima I really want to visit a pork farm and learn about the special methods that make Kurobuta pork so lusted after. Some weeks prior to our arrival, I had made contact with a famous pork farm in the region, and began to negotiate a visit.
Dealing with corporate Japan is always tricky. One of the main challenges is that, whether you are making a formal approach to a company or just asking a convenience store assistant if they sell chocolate mochi, it is rare ever to get a blunt ‘no’ in Japan. If your request really is literally impossible, you will most likely receive a head tilt and an expression of regret, followed by something along the lines of ‘That’s difficult at the moment’, or ‘Mmm-hmm, I am not really sure if that’s possible.’ I have several theories about why the Japanese find it impossible to say ‘no’ to one’s face: it could be a facet of their famed service culture, ‘omotenashi’, in which the customer is not merely always right, they are properly cherished and respected; maybe it is born from an excess of sheer politeness, or just a genuine reluctance to disappoint; perhaps it is because I am a foreigner – I really don’t know.
Neither am I any the wiser about what happened in what I came to think of as ‘the mysterious case of the reluctant pork farmers’. It was clear early on that the people at the farm didn’t want me to visit for reasons never specified during our initial correspondence but, equally, they couldn’t quite bring themselves to refuse outright. Using the incredibly helpful local tourist board as an intermediary, I repeated my request. It did the trick, and what I believed to be a firm date for a visit to see some Kurobuta pigs in the Fleisch was finally arranged.
Except, I wouldn’t be able to see the actual pigs, they informed me in a later email.
That was the whole point, I replied. I really need to see some pigs.
Oh, OK, then, you can see the pigs, they wrote back.
Fast-forward a few weeks and we have arrived in Kagoshima, and checked into our hotel, the Shiroyama. Our room, with four single beds arranged in a line like something from The Waltons, has stunning views across the bay to Sakura-jima and its gently, smoking, very live volcano. I am unpacking. Lissen is tending to her sweet potato test tubes, lining them up on the window sill so that they can get some light and, I think, yes, she is actually singing softly to them. Asger and Emil are looking at the photos they took at Okinawa’s aquarium of the three astonishingly graceful, gigantic whale sharks held in captivity there.
I check my emails. There is one from the pork farm. They have cancelled the visit tomorrow. Apparently, local authority rules forbid such visits to pig farms. Presumably these rules have been in place for a while but they have only now decided to tell me. When it came down to it, a concern about breaking rules finally trumped disappointing the foreigner. I ping back a virtual foot-stamp and angry pout, but they politely explain that foreigners, or indeed anyone who has been abroad, cannot come within sight of the pigs. A few years ago a foreign agricultural student visited a farm elsewhere on Kyushu and inadvertently brought foot and mouth disease with him, resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of animals. Aside from the fact that this seems to imply that anyone who works in the pig industry in Japan is never allowed to go on holiday abroad, I completely understand their concerns. I will just have to make do with eating some pork instead, which we do that night at a famed local restaurant, Ajimori.
Not only is Ajimori, an upscale place in downtown Kagoshima, the place to eat pork in this southern capital, it reputedly invented pork shabu-shabu. More commonly associated with beef, shabu-shabu is such a convivial, civilised way to eat I always feel, and healthy too. In the middle of our table is a large metal pot, atop a portable butane gas burner, or ‘konro’. Inside the pot is a delicate, translucent konbu-infused broth into which we swish super-thin cuts of the local pork belly. The slices are more fat than meat and have been beautifully presented on a platter, bunched into pink and white striped roses, alongside shiitake mushrooms, cabbage, negi (Japanese leeks), enoki mushrooms and, finally, udon noodles, all of which are also to be cooked in the pot. The pork is extremely sweet, gently porky rather than the full-on barnyard you get with tonkotsu ramen, and it is so tender that it only requires a few seconds in the hot broth. The local shochu pairs perfectly with it, cutting through the fat and cleaning the palate ready for the next swish. All in all, it is a much more enjoyable introduction to the best pork in the world than a visit to a pig farm would have been.
Japanese hotel breakfast buffets present a strange culinary landscape, an improbable smorgasbord of incongruous delights. There is always tofu, seaweed, miso, rice and pickles, of course, but usually a salad with Italian dressing, maybe some fried chicken, various cakes and pastries, and often the dreaded natto (snot-textured, fermented soy beans which smell like a tramp’s wet woollen socks). In a hotel in Kanazawa at breakfast I once faced the twin challenges of pickled fugu roe and the siren song of a morning draft beer, but the Shiroyama Hotel’s breakfast buffet is perhaps the most extreme I have encountered so far, featuring a self-serve soft ice-cream machine, more draft beer, as well as lasagne, ‘tuna lung’ and wagyu croquettes. Along with the usual condiments of soy sauce and ponzu, there is also the fabulous local black vinegar, made from brown rice and fermented outdoors in ceramic pots for up to five years, plus I spy a display of another of Kagoshima’s great local delicacies, ‘satsuma-age’, deep-fried hockey pucks of finely minced fish paste, sweetened with mirin.
We try a few more satsuma-age later that morning at the city’s most famous satsuma-age shop, Agetateya. I get a bit carried away, and order mushroom, sweet potato, green pea, carrot and cheese versions. In each, these various ingredients are added to a basic fish paste, made with a blend of cod and mackerel with a little flour and lots of – perhaps too much – mirin (a kind of sweet sake, for cooking). Satsuma-age are extraordinarily sweet for something that is supposed to be savoury but at least Agetateya’s, being freshly made, are a little less rubbery than they can be.
Agetateya has been doing business for around half a century but across the street is an even older store, Akashiya, founded in 1847, selling another Kagoshima sweet treat, karukan, a type of wagashi, or Japanese confectionery. These are ethereal, spongey-soft, snow-white cubes made from ground yam, egg whites and very finely ground rice flour, along with lots of sugar. They are utterly moreish. I have a mental list of Japanese foods and products which I would sell in my imaginary Japan-themed store, and karukan is definitely on that list.
Later, we take the ferry across Kagoshima Bay to the volcanic island of Sakura-jima. Emil excitedly points to a group of dolphins a little way off in the bay. We assume they are an everyday occurrence but another passenger, a local, tells us she has never seen dolphins here before. Some in our party appreciate our good fortune, but others among us interpret the dolphins’ appearance as an omen of impending tectonic disaster.
I am wrong, at least that day, but Minami-dake, the southern peak of Sakura
-jima’s range of three volcanoes, does erupt frequently; news of its most recent outburst had, you’ll remember, filtered through to Europe just as we were leaving for the airport to fly to Okinawa. About 4,500 brave souls actually live on the island, many of them farming the local type of orange, the Sakura-jima komikan, and the Sakura-jima daikon, which, thanks to the unusually fertile volcanic soil, can grow to the size and shape of a medicine ball and weigh over thirty kilos. Though their island erupts less often than it used to, kids go to school wearing yellow hard hats, every home has a shelter and every street a special rubbish bin for the ash. According to contemporary reports, during the 1779 eruption ‘the water in local wells boiled and the sea turned purple’; the largest eruption was in 1914 and created a lava flow so expansive it connected the island with the Kagoshima peninsula. The fallout stretched as far as Kamchatka in Russia. Of course, virtually everyone in Japan lives with the threat of seismic activity to some extent, a fact which will be brought home just a few weeks after we passed through Kyushu when a 7.3 quake, and several large aftershocks, strikes the city of Kumamoto on the east coast. Two dozen people will die and thousands will be left homeless.
One place which makes the most of the region’s volcanic activity is Ibusuki, a small town a little further south around the bay, back on Kyushu proper. This is where people flock to be buried – mostly, if they are honest, to be photographed being buried – in the black volcanic sands which are warmed by the local hot springs.
After visiting Sakura-jima, we drive down to Ibusuki to Hakusuikan Hotel where you don’t even have to leave the luxury of what is one of Japan’s most famous hotels to be buried up to your neck in hot sand for fifteen minutes; it all takes place in a specially built wooden shed next to the hotel’s onsen baths.
The hotel’s owner, Tadataka Shimotakehara, tells us people have been enjoying the health benefits of the hot sands here for 400 years, including his family. ‘My father [who built the hotel over sixty years ago] is ninety-five, and my mother ninety-two, and they are both very well, so it must be good!’ he says. The seismic activity which creates the hot springs also helps to create a special white clay found in Kagoshima, used for the celebrated Satsuma pottery. This is all very interesting, but then comes the bombshell: Sean Connery stayed at the hotel while filming You Only Live Twice nearby in 1966! ‘A very nice man, very kind to me when I was a young boy,’ remembers Shimotakehara.
Afterwards, we try the hot sand for ourselves but, far from being the relaxing if quirky spa-type treatment depicted in TV documentaries, I find the whole experience to be more akin to a form of torture. The sand is heated by the hot spring water which runs just a few centimetres beneath the surface and reaches as much as 70°Celsius and, as teams of young people bury us beneath several kilos of the stuff covering our arms and hands, we must endure the unbearable tickles of sweat trickling down our forehead and face. After just a couple of minutes of this, if someone had asked me for my PIN number, I would have surrendered it gladly.
After rinsing all the sand out of our various crevices, we adjourn to the separate-gender onsen baths. This is the first experience of a Japanese onsen for Asger and Emil and though, having been raised part-Scandinavian, they have no qualms about public nudity, I note puzzlement and some alarm cross their faces as I explain onsen etiquette.
‘First you need to sit on these little stools in front of that mirror and thoroughly wash yourselves with soap. Then you rinse. Take one of these tiny flannels and, using it to vaguely cover your private bits, you go into that room there, where there is a very large hot bath which we are going to share with a bunch of other men. We don’t know them, no. When you get into the bath, it is important that neither the cloth nor your hair goes in the water, so you fold the cloth and place it on the top of your head, like this, right? And no swimming. And no diving, or splashing. The idea is, you just sit in the water. OK?’
Asger and Emil nod warily but follow my instructions. They are impeccable onsen guests but, later, there emerges a very clear schism regarding how the two felt about this most Japanese form of social interaction. Emil is adamantly opposed, claiming at another onsen we visited later on in the trip that he saw some ‘poo’ floating in the water.
‘I hate sitting on the little plastic chairs to wash. If people like it, then good for them. I know what I saw. Even if it was algae or something, that doesn’t make it any better,’ he will say.
Asger, on the other hand, has always had a relaxed attitude to public nudity. He also happens to be very long-sighted. As he puts it, ‘Without my glasses, I can’t see anything anyway, so it doesn’t matter to me if anyone has their clothes on or not.’
Chapter 6
Shochu
Can you name the world’s most popular spirit? Vodka? Whisky? In fact, it is soju, the Korean distilled spirit, an ancestor of arak, the distilled drink made from grapes, which arrived on the Korean peninsula with invading Mongolians in the fourteenth century. Soju is usually made from rice and typically has around 20–25 per cent alcohol content (although sometimes much more), but it can also be made from potatoes or grains. The bestselling brand is Korea’s Jinro which sold seventy-one million cases in 2014 and is promoted by Psy, of ‘Gangam Style’ fame.
Soju translates directly as ‘burn liquor’ and though I am sure different brands vary in quality, the only virtue of those I have tasted in Korean restaurants is that they were very cheap and very strong. Few other drinks can match up to kimchi, and soju at least induces a warm, fuzzy feeling in an efficient amount of time.
Japan’s equivalent is shochu, whose distilling techniques were probably acquired during a Japanese invasion of the Korean peninsula in the sixteenth century, maybe even earlier. There are two main grades: otsurui, the more characterful, richer flavoured premium type, sometimes also called honkaku-shochu and made via a single distillation from whole sweet potatoes, or rice, or wheat (although I have heard of shochu being made from everything from carrots to chestnuts); and korui, a lower grade, lower alcohol, blander variety, distilled multiple times from a mash of sweet potatoes, often with various additives.
Shochu used to have a similar image to soju – it was something to be drunk with purpose, that purpose being to get drunk – but over the last decade a new wave of shochus has emerged in Japan that are smoother and dangerously drinkable. Sweet potato-based shochus in particular are even beginning to usurp sake as Japan’s national drink.
Every time I try a good Japanese shochu – whether it is one of those fiery-fruity ‘imo shochu’, made with potatoes, or the smoother, korui grain varieties – I wonder why this clear spirit is not more popular in the West. I have become a bit of a shochu evangelist (if by ‘evangelist’ one can mean ‘heavy drinker of’). I like it neat on the rocks but it is also great diluted with hot water (called ‘oyuwari’ – ideally mixed a day before and reheated in a clay vase), and is ubiquitous throughout the izakaya (a casual restaurant where the focus is usually as much on drinking as eating) of Japan as the mixed drink Chu-Hai (a truncation of ‘shochu highball’), blended with lemonade, cold tea or other soft drinks – a kind of Japanese alcopop. Grape flavour chu-hai is good but the lychee one is insanely drinkable. Chu-hai is also sold in cans – never bottles for some reason – in all convenience stores in Japan.
Chu-hai is about as far as you can get from something a sommelier might get involved with, but the last time I drank a can of it, for some reason I started to think about terroir and wine pairings, the way wines in Europe often match the local cuisine – a flinty Sancerre with the chalky white local goat’s cheese, for instance; a bold and fruity Côtes du Rhône with a meaty boeuf en daube; or a vinegary Alsatian choucroute garnie with a light, mineral Pinot Noir, and so on. This led me to wonder why there is no equivalent symbiosis between sake and Japan’s regional foods. Of course, there are plenty of notable regions for making sake, places like Niigata or Kyoto where you are guaranteed a certain quality level, and there are also several bad sake regions (
like Tokyo and Yamanashi), where you would probably be better off drinking the local beer, or even, as we will see later, the local wine, but sake always seems detached from the food of its region, from its terroir.
Perhaps the ‘problem’ is that sake goes with just about every type of food, Japanese and non-Japanese. Its acidity, sweetness and complex umami flavours make it a great match for just about anything savoury, but the real reason for the terroir disconnect, I think, is that the main ingredient in sake – rice – can be grown just about anywhere in the country. Indeed, sake producers in one part of the country will often boast that they get their rice from another prefecture, often Niigata, Fukushima or Akita, no matter that they are hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, the other important ingredient in sake is water and, though I realise that Japanese water has special qualities, I am not convinced it is that different depending on where you are in Japan.
It occurred to me that maybe shochu was different. I knew it was particularly associated with Kyushu and its food so perhaps it reflected aspects of terroir. Already, we have discovered at the shabu-shabu pioneer Ajimori that shochu matches really well with the sweet, juicy pork for which this part of Japan is famed, but what other connections might there be between shochu and Kyushu cuisine?
Historically, the shochu industry has always focused on Kyushu precisely because of issues of terroir, namely its warmer climate and the fact that this has always been Japan’s main sweet potato growing region. This is the shochu heartland also partly by default, as the warm, humid climate makes sake brewing tricky. Even in colder parts of the country, sake brewing takes place in the autumn and winter for this reason. To make sake here you would need to have powerful air conditioning running throughout the autumn brewing season, otherwise the yellow koji used for sake wouldn’t survive. Hence, there are only a couple of sake brewers in all of southern Kyushu, while in contrast there are dozens of companies making shochu. The largest is Kirishima, the Kikkoman of the shochu world, which makes what are generally considered solid, mid-range, quality shochus in vast quantities. But as we were to discover when we drove there through the Austrian-looking alpine countryside from Kagoshima to Kirishima City, it also makes some intriguing and unusual premium brand shochus.
The Meaning of Rice Page 4