The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  Afterwards we walk back through packed alleyways illuminated with yet more lanterns, stopping on the way for a pork bun or two.

  We sample more of China’s culinary influence on Nagasaki at lunch the next day. This is Shippoku ryori, a multi-course banquet which blends Japanese, Chinese and, supposedly, Dutch influences although, perhaps fortunately, I can’t spot anything Dutch about it. Radically different from the Kyoto style of kaiseki ryori, Shippoku ryori features more seafood, as well as pork and sugar, and is served in a less formal atmosphere. Once fashionable as far away as Tokyo, Shippoku ryori fell out of favour after World War II when the influence of American food grew and it was deemed both decadent during times of hardship, and too imitative of the Chinese. This is a shame, I think, as this may well be the world’s first ever example of fusion cooking.

  The meal is served for all four of us to share at a Chinese-style red lacquer round table at an historic ryotei, Hashimoto (ryotei are a type of traditional-style inn, usually with a restaurant attached). It begins with the ohire – a clear soup made from sea bream, with one of the fish’s fins floating on the surface. Just as our spoons are poised at our lips, our host, Yumi Hashimoto, the third-generation owner of the restaurant, coughs loudly. It is explained that Shippoku tradition dictates that no one can take so much as a sip until the host or hostess says ‘Ohire wo dozo’, or ‘Please enjoy the soup’.

  Once she does, we tuck into the soup, followed by slow-simmered pork belly (the Chinese-influenced ‘buta no kaku ni’); a stunning tempura course in which the tempura batter is made in the Nagasaki style with yolks only; a classic Shippoku cold starter, or ‘shosai’, of white beans; and ‘umewan’, or ‘plum bowl’, an adzuki bean and mochi ‘soup’ for dessert, also very sweet.

  Pace is important to a Shippoku meal. Things begin quietly with the soup being consumed in silence alongside the cold dishes which are already on the table, then the sake starts to flow, toasts are made and there is a burst of action as special dishes are brought out. It ends with a sweet dessert which is also not a very Japanese way to finish a meal: the Dutch influence, perhaps.

  The highlight for me is the chance to taste ‘kue’, a fish, known as ‘ara’ in Nagasaki, which is one of the few places where it is caught. This is ‘longtooth grouper’, rarer and more expensive than bluefin tuna, and a winter highlight of the menu at the absurdly expensive Manhattan sushi restaurant Masa, where dinner can cost upwards of $500 per person. I’ve read that the restaurant has it flown in directly from Kyushu at vast cost. Hashimoto-san whispers to me that it costs ¥500 per slice; the richness of flavour apparently comes because it feeds on konbu. I notice both Emil and Asger have left most of theirs so, when Hashimoto-san leaves the room, I swiftly vacuum up the remaining slices of the fish, which has been slightly poached – perhaps, again, in deference to the Chinese, who traditionally don’t eat raw seafood.

  The cost and complexity of a Shippoku mean that the locals in Nagasaki would rarely make it at home. Hashimoto is the kind of place to come for milestone celebrations, like weddings or birthdays. In the 1940s this traditional wooden house with its ornamental garden, sliding paper walls and engawa, or deck, stretching all the way around the outside, was a residence for the officers of the occupying US Army, and today it is one of the few places still to host geisha in Nagasaki (there are eighteen geisha remaining in the city: should you be interested, the going rate is ¥21,000 – £155 – for three hours of their company).

  As we eat, as if arranged perfectly to complete the Madam Butterfly mood, a few snowflakes begin to descend delicately into the carp pond in the garden. A geisha would have been quite a nice addition, actually.

  With its slow-cooked pork and sugary flavours Shippoku ryori reminds me a little of the food in Shanghai. Both cities have a notably sweet tooth, something also evidenced by Nagasaki’s most famous cake, Castella, another of those nanban imports dating back several centuries.

  Castella is either Portuguese or Spanish in origin depending on who you talk to (the Portuguese were said to offer it to potential Christian converts as a bribe) but, as usual, the Japanese have taken things a step or two further, refining the recipe over the centuries to create a super-moist slice of pale yellow spongy perfection, dense with tiny air holes and a thin, browned, soft crust on the top and bottom. It is a genuine Nagasaki icon, familiar in convenience stores the length of Japan, where it is sold by the slice. In Nagasaki long, rectangular boxes holding an entire Castella are a popular gift. Locals like to eat it with milk or green tea for breakfast and, slightly more improbably, the manager of Shokando, the best Castella shop in Nagasaki and supplier to the Emperor of Japan, assures me when we visit that the cake is especially loved by marathon runners because it gives them energy.

  Asger, Emil and I are visiting the Shokando store in central Nagasaki, right by the iconic Megane Bridge (the oldest stone arch bridge in Japan, dating from 1634), to learn the secrets of their beautifully airy sponge. They make several varieties, all hand-baked in special wooden frames about a metre square. The premium product – the one sent to the Emperor’s palace in Tokyo – uses a ratio of five egg yolks to three whites, along with rice syrup and Japanese sugar, which is unusually moist and I suspect a key ingredient. They use no raising agent, other than the egg whites. The key to that dense but light pound cake-style sponge is the ‘awagiri’ technique whereby the mixture is stirred three times during the baking, with steaming temperatures closely monitored by the highly experienced Castella baker.

  Shokando’s manager claims that the first documented recipe for Castella in Japan dates from the late sixteenth century but he knows little more of its history. For that, I will have to travel further north along Kyushu’s western coast to Hirado, Japan’s westernmost port, where the Europeans first settled. Leaving Lissen and Emil in Nagasaki, I drive there with Asger the next day in search of an edible history lesson which, he and I later agree, is the very best kind.

  ‘The first Portuguese ships landed here in 1550, and they brought many cakes, including Castella. It came literally all the way from Lisbon.’ As he explains the origins of his iconic cake, Toshiyuki Matsuo, the master baker of Tsutaya, the legendary Hirado con-fectioner, is preparing their special version of Castella, called Casdous. Casdous is even lighter and even sweeter than Castella because Matsuo beats even more air into the batter and, after baking, the sponge is cut into slices, dipped in egg yolk, dropped into hot sugar syrup and rolled in yet more large-grain sugar. It is unbelievably, almost intolerably, sweet, although its magnificently light texture somehow redeems it.

  Tsutaya has been making Casdous here in Hirado for almost five centuries, but the company dates even further back, to 1502, before the Portuguese arrived in Japan. Matsuo is the twenty-fourth-generation owner. Hirado was, then, already a centre for confection before the arrival of sugar in Japan, back when they would have made jellied confections from adzuki beans or rice flour, the sweetness coming from fruit or honey. The ruler of Hirado throughout the period of Dutch and British trade was the head of the Matsuura clan, whose descendants remain prominent in the town. The family grew unusually rich by Japanese standards thanks to the trade with the newly arrived foreigners, while their remoteness from Tokyo afforded them an unusual autonomy. With this wealth and isolation, it seems, there also came a certain amount of self-indulgent thumb twiddling, and thus Hirado developed its own version of that ultimate time-frittering exercise, the tea ceremony.

  The apogee of Hirado’s tea preoccupation came in 1841 when the Matsuura ruler of the day demanded that Tsutaya make him one hundred different types of cake and wagashi for the tea ceremony to end all tea ceremonies. According to the records, Casdous was one of those cakes.

  As Matsuo-san explains all this, it occurs to me that what came to Hirado all those years ago was more likely some kind of ship’s biscuit: hard and dense and probably riddled with maggots. Though presumably named after the Spanish region of Castilla, Castella – and also Casdous – clos
ely resemble a bready type of Portuguese cake called Pão de Ló. Obviously, there is no way a cake like that would have lasted a journey of many months. Rather, the Portuguese will have brought knowledge about oven-baking techniques which were new to Japan, and maybe the idea of baking with eggs too, but in their simplicity and almost artificial perfection the contemporary Castella and Casdous I tried during our days in Nagasaki seem to me to be entirely Japanese creations, not least because the rice syrup and Japanese sugar were crucial in keeping the sponge moist.

  Matsuo-san shows us how the wooden frames in which he bakes the Casdous are lined first with newspaper, then baking paper, with a final scattering of sugar over the surface, before going into his ovens (which I notice are made by a brand called Nanban). ‘This has so much history, I can never change the recipe. It has been passed down by word of mouth over the years. My job is just to use the best ingredients I can, and respect that tradition.’

  I give Asger a significant ‘regard how deeply Matsuo respects history and tradition’ look, but he is busy scoffing the pale yellow offcuts from a fresh-baked loaf of Casdous which another baker is expertly trimming.

  I am curious about something. My question is not really related to cake and I hesitate as it is perhaps too personal. Given the fact that Matsuo was the twenty-fourth generation of a five-centuries-old company, did he ever have a choice over his own career?

  ‘No, I had no choice! I was working here from when I was little. Then I went to train in Fukuoka and Tokyo but I realised how important Hirado had been in the tradition of sweets in Japan. It’s a small town, but because it was the first town to get sugar it has a long history of sweet things. I started to feel a responsibility to keep Casdous going and the best quality I can make it, because it represents the history of this place.’

  Matsuo has taken the family firm from strength to strength. Nine years ago, Tsutaya moved into a new, rather auspicious address down on the high street in Hirado. This was the former home of one of the most remarkable foreigners in Japanese history, an Englishman who was among the twenty-four ‘red haired barbarian’ survivors of De Liefde, the first Dutch ship.

  William Adams of Kent was the ship’s pilot and a skilled ship-builder. After a tricky initial period during which the Japanese confiscated all De Liefde’s weapons and the Protestant survivors were entirely at the mercy of hostile Portuguese Jesuit translators, Adams managed to avoid execution. More than that, over time, in the kind of yarn you might find in a rather implausible romantic novel, he became a valued adviser to the great ruler and unifier of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu – equivalent to a random, shipwrecked Japanese sailor becoming the left hand of Henry VIII. Adams grew wealthy through his connections, married a Japanese woman and became the first foreigner to attain the level of samurai. And his life was indeed the loose inspiration for an implausible romantic novel, James Clavell’s blockbuster Shogun, so in my head he is always played by Richard Chamberlain.

  Thirteen years after he had settled in Japan, Adams – who became known by the Japanese name Anjin Miura – would be the first contact for the British East India Company when, decimated by scurvy, dysentery and cannibals encountered along the way, the surviving crew of its galleon, the Clove, staggered ashore here in June 1613. They had been at sea for over two years, despatched to the part of the globe literally marked ‘Here be dragons’, bearing a letter from King James I requesting permission to trade.

  As we’ve seen, the great enemy of the English, the Dutch, were already successfully established in Hirado and they would endure here long after all other foreigners were driven out. Still today, 400 years later, every fourth Sunday in the month the local ladies of Hirado dress up in Dutch costume and parade up the high street. But when I first visited the town back in 2013 to research a story about the 400th anniversary of British–Japanese trade for a British newspaper, Union Jacks had adorned the main drag.

  ‘You feel like you’ve come to the end of the world, don’t you?’ my contact on that visit, ironically a Dutchman, Remco Vrolijk, said as we had clambered aboard his titchy Daihatsu. Hirado certainly felt like the end of Japan that day. ‘If you want to experience a more authentic side of Japan, this is the place,’ beamed Remco, towering above me in that irritating way the Dutch have.

  Remco was a genial fellow obviously well liked in Hirado judging by the greetings he received as we walked down the high street. He took me to see the site of the original English warehouse, now a noodle shop; we also saw Adams’ house – now Tsutaya’s gorgeous new showroom – and the place where Adams was buried in 1620, on a hill overlooking the town.

  ‘You see that house,’ Remco said pointing behind some trees as we stood on the hill. ‘The family name is Miura, the name Adams took.’ Relatives? Remco shrugged. ‘Maybe. When Christianity was banned in Japan anyone with foreign blood hid their traces.’

  To gain permission for the newly arrived English to trade, Clove’s captain, John Saris, needed to secure an audience with Tokugawa Ieyasu, which meant travelling to Shizuoka, at that time the Tokugawas’ home city. Saris was accompanied on the four-week journey by Adams. Bear in mind Adams had been in the pay of the Dutch for years, even before arriving in Japan, and was clearly prospering personally. Thus, Saris and his crew had not received the effusive welcome they had expected from their countryman whom they had assumed to be unhappily marooned on the other side of the globe. The two men grew justifiably wary of each other. Saris distrusted Adams, describing him as ‘a naturalised Japaner’, while the English historian and expert on Adams, James Murdoch, likely echoed Adams’ view of Saris when he described him as ‘a mere dollar grinding Philistine with a taste for pornographic pictures’. The captain exasperated Adams by ignoring his advice on points of courtly etiquette, insisting on delivering King James’s letter to Ieyasu himself along with a gift of the first telescope to leave Europe, but refusing to prostrate himself before the Japanese ruler as courtly etiquette demanded. But the journey also gave Saris time to observe the Japanese. In his journal he recorded that he liked their ‘cheese’ (tofu), and that the women were ‘well faced, handed and footed’ although he was somewhat put off by their practice of dyeing their teeth black.

  Ieyasu lavished hospitality upon the new English visitor, perhaps out of respect for Adams. This time, though, it was Saris’ turn to be exasperated as he learned that they would still have to travel to Edo – modern Tokyo, more than 600 miles from Hirado – to beg final permission to trade from Ieyasu’s son, Hidetada.

  Permission was finally granted, but the ensuing story of the English in Hirado is hardly bathed in glory. Though they learned to enjoy onsen and green tea, and fathered several children in the town, the Englishmen left behind to run the East India Company’s trading station at Hirado went slowly mad on a diet of drink and whores.

  In charge of English trade efforts towards the end, long after Saris had departed, was Richard Cocks, a man for whom the word ‘hapless’ might have been coined. Thanks largely to his naivety and indolence, the East India Company’s Japanese adventure ended in unmitigated disaster. The English never did figure out what goods the Japanese wanted to buy or how to sell the products they had to offer. Cocks died on the journey home after the Hirado warehouse closed in 1623.

  Back in Hirado, Remco and I had stopped by a bronze statue in Cocks’ memory. I took a closer look and noticed that the plaque read ‘Richard Cocs’ (sic). Even in death, ignominy stalked the Englishman. He must have cursed the day he was not born Dutch.

  I am happy to report that the British would eventually redeem themselves on the island of Kyushu. After Japan reopened to the world in the mid-nineteenth century, a Scot, Thomas Glover, arrived in Nagasaki, aged just twenty-one, bringing with him the many innovations of the British industrial revolution. He was the first man to drive a steam engine on Japanese soil; was heavily involved in the founding of the country’s first Western-style factory, the Nagasaki Ironworks, which would eventually become the Mitsubishi Corporation (stil
l a huge presence in the city); as well as the Japanese Mint and a coal mine. Perhaps most happily of all though, he helped to start the company which would become Kirin Beer.

  So, beer. The Portuguese brought cake and tempura. The Dutch brought everything else of significance. But we British, we British gave the Japanese beer.

  And then came the Americans …

  Chapter 10

  Burgers

  There are eight US military bases in Japan, located the length of the country from Okinawa to Hokkaido and home to around 50,000 servicemen, 40,000 members of their families and 5,000 American civilians employed by the US Department of Defense. I have no particular view on this – it is none of my business – but I do find it quite astonishing that Japan is for now still, in a sense, an occupied land.

  Particularly striking is the continued existence of the US military’s Sasebo base, because it is located a little more than an hour from Nagasaki where the American Air Force dropped ‘Fat Man’, the second nuclear bomb, in August 1945, the first having been dropped three days earlier on Hiroshima.

  Reunited with Lissen and Emil after Asger and I had taken our detour to Hirado, we all spent the next morning visiting the Nagasaki Peace Museum, close to the epicentre of the bomb.

  Whatever the justification for the bombing of Nagasaki, the fact remains that American bombs killed tens of thousands of civilians here, devastated a city and contaminated the land for years afterwards. So, in that sense, the last thing one would perhaps expect to find is that, within a decade, a nearby town would embrace that most American of foods, the hamburger, to the extent that, today, the two – town and burger – have become synonymous. But this is precisely what happened in Sasebo which proudly proclaims itself the first city in Japan where burgers were served, and is known throughout the land as ‘Burger City’, complete with a burger-ish city mascot, drawn by Anpanman artist Takashi Yanase.