The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  Kirishima is almost singlehandedly responsible for the extraordin-ary shochu boom Japan has experienced in the last few years. Around fifteen years ago it set out to change the classic demographic of the shochu drinker by targeting female drinkers with new, smoother, multiple-distillation shochus. These were sold in pretty bottles with lighter colouring on their labels and promoted with celebrity endorsements and female models in their adverts. It worked, at least if the sheer scale of the Kirishima Distillery is anything to go by.

  Visiting a large Japanese company is always a special experience. You would expect it to be formal, and it is: both guest and hosts have clearly delineated roles to play. Over the years, I have learned that guests are expected to arrive about ten minutes before the agreed time, but no matter how early you get there a group of between four to six men and/or women in dark suits will already be standing silently waiting for you in reception (in Japan, if you are ‘on time’, you are late). There follows an awkward flurry as many, many business cards are exchanged simultaneously and deep bows executed. The entire group then follows you throughout your visit, even though only one or two of them will ever speak or in any active sense be involved in the tour.

  This normally begins with the visitor being shepherded into a dusty, rarely used boardroom which always has a kind of trophy cabinet at one end and, no matter how prestigious or fancy the company, the same old worn-out, budget office furniture (this was even the case at Muji, the chic interior and clothing retailer, whose HQ I once visited in Tokyo: it might as well have been Wernham Hogg). In the boardroom, a corporate video, sometimes still actually on a VHS tape, will already have been lined up in the machine. The film will begin with a wobbly image of a sky- or seascape accompanied by some piano muzak, and continue with various scenes of diligent employees going about their work in factories and fields, before climaxing with another shot of a seascape and some slightly more stirring orchestral music. The video inevitably closes with a not-quite-right English slogan (in this case ‘New Quality Wave: Kirishima’). After that you don disposable white paper hygiene-ware (stretchy hat, paper coat and comedy plastic slippers, always three sizes too small) and are shown a variety of production facilities featuring very large stainless steel tanks and complex piping, with a glimpse of a laboratory, before ending in a store selling the company’s products. This is the case whether you are visiting a fruit company, a soy sauce factory or, in this case, Japan’s leading shochu distillery. At least by now I know what to expect and am able to brief my family to muster their interested faces which, I have to say, they manage very well.

  Kirishima is slightly different, though. It is really huge; it has its own golf course. Then there is the wonderful aroma of cooked potatoes which sets our nostrils twitching before we even enter the main building. And, this time we are accompanied by nine men and women in dark suits, as well as one or two in scrupulously clean overalls – a record. Then comes the final difference between the Kirishima factory tour and all the others I had experienced: our trip ends with one of the greatest meals I have ever had in Japan.

  But first the tour. The scale of the output here is immense: 40,000 bottles a day. We learn the difference between Japanese shochu and Korean soju (the Koreans add sugar, while the sweet potato shochu Kirishima makes relies on the sugars in the potatoes to provide the alcohol). Kirishima makes some shochus using rice, buckwheat and barley, but most of their output is sweet potato shochu, which requires 320 tons of locally grown potatoes per day, 110,000 tons a year, making the company the largest consumer of sweet potatoes in the world; in one vast hangar we watch endless broad conveyor belts of yellow-skinned potatoes the size and shape of rugby balls being sorted prior to steaming. Shochu-making proceeds precisely as with sake-making for the first few stages. Rice is soaked in water, then steamed and inoculated with this mystical substance, koji, but hereafter the two diverge as cooked sweet potatoes are added and thereafter shochu is distilled rather than brewed with yeast. For most of its mainstream products Kirishima uses a whisky-style continuous distillation process which makes for a smoother, some would say blander drink with a broader appeal, but for the more complex, premium shochu, they distil only once.

  Kirishima is currently run by three sons, the third generation of the founding Enatsu family. After the tour we are invited to have lunch with the second son and chairman, Takuzo Enatsu. An imposing man in his late fifties wearing a dark suit, he is the archetype of a Japanese CEO. We join him in the traditional tatami-covered dining room of the Enatsu family house where he was born within the factory grounds.

  ‘Some years ago, I decided that shochu should be part of Japanese food culture,’ Enatsu-san begins as we sit down at the table. ‘So I created kuro shochu to pair better with Japanese food.’

  This would prove a very smart decision. Today, Enatsu’s brain-child – shochu made with ‘kuro’ or black koji is the bestselling shochu in Japan, but at the time it was a controversial move as this smoother, continuously distilled sweet potato shochu is made with the same koji that awamori producers used. But Kirishima’s shochu is very different from the Okinawan spirit, Enatsu explains.

  ‘Awamori is made with rice, of course, and it goes very well with Okinawan fried foods. I always drink it when I go to Okinawa. But when I bring it to Kyushu it just doesn’t match with local foods here. So I wanted to make a shochu with a milder flavour. I was going against eighty years of tradition in this company when I changed the type of koji to black koji, and some of our older customers were angry when I changed it. But you can’t keep on doing things the way they were done a hundred years ago. Nobody on the board believed me when I said I wanted to make this. I did it though, and the market loves it.’

  This blockbuster shochu is one of the half-dozen shochu we are served during a dazzling lunch of local dishes. Another is Aka Kirishima, a seasonal shochu, made with purple sweet potatoes. It has a notably sharp aftertaste.

  ‘Yes, exactly!’ Enatsu beams approvingly when I mention this. That sharpness helps clean the palate between mouthfuls of food. ‘You have ten thousand tastebuds, and when you take a sip of this, it resets them ready for the next flavours.’

  The company is about to celebrate its centenary and to mark the anniversary Enatsu is breeding a new super-potato. ‘I want to create a potato with a DNA unique to Kirishima, that no one else has or can copy. I will make something that nobody in human history has tasted. After you drink shochu made from it, I want you to feel like you’ve had a big hug. That’s the taste I am after.’

  Enatsu also has an eye on the health and beauty market. Because Kirishima doesn’t add sugar to its shochu, it has fewer calories than many other alcoholic drinks; what calories it contains, he claims, are ‘consumed by the body’s temperature. It is good for beauty and eyesight too. There is a growing demand for foods that make you healthy and beautify you, and you can do this by drinking shochu.’

  This is the best news I have had all day, to go with what has been an outstanding meal – an astonishing kaiseki lunch featuring abalone with fermented katsuo (bonito) guts, beef tongue, grilled bonito, vegetable nigiri and a lobster miso soup the umami power of which shall haunt me for many years to come. It is not an obviously child-friendly menu, but I watch, amazed, out of the corner of my eye as my two sons devour the lot.

  I focus my increasingly blurry attention on tasting more Kirishima shochus. There is an Astaxanthin shochu, whose alarming pink colour derives from the same compound as that found in crabs and salmon eggs; and a top of the range, limited edition, thirteen-year Misty Island Gyoku in a gold box. This last one is personally blended by Enatsu-san and includes Chinese herbs, birds’ nests, Madagascan vanilla beans, mozuku seaweed and coprinus mushrooms. It retails for ¥9,500 (£60) compared to ¥1,000 for their basic shochu and has a strong, sweet vanilla aftertaste.

  For dessert we are served a classic Miyazaki confection, ‘kujira yokan’, or ‘whale yokan’, a black and white azuki paste/mochi sandwich, so-named because it
s colour scheme supposedly resembles that of a killer whale (created for the fifth lord of the Shimizu clan, legend has it, so that he would grow up as strong as a whale). This is followed by a slice of a remarkable fruit, the hyuganatsu, a citrus which – I later look up – spontaneously evolved following the freak pairing of a yuzu and a pomelo in a garden in Miyazaki in the 1820s. The hyuganatsu looks like a self-satisfied yuzu, plump with a beautifully smooth complexion. It is not only blessed with delicious, sweet orange flesh, but also has edible pith which is neither bitter nor astringent like every other citrus fruit I know, but sweet and delicately fragrant. I have a kind of pith phobia but this is fantastic. I add it to my mental list of those obscure local citrus fruits with which Japan abounds, like the dekopon from nearby Kumamoto, the vivacious sudachi (like a kind of mini lime with orange flesh), or the sweet kumquat, the ‘kinkan’.

  An analysis of my liver function might have told a different story, but as I totter away from the Kirishima Distillery together with my family some time later, I have convinced myself that our meal has been a healthy introduction to this fabulous, friendly spirit shochu, and to the terroir of southern Kyushu.

  Chapter 7

  Nori

  Something is troubling me. On our three-hour drive up the western Izumi coast of Kyushu we pass a pachinko parlour. Nothing unusual in that. There is at least one of these cacophonous cathedrals in every Japanese town, each of them filled with row upon row of vertical pinball machines providing a constant clattering of ball-bearings and flashing lights for their entranced victims. And the coast of Kyushu, though spectacular with its forested, mountainous cliffs, rocky islets and sandy bays, is no different. Wherever man has intervened in the precious gaps of flat terrain, he has hastily filled them with flat-pack retail warehouses and light industrial estates, strip malls and fast food drive-throughs. Only the occasional vivid green rice paddy relieves the grey concrete and rusty corrugation. You see this kind of almost wilfully dreary urban sprawl everywhere in provincial Japan but, actually, it fascinates me. There are few if any places in this country that I don’t find interesting, few if any streets I can walk down without finding something to linger over, whether it is a crazy tangle of overhead electric cables, the precision parking of a tiny kei car in a space barely larger than it, or one of those ingenious life ‘hacks’ at which the Japanese excel (they call them ‘urawaza’) – water bottles dangling on fences to deter cats, and so on. Sometimes, though, even I have to concede things have gone too far.

  In between the Mazda showrooms and endless parking lots, the biggest buildings are these pachinko parlours; ‘parlour’ – an oddly domestic word for such cavernous warehouses. But a slogan, in English, on the outside of one especially vast pachinko place we have just passed intrigues me. It reads:

  ‘Take your hat off to the past, but take your coat off to the future.’

  What could this possibly mean? What aphoristic imperative was mangled here? This occupies me for some miles until we arrive by the concrete sea wall at the small fishing village of Izumi. In fact, it is only now, looking at my notes some weeks later, that I have come up with my own interpretation of the weird slogan. I reckon it is an ominous prophecy for the future of nori.

  We are driving up the coasts of Kagoshima and Kumamoto Prefectures to find out more about nori, the paper-like black, dried seaweed used to make sushi rolls and also to enwrap the ubiquitous onigiri – or rice balls – the classic Japanese snack found in every convenience store and train platform kiosk the length of the country. Nori is also sold shredded as kizami nori, but best of all is furikake – shredded nori mixed with sesame seeds, various different types of dried fish, and chilli flakes. Furikake is one of those substances, like parmesan or bacon, which makes everything you sprinkle it over taste better.

  Like shochu, nori processing was another sixteenth-century arrival brought back following military activities by the shogun’s armies in Korea. Back then it was a precious crop; one sheet of nori was said to be worth 1.5 kg of rice. These days, of course, the most common variety, susabi nori, is as cheap as paper and sold in most supermarkets in Britain.

  I had often wondered how they turned seaweed – in this case, Porphyra – into perfectly square paper-thin sheets, one side always slightly rough, the other shiny-smooth, but my curiosity turned to fascination after I visited a specialist nori shop on a busy street corner close to Tsukiji fish market, in Tokyo, a year or so earlier. I had asked the shop manager what was the ultimate, the very best type of nori.

  ‘Definitely Asakusa nori,’ he had told me. ‘But we haven’t had any this season, and I am not sure we will ever get it again.’ I made a note of the name, ‘Asakusa nori’, and began asking about it whenever I spoke to chefs in Japan.

  Did it really come from Asakusa, a central district of Tokyo? This seemed unlikely. Why was it so great? How could I get some? How much did it cost? I found no clear answers.

  At one point, I was lucky enough to meet the legendary Japanese chef Nobu Matsuhisa, co-founder with his friend Robert De Niro, of the Nobu restaurant chain, and the man credited by many with bringing Japanese food to the global mainstream. I was introduced to Nobu-san by mutual friends at an event at the London branch of his eponymous restaurant chain. I asked him if he had heard of Asakusa nori. He thought for a moment, as if dredging up a long-forgotten memory. ‘Asakusa nori is from Tokyo, or it used to be. It doesn’t grow in Tokyo any more, and hasn’t for a long, long time,’ Nobu said.

  Eventually, I heard a rumour that Asakusa nori was still farmed on Kyushu and, knowing we would be travelling through the island, I thought I would look into it. What I didn’t count on, as we set off from the hot sand hotel at Ibusuki that day and headed up the coast, was that I would also discover an improbable tale of how the entire multi-billion yen Japanese nori industry as we know it today would not exist if it weren’t for a discovery made by a remarkable English woman, long forgotten in her homeland but celebrated every April here in western Japan.

  It looks like nori, but not quite the nori I am used to. Held up to the light, the raggedy looking sheet is a translucent apple-green, not the dense, inky-black of the nori sheets I buy at home or that wrap onigiri in the convenience stores. It is like comparing handmade paper to the stuff I buy in bulk for my printer.

  I have in my hands actual, genuine Asakusa nori, the King of Nori. Not only that, this is the ultimate incarnation because it has been dried naturally, in the sun, instead of by machine. I take a sniff and get a subtle tang of the sea. I tear a piece off to taste. It evaporates on my tongue, leaving a sweet, toasted, briny flavour. Unlike the nori I am used to, it doesn’t clump together and stick to my teeth, and there is no bitter aftertaste. It is the finest, most fragile and delicious sheet of seaweed I have ever eaten, the seaweed equivalent of white truffles or caviar. Except, it turns out this translucent green paper is far rarer than mere truffles because it is quite probably the last of its kind on earth.

  The man who has been kind enough to give me a sheet of the nori is Yoshio Shimanaka, sixty-two, a nori farmer just like his father before him. He is one of seven still working in the small harbour town of Izumi in Kagoshima Prefecture, our first stop of the day. With his massive meaty hands and close-cropped hair, Shimanaka looks more like a retired boxer, but he has spent all his life growing, harvesting and drying nori, working twenty-hour days during the freezing cold harvest season from December to mid-March.

  In its natural state, nori grows like a slimy, dark green curtain on rocks in tidal areas, benefiting from the nutrients in the sea when it is below the water and then, when the tide goes out, from the sun’s rays. Farmed nori replicates this cycle; spores are cultivated in oyster shells which are tied to rigid plastic nets suspended horizontally between poles planted in the seabed.

  About a decade and a half ago farmers in Japan began spraying their nori with different types of acid solutions to control pests. The acids were supposed to be closely monitored but in reality all sorts of
nasty stuff has been used, including hydrochloric acid, and the surrounding seas have been badly contaminated. ‘Chemicals are not allowed here in Izumi,’ Shimanaka explains as we chomp on the nori. ‘We have kids and grandkids, we don’t want to put chemicals in the water here.’

  Nori is high in amino acids, and an especially good source for vitamin B, he continues. ‘And it is very, very healthy. You know, after the Fukushima disaster many of the locals there started eating more nori instead of the local vegetables. The best way to eat it is just lightly toasted over an open flame, with rice.’

  We are standing in an open-sided corrugated shed next to his house beside the seawall. Over a dozen other people have gathered here to welcome us this morning: other nori farmers, Shimanaka’s wife and the mayor of Izumi. A table has been laid with all manner of sweets and cakes which Asger and Emil are eyeing intently. We are offered tea and soft drinks and sit down in deckchairs to talk. Asger and Emil descend on the cake table like locusts.

  Afterwards, we walk across the road, through a row of pine trees twisted by the wind, and climb the sea wall to look out over Shimanaka’s fishing grounds. Hundreds of wooden poles jut in neat lines from the sea’s surface.

  During the harvest season, the fresh-grown tips of nori are cut every week or so, and the harvested purple-brown slime is brought back to the shore for drying and processing. Here in Izumi the bay is shallow for several hundred metres out, so farmers usually wade out into the freezing water during the winter time, often at night because the flavour is said to be better when the seaweed is harvested then. Sometimes Shimanaka will hand-harvest but mostly he will use a machine which automatically cuts the seaweed at the right length to leave ten centimetres still growing on the netting. Most is dried by machine, but Shimanaka does sun-dry some special nori, like the sheet we just tasted, for his own use.