The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  It could be argued that it was here, in this otherwise nondescript port town, that the invasion of Japan by the American fast food revolution began. This was where the Japanese began their inexorable – and some would say calamitous – move away from their traditional, relatively parsimonious, low-fat, vegetable-, soy-and fish-based diet to the current, meat heavy, deep-fried, fat-filled, fast food frenzy.

  Here is Hideo Miyauchi, the Sasebo City tourist boss, in his cramped and cluttered office overlooking the concourse of the train station. We have come along to hear him tell the origin story of the Sasebo burger.

  The Korean War brought many American servicemen to the city during the 1950s, he tells us, and, to cater for them, local restaurants started serving cheap beer and French fries. Soon, burgers were added to the menu, but no one, Miyauchi says, knows exactly when or who was the first to make them here. Actually, he admits sheepishly, the branding of Sasebo as Burger City didn’t start until they were looking for a way to mark the city’s centenary in 2001.

  ‘We realised that the burgers were special for our culture here,’ says Miyauchi. ‘In daily life, everyone eats burgers but people from other prefectures thought what was unique here was that we eat them after drinking, when other Japanese might have a bowl of ramen.’

  A map of all the burger places was duly drawn up, a burger festival organised and, aided by Takashi’s mascot and a mention in Sasebo-born novelist Ryū Murakami’sfn1 novel 69 and the movie based on it, the branding of Sasebo as Burger City took off nationally.

  At peak burger a few years back, there were nearly forty burger places in Sasebo; 50,000 people attended the city’s burger festival; and a satellite Sasebo Burger ‘theme park’ opened in Tokyo. Today, the theme park has closed and there are thirty burger joints. I wonder aloud if the whole burger thing is running out of steam. Perhaps there is a movement away from fast food. Could the gourmet burger be the way to go?

  ‘The Sasebo Burger is an icon. It is good quality, not fast food. It is cooked to order, it takes time,’ replies the tourism chief, slightly tetchily. ‘We don’t call them gourmet, but we have special burgers all the time, like some made with Nagasaki beef, which won best beef in Japan in 2014, or there is one that is the size of a pizza and another with waffles. One restaurant is in an air raid shelter, you know.’

  The interview is at an end, but that is OK. The tourism man seems actually to know very little about the origins of the burger in his town. We head off, clutching our Sasebo burger map, to the oddly named Log Kit, a small, first-floor restaurant decorated like a Wild West log cabin, just a couple of minutes’ walk from the entrance to the US base. It seems to be one of the older burger joints, if not the oldest. Perhaps this is where the Sasebo burger phenomenon has its roots.

  ‘My parents started this place when I was three, back then it was a laundry for the [US] base and we did some bike rental too. Then, when I was older, I was volunteering on the base teaching yoga and I saw how they made burgers there.’ Nobuyo Maruta, a tiny woman in her late sixties, dressed as if for a rodeo in matching red shirt and stetson, is explaining how she did, and didn’t, invent the Sasebo burger. ‘McDonald’s had started in Japan but I saw that the servicemen wanted a different kind of burger from that. They wanted the taste of their mothers’ burgers, these big home-made burgers, a burger as a whole meal, so I improvised a recipe. I started the Sasebo burger!’

  So, she was the one, the inventor of Sasebo’s signature dish?

  ‘Ha! Yes, I was thinking of getting it patented! No, no,’ she continues, confusingly, from behind the bar where she is flipping burgers for our order, ‘I’m not the one who started it. There were many diners serving the hamburgers back then, many American bars.’

  Our burgers arrive. Mine is a Special Burger, a gigantic, towering affair featuring lettuce and onion and thick-cut bacon. It is a challenge to eat tidily but is very good, and does indeed remind me of the burgers my mother used to make. Asger, Emil and Lissen go for two bacon double burgers and a chicken avocado burger respectively, and tuck in with gusto. Emil says it is the best burger he has ever eaten.

  I hesitate to turn to more sombre matters but ask Maruta-san how she explains the enthusiastic embrace by Sasebo of a dish so synonymous with the nation that had virtually destroyed nearby Nagasaki just a few years earlier?

  ‘Since I was born I have been close to American people, like everyone in Sasebo. I had personal experience of them. Of course, because of the bomb some older generation said, “We can’t eat burgers”, but when I heard them say that, I said, “Shall we eat Americans instead then?”’

  I suspect something of this last aside was lost in translation, but I take it to mean she felt that it was time to move on, despite the fact that her mother’s family was from Nagasaki and several of them perished there in 1945. It sounds extraordinarily magnanimous but I don’t think this attitude is so unusual in Nagasaki Prefecture. A couple of locals I spoke to described the essential difference between how the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reflect on their respective atomic disasters: Hiroshima, they said, stood for protest, while Nagasaki, perhaps because of the Christian history of the region, stood for prayer and reconciliation.

  As Maruta-san and I chat, a tall American in his thirties with a buzz cut enters and starts looking at the take-out menu. Obviously a serviceman from the nearby base, I ask him what he thinks of Log Kit’s burgers. He mulls over the question with appropriate gravity for some moments before answering.

  ‘This burger has much more pepper in it, and there’s lots of dressings, mayo and ketchup and egg,’ he says. ‘I’ll definitely be putting the fried egg in my burgers when I go home to the States. It’s not really American style, though, it’s American with a Japanese twist.’

  Chapter 11

  Arita

  ‘It requires a strong personal commitment to become a craftsman here.’ Atsushi Sakaida is very much not joking. Atsushi is the fifteenth-generation descendant of Sakaida Kakiemon, the most famous potter in Japanese history, and the son of Sakaida Kakiemon XIV, until his death in 2013 one of Japan’s officially designated Living National Treasures. ‘We believe that you should take your time to master all the techniques when you start your career as a potter. It is a lifetime commitment.’

  Atsushi is showing Asger and I around the 344-year-old company’s exquisite collection of vases, plates, cups and pots housed in a small museum at the entrance to the neatly kept factory compound.

  We have stopped off for the afternoon in Arita, a small town with a big reputation, while Lissen and Emil continue on from our lunch in Sasebo, across the top of Kyushu, to our next overnight at Yamaguchi, on the next island east, Honshu.

  Wedged in a steeply sided, forested valley in north-west Kyushu, the town of Arita is Japan’s unofficial porcelain capital. This is where many of the plates and bowls I have eaten from in kaiseki restaurants up and down the land have been made, items of fragile, translucent beauty decorated with scenes from nature and the seasons which played a sometimes annoyingly allusive role in supporting and enhancing Japan’s traditional multi-course meal. Of the more straightforwardly symbolic pairings, for instance, I remember a bowl with an autumn scene bearing chestnut rice, and a plate decorated with a seascape for sashimi, but more often the decoration would reference an image from traditional Japanese art which in turn would contain a visual pun which referenced back to one of the ingredients, or the month or the moon’s phase, and so on. What hope did I have of solving these kinds of riddles? But even when I failed to interpret their symbolism, Arita pottery, with its almost Chinese-style bold reds and royal blues, was always distinctively, exquisitely beautiful.

  I was drawn to the town itself by a chance encounter at the event I had attended a few months earlier at restaurant Nobu in Mayfair, London, the same one where I had asked Nobu about Asakusa Nori. Nobu-san, the stiff-backed, hamster-cheeked elder statesman of Japanese food in America and Europe, had been launching a new range of tableware co-c
reated with the artisans of Arita, and I was lucky enough to be invited along to the celebratory dinner to mark its launch.

  Before we sat down to eat in the private dining room of the restaurant, we had been shown a documentary made for the Discovery Channel about the collaboration between Nobu and the potters of Arita. It followed Nobu’s quest to commission new pieces from them, as he explained the brutal realities of a professional kitchen’s dishwashing regime on their fragile, decorative pieces. The subtext of the documentary was a hoped-for revival of a declining market for these makers of ornamental porcelain by getting them to create more everyday, usable pieces.

  Some of the potters had travelled to London for the launch of the new tableware. I’d been introduced to this group of rather shy men with the air of country mice in the big city (for some of them it was their first time, not only in Europe, but abroad), and, when I realised that on this trip we would be passing Arita on our way across Kyushu, I asked if I might stop and see one of the famous workshops. Happily, they agreed.

  Arita was the birthplace of Japanese porcelain. Korean artisans, who had learned porcelain-making techniques in China where the technique had existed for several centuries, had been captured during one of Japan’s expansionist periods in the early seventeenth century and started making their wares on Kyushu. Instead of earthenware, which is made from clay, porcelain uses a type of white stone, kaolin, which is turned into powder and then mixed with water – traditionally by kneading with bare feet – to make a special clay. Following high-temperature firing, this produces far finer pieces. The Koreans had been making pottery in Kyushu for some decades when one of them discovered a source of kaolin in the hills of Izumiyama close to Arita, and production began of, initially, simple pieces decorated with indigo patterns and depictions of nature similar to, but more impressionistic than, those made in China.

  It was here, too, that Sakaida Kakiemon (1615–53) began making overglazed enamelled porcelain in 1643, supposedly having learned that technique from a Chinese craftsman in Nagasaki. As the name suggests, the technique allowed Kakiemon to paint over the glaze and introduce more colour to his designs. He defined what remains the company’s signature style, called ‘iro-e’ – literally ‘a colour picture’ – featuring predominantly red, yellow and green depictions of trees and birds, with plenty of white space in between.

  The Dutch East India Company began exporting Arita porcelain from Dejima in 1659 to fill the gap left by a decline in the availability of Chinese porcelain because of their war with the British. As a result, the pieces produced in Arita, and later also those made further south in Kyushu’s rival porcelain district of Satsuma, would become famous in Europe, cherished by monarchs and noblemen. They were among the first Japanese cultural artefacts to make it to Europe and were a source of immense fascination, but the canny Dutch also influenced the style of Arita-ware in the other direction, requesting Chinese themes and patterns to satisfy the European tastes of the time. By the late seventeenth century, Arita porcelain was more valuable than gold and it directly influenced the nascent porcelain industries in Meissen, Delft, Sèvres and Spode. Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa, ruler of the House of Habsburg, was a fan, as was Augustus II of Saxony who owned 20,000 pieces of Arita porcelain. He once reportedly swapped 600 soldiers for 100 pieces. Today, decorative art museums from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul to the V&A in London have some of the five million Arita pieces said to have been brought to Europe by the Dutch, the ones which had survived a one-year voyage around Africa. Though these days the market for Arita-ware – sometimes called Imari-ware after the west Kyushu port from where it was exported – is nothing like as inflated as that for Chinese porcelain, pieces can still fetch tens of thousands of pounds at auction.

  Atsushi Sakaida has agreed to show us behind the scenes at Kakiemon to areas usually off limits to the public. First, we are led to the workshop where pieces are hand-formed in ghostly white clay by men who have dedicated their lives to maintaining this rare craft. (I actually prefer the undecorated pieces to those that have been painted and glazed, but don’t mention this.)

  ‘If you become a Kakiemon apprentice you can expect to wait ten years before you actually get to make a finished piece,’ Sakaida-san tells us. ‘It takes thirty years to train properly before you can teach the next generation.’ Some of the craftsmen have been there for over forty years. Ten years practising. Another twenty refining your skills. Graduating as a brain surgeon takes less time. I send a meaningful glance towards Asger who has been listening intently.

  If Asger has a fault (and it’s a big ‘if’, he is an amazing young man, and I say that from a position of complete impartiality), it is that, like many teens, he has less enthusiasm for sustained effort when it comes, say, to acquiring the complex motor skills required to play musical instruments, or doing the washing-up properly. I have brought him along today because I hope that Kakiemon will offer an inspiring insight into what one can achieve with intense focus and long-term dedication. As it turns out, the Arita motivation model is turning out to be more offputting than inspiring.

  ‘The first few years they spend learning how to prepare the clay,’ Sakaida-san continues. ‘Then they practise on the wheel for some years. Only at ten years are they allowed to form something, usually something small and round like a tea cup.’ Apparently there is no great ‘coming of age’ ceremony at this point. The satisfaction, Sakaida says, is all internal, personal. What’s more, Kakiemon strongly discourages any artistic expression on the part of its ‘shokunin’ (directly translated as ‘working person’ or more accurately, ‘artisan’). Continuity is always subservient to creativity. Despite this glacial career progress, Sakaida claims there is a zero drop-out rate for apprentices. I wonder if, given the time it takes to train, whether they have trouble finding new apprentices – something which had been a common concern when I had spoken to people within the food world in Japan. ‘No, we have no problems. We always have plenty of enthusiastic young people wanting to work here.’ Presumably it pays well? ‘There is a strong personal commitment to being a shokunin. They are prepared that this career will have no end.’

  I take that as a no.

  Making Kakiemon-style enamelled ceramics is an extraordinarily involved process. A simple dinner plate, for example, will go through eleven stages including moulding, drawing, painting, firing, glazing and firing again, at any point during which a minuscule flaw might emerge meaning the piece must be destroyed. Pity the poor person in charge of the kiln: the local Izumiyama stone they use creates a clay with a distinctive kind of milky white colour, called ‘Nigoshide’. This differentiates it from other white porcelains which can have a blue tint, but it is infuriatingly tricky to fire. Around half of the pieces entrusted to the kiln do not survive the process and so the kiln guy is presumably held responsible for the destruction of pieces over which people have slaved not just for days, but, in a sense, for years. ‘Yes, there are moments of conflict, not exactly fights but …’ Sakaida trails off.

  Though it is a Saturday, the Kakiemon craftsmen are still at work in a dozen or so workstations sunk down into the bare clay floor in a row beneath the windows so that the craftsmen’s eyes are level with our knees. Just above their heads are planks of wood balanced across the beams, laden with the fruits of their work: stark white unpainted cups and pots and vases. Each worker sits hunched on a white cushion on a wooden bench over a potter’s wheel. Beside them is a small barrel of water and an array of strange implements, guides, scrapers, callipers and something that looks like a small, padded cricket bat, all to regulate forms and sizes.

  All the potters are men but in the painting workshop there are several women diligently decorating pots and vases beneath the focused light from Anglepoise lamps. They use thick brushes made from deer hair, with short, chunky bamboo handles. ‘Preparing the clay is very physical, hard work,’ says Sakaida by way of explanation for the gender split between the two disciplines. ‘Painting is not so.�
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  There are two types of painters: one does outlines, the other fills in. We watch them through the window of their workshop which is arranged like a classroom with several rows of three painters sitting in silence, none of them, Asger points out, wearing headphones.

  I hang back to ask Asger what he makes of all this. Could he imagine spending ten years learning a craft? ‘Nooo, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I think I’d move on pretty quickly somewhere else. I’m more a man of action.’ I don’t blame him. I suspect it requires a very specific mentality to flourish as a Kakiemon potter.

  As we go to leave, I see one of the potters inspecting a freshly thrown cup. He holds it up to the light at different angles for a minute or so. He taps it to check for the correct thickness, then takes out a measuring gauge to check its dimensions. Though his expression remains neutral, clearly something has displeased him. He crushes the cup between both hands, and throws it in a bin.

  Chapter 12

  Tare

  I had one final task to carry out while we were on Kyushu. One last puzzle I wanted to solve which, naturally, would involve one last meal that I wanted to eat. This particular dish would be the culmination of a year-long quest to find the oldest continuous tare still in use in Japan. What is a ‘continuous tare’? Allow me to explain, but first a bit of a rambling introduction …

  There are two golden rules for journalists in the modern era: never comment online on another journalist’s article, and never read the comments on your own. I routinely break both rules but occasionally the comments can be enlightening. I remember reading one beneath an online piece in the Guardian newspaper, for instance. The piece was about the wonders of Osakan cuisine and I had written it. The comment said something to the effect of, ‘Well, I lived in Japan for a year and I can tell you Japanese food is all the same – everything’s cooked in soy sauce and sugar.’