The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  The ‘seducer’ moves back, smiling. His Kabe Don work is done as far as my wife is concerned, but now it appears it is my turn. I am guided gently towards the man by the Huis Ten Bosch staff and enter his ‘office’ in the corner of the chocolate shop. This has been cordoned off and, for some reason, furnished Steampunk-style, like a Victorian doctor’s surgery. I pass Lissen as she leaves. She is looking a little flushed and guilty, as well she might. The man now positions me against the wall. I assume it is a joke, that he will stop and everyone will start laughing but, without warning, he moves in again, pressing one hand on the wall beside my head.

  ‘Ha, yes, this is all very jolly and funny, can we stop now?’ I think to myself, but he begins unwrapping a heart-shaped candy and positioning it on my lips. I mean no offence to my beautiful wife but, clearly, you could have placed a dead halibut in front of this guy and he would try to seduce it. Blushingly, I find myself accepting the chocolate, trying not to feel like a cheap sex object. My dear children have somehow now forgotten their embarrassment and are filming all this on their cameras for future use.

  ‘That was weird, wrong on so many levels,’ says Emil afterwards. ‘Is that seriously how Japanese people are like? They need to get a life. It’s already weird enough to see you and mum kiss, but another man feeding you chocolate …?’

  Kabe Don is definitely strange but I should stress that it was performed with the kind of relaxed humour typical of the Japanese but which rarely survives the translation via our media. Contrary to their popular image, the Japanese have a pretty good sense of humour (if I may generalise about an entire nation, not for the first time in my career). They are open, accepting, non-judgemental and fun, which is something to bear in mind when you see those crazy Japanese game shows, or Instagram feeds of people wearing cosplay costumes. Mostly, those involved get the joke and usually the broader Japanese viewing public tend to think it is all as mad as we do (it always helps, too, to attempt a cultural reversal: how must Mr Blobby, say, or the State Opening of Parliament appear to outsiders?).

  As our blushes subside, it is time to move on from the Chocolate House to explore some of Huis Ten Bosch’s other, more child-friendly attractions. I had planned this visit really as a thank you to Asger and Emil. Over the previous few days they have sat through endless technical discussions about seaweed husbandry and shochu distilling techniques which they probably did not find especially gripping. This is payback, so I didn’t expect to enjoy Huis Ten Bosch at all, but, my Kabe Don assignation aside, I absolutely love it. I assumed it would be a chipboard and fibreglass mock-up of a Dutch city, but the buildings are constructed with absolute integrity out of proper materials and it is actually quite beautiful, right down to the detail in the brickwork and the ornate, cast-iron street lamps. Being Japanese, all is clean, ordered and relatively classy. The tulips are incredible, and not a little miraculous given it is February, and best of all there is virtually no queueing. On the rare occasion when there is the slightest risk of having to wait in line, ‘Please Wait Slightly’ signs are positioned at the entrance to the attraction.

  The food is on a higher plane to the stuff usually served at Disneyland, too. In the countless gift shops dedicated to local foodstuffs you can buy mentaiko (cured, spicy pollock roe, a speciality of Kyushu), dried niboshi (sardines), and Dutch cheeses. Best of all, at night-time, the entire park erupts with astonishing 3D lighting displays which transform the buildings’ facades into moving images. The sixty-six-metre-high town hall tower becomes a giant waterfall; the surface of the canals turn into Saturday Night Fever-style pulsating dance floors.

  We join an open-air ‘Venetian masked ball’ which turns out to involve communal dancing to ABBA hits. There aren’t any roller-coasters or conventional thrill rides at Huis Ten Bosch. The closest you can come to visceral thrills is on a zip wire. To gain admission we have to sign a lengthy indemnity form pledging that we have no physical ailments and that we understand it brings a risk of ‘emotional injury’. It all seems a little overcautious for something that can be enjoyed by six-year-olds and the precautions seemed odder still when, later on that evening, we visit a kind of haunted house, called the Prison Ward, which turns out to be quite the most disturbing thing I have ever experienced – either at a fun park or anywhere else. Far from the tame ‘fright house’ experience I was expecting, it involves full-on psychological terrorising which begins with the stomach-churning smell of formaldehyde as we enter (the theme appears more ‘prison hospital from hell’); is followed by the graphic, gruesome exhibits of operating theatres and severed limbs which I have to scurry past with as much dignity as I can muster; as well as the suddenly rattling doors which make me jump out of my skin; and the horribly authentic moans and screams from hidden speakers. It is as if David Lynch directed Casualty. I leave the building a quivering wreck.

  True to its billing, the front desk of the Robot Hotel on the edge of the park is ‘manned’ by a robot dinosaur and a robot woman. We elect to check in with the dinosaur but he doesn’t seem in the mood, remaining motionless to our commands. While we wait for him to gather his thoughts and accept our reservation code, Lissen and I start a heated discussion about the last chocolate-covered macadamia nut in a box we have been sharing – a convenience-store staple to which we have lately become a little addicted.

  Our raised voices at last prompt the dinosaur into action, and he begins to berate us in Japanese. Eventually, a member of staff is reluctantly forced from behind a curtain, like the Wizard of Oz, to check us in manually, which seems to defeat the point of all the costly animatronics. The ‘robot luggage trolley’ which accompanies us to our room is also a bit of a head-scratcher. It is glacially slow – it would have been quicker to carry our own bags; and yet another robot in our room doesn’t really seem to work either. It squats on the bedside table and appears to serve no practical purpose other than to startle us by bursting into life in response to the TV or random movements. We can’t figure out how to switch it off so it continues in this vein through the night, as if it has taken it upon itself to extract some information from us through Chinese secret police-style sleep deprivation torture techniques, abetted by the similarly random ‘automatic’ lighting system. At one point it occurs to me that we are the unwitting participants in one of those sadistic Japanese hidden camera shows, observed via a two-way mirror by someone operating the technology with the sole aim of nudging us towards emotional breakdown.

  Never mind; as we leave the next morning I still proclaim Huis Ten Bosch the world’s best amusement park. When I had first heard about it, I thought it sounded absolutely bonkers. A recreated Dutch city on the western coast of Kyushu seemed the most random thing imaginable. What on earth did the Dutch have to do with Kyushu? Why were the Japanese so infatuated with Holland?

  Actually, it still seems pretty bonkers as we leave the next morning too, but then we come to Nagasaki and it all begins to make some sense.

  Chapter 9

  Sugar

  The Portuguese were the first of the nanban, ‘southern barbarians’, as the early Europeans in Japan were called by the locals. A group of them arrived in Japan in 1543, having been shipwrecked on the islands of Tanega off the Kagoshima coast in southern Kyushu.

  Famously, the Portuguese brought with them the method for tempura; less famously, they also brought the recipe for a type of sponge cake called Castella. I am sure the Japanese were grateful for the cake and fried stuff but after establishing a trading route from their bases in Goa and Macau to their new East Asian outpost, a small fishing village called Nagasaki, the Portuguese also helped fuel a civil war raging in Japan at the time thanks to their new-fangled firearms. And then the Jesuits set about their work. Within seventy years of their arrival, three-quarters of a million Japanese had converted to Catholicism but such evangelical zeal would eventually prove the Portugueses’ undoing when the Japanese Christian farmers of the Shimabara peninsula staged a violent revolt against their rulers in 1637. The farme
rs were put to the sword, and the Portuguese were blamed for their rebellion. The remaining Portuguese traders were quarantined on a small, man-made island in Nagasaki harbour, called Dejima. Later, as he nervously regarded the rising influence of the Europeans in China, the ruler of Japan, Tokugawa Iemitsu (grandson of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who unified Japan), eventually kicked the Portuguese out of Japan altogether, making Christianity a capital offence in 1639. A notably hideous persecution of Japanese Christians ensued over the next few years, as graphically detailed in Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence.

  Meanwhile, the Protestant Dutch had also arrived in Japan, in 1600. A ship, De Liefde, which had left Europe with 110 sailors a few years earlier arrived, again off the coast of Kyushu, with just twenty-four – this time red-haired – barbarians alive, the others having perished mostly from malnourishment and disease (astonishingly, you can see De Liefde’s figurehead of Erasmus in the National Museum in Tokyo). More Dutch arrived within a few years and settled in the town of Hirado, further north up the Kyushu coast from Nagasaki.

  The British, too, followed their great rivals and set up their own trading warehouse in Hirado a few years later but, due to a combination of factors including more rewarding colonial activities elsewhere and sheer incompetence, they only lasted a few years before packing up and heading back to India. The Dutch stayed for quite a while longer, more than two centuries in fact. Their trade and knowledge became so important to successive rulers of Japan that they were granted a special exemption to continue doing business long after the country was almost entirely closed off to the outside world.

  The ‘Sakoku’, as this period of Japan’s closure was termed, began in earnest in 1651. During this time the Dutch were ‘invited’ to move to the island of Dejima, vacated by the Portuguese. Presumably, the Dutch imagined this would be a temporary sojourn, but they ended up staying confined to this tiny, crescent-shaped island until the American naval commander Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and forced the country to open up once again to foreign trade.

  Two hundred years confined to an island measuring not much more than a single hectare: this is the curious story of the Dutch in Japan. During that time, the short, narrow wooden bridge connecting Dejima to Nagasaki’s harbour-front was the only connection Japan had to the outside world, as far as Europe was concerned. No Japanese were allowed to leave, and no foreigners – at least no unaccompanied foreigners without very good reason to be there – were allowed to set foot on Japanese soil, on pain of very painful death. For Japan, most of the world was thus viewed through orange-tinted glasses, and Huis Ten Bosch is the bizarre, though in its own way quite logical, legacy of this Dutch–Japanese trading history.

  Nagasaki has, of course, changed virtually beyond recognition since Dejima’s construction, not least on account of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on 9 August 1945 but, remarkably, the Dutch traders’ island enclave is still here, albeit surrounded by built-up, reclaimed land, and no longer inhabited by red-haired barbarians.

  My family and I are standing at its entrance now, beside the two sea gates – one for import, one for export – which these days open onto a sea of traffic rather than galleons and junks. Through these gates first arrived an astonishing number of products, technologies and ideas which Japan now takes for granted.

  After our discombobulating Huis Ten Bosch experience, today we are fortunate enough to be visiting Dejima with someone who can help us make sense of history. This is Junji Mamitsuka, director of Dejima’s restoration office. He has overseen the restoration or re-creation of most of the Dutch buildings which grew up on Dejima during their residency in a motley assortment of styles and materials – some are wooden, others are clay-walled or clapboard – plus an allotment.

  ‘For us Japanese, this island was almost like a foreign country,’ Mamitsuka explains as we walk along Dejima’s ‘high street’, stopping outside what was once the residence of the Dutch trading team. ‘All of our trade with Europe came through this gate, and it was all controlled by Holland.’

  In the next building are exhibits of the products which were introduced to Japan through those gates during the time of the Dutch. These included:

  Nutmeg Sloths

  Cinnamon Pumpkins

  Black pepper Orang-utans

  Cloves Wine

  Ivory Beer

  Chillis Vaccinations and stethoscopes

  Chocolate Tomatoes

  Tobacco Cheese

  Coffee Astronomy

  Bread Pineapples

  Sugar cane Photography

  Elephants Cabbages

  Porcupines Potatoes

  I can’t speak for the influence of porcupines on Japanese culture but modern Japan would be unimaginable without many of these products. Perhaps the most significant was sugar which the Dutch brought to Japan initially as sugarcane from South America via the Caribbean. Previously, sugar had only been imported in small quantities from China for medicinal purposes, but from the early eighteenth century onwards the manufacture of sugar from sugar cane increased rapidly, in part as a result of the development of the tea ceremony and its accompanying ‘wagashi’, or Japanese sweets (beet sugar, incidentally, also arrived via Dejima, in the nineteenth century).

  Sugar was particularly influential on Kyushu’s cuisine as the island’s climate was ideal for growing sugar cane. To this day Kyushu’s food is noticeably sweeter than that in the rest of Japan; the tares, or basting sauces – most commonly for eel – are much sweeter here than in Tokyo, for instance; the satsuma-age – the deep-fried fish cakes we had eaten in Kagoshima – are also sweeter; even the soy sauce is sweet on Kyushu, unpleasantly so, actually.

  As we walk, Mamitsuka explains how, each year, the Dutch ships would arrive with their cargo in July and August, borne by the summer winds from Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) about a month away, and then leave in October laden with Japanese camphor, silk, pottery, precious metals like silver and copper, as well as sake. Of these, copper became by far the most valuable commodity to the Dutch. So rapacious was their appetite for it that, in the end, the Japanese had to ration them to two ships a year.

  Apart from rare, closely monitored trips to meet the Tokugawa in Tokyo, for the rest of the year the resident employees of the Dutch East India Company (who ranged from several dozen in the seventeenth century to under twenty towards the end of the Dutch period), had little else to do but play billiards and badminton, and enjoy the semi-legal visits of the local prostitutes, resulting in numerous mixed-race children being born in Nagasaki, Madam Butterfly-style (Puccini’s opera is set in the city, but features an early twentieth century American–Japanese liaison). And so, for most of the time, a captive Dutch community lived here on this fan-shaped piece of dirt, their only view of the outside world through the windows overlooking the harbour from where they would watch the less restricted comings and goings of their Chinese rivals in the silk trade.

  The Dutch attempted as much as possible to live as they had done in Amsterdam, raising, slaughtering and consuming their own pigs, for instance, something severely restricted on the mainland, although they respected the ban on Christianity by celebrating the ‘Winter Solstice’ instead of Christmas. Some of them stayed for up to a decade at a time, going slightly mad in the process, one suspects. Their suffocating community is brilliantly evoked in David Mitchell’s 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the characters of which are loosely based on real residents of Dejima; it has a denouement which also mirrors a real incident in which the British Royal Navy frigate HMS Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki harbour in 1808 to attack the Dutch. (France then annexed the Netherlands and for three years Dejima was the only place on earth where the Dutch flag was still flown.)

  Today, the Dejima museum attracts almost half a million visitors a year and Nagasaki has turned its origins as an international trading centre, a city open to the world when virtually all others in Japan were closed, into a core element of its brand. But, as wel
l as celebrating its Dutch connections, the city also acknowledges the considerable influence of the Chinese.

  There was some contact with Korea elsewhere in Japan, but China was the only other nation permitted to trade with Japan during the Sakoku, which it did from its own, much larger enclosure, home to two thousand Chinese traders and staff, adjacent to Dejima in Nagasaki harbour. The Chinese were seen as less of a threat by the Japanese and were free to enter and leave their trading zone which is perhaps why, these days, their influence in the city is much more evident than that of the Dutch. We happen to be visiting during the Chinese New Year when Nagasaki’s China Town erupts with spectacular festivities and feasting. The manager of the hotel where we are staying is part of the team that carries the dragon during the elaborate dragon dance. The dance is due to take place that night, and he invites us along to watch.

  The celebration is set in a kind of makeshift open-air theatre in one of the city squares. Though it is freezing, the place is packed. Even after the Technicolor overload of Huis Ten Bosch, this is quite some spectacle with thousands of coloured paper lanterns, illuminated dragons and, in pride of place, a fifteen-metre-high light sculpture depicting the legend of the Monkey King. The skill of the dancers as they manoeuvre their dragon, mounted high up above their heads on long poles, through a complex choreographed routine is breathtaking, particularly when, after the dance, our new friend lets me try to hold the dragon’s head: it weighs ten kilos and feels like carrying a small fridge.