CHUGOKU
Chapter 13
Clams
The test tubes are lined up along the train window and, though it is true that Lissen’s Okinawan sweet potato plants are not quite as vivacious as they once were, the small green sprouts are at least still alive and enjoying the light. There is plenty of it as the snowbound landscape reflects the morning sun into the carriage of our Limited Express stopping train from Yamaguchi at the western tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu, along the Sea of Japan coast.
The Limited Express is no Shinkansen, but that’s OK. I have deliberately chosen this route through Shimane Prefecture to slow our pace. On Kyushu we hurtled from town to town like hungry Pac-Men gobbling up sights and flavours, but in this part of Japan, which I have not only never visited but never even considered visiting, I have heard that life moves at a more sedate pace.
This is the ‘Other Japan’, as the Japanese refer to it, the dark side of the moon, a place of spirits and legends, ghosts and demons, where many of the country’s myths and fables arise. Shimane is the least densely populated prefecture in Japan; there are fewer people here than even Hokkaido, and it is depopulating the most rapidly, too. Not only is there no Shinkansen line here, there are no plans for one either, there are few main roads, and the only major town is the ‘City of Water’, Matsue, home to 200,000 people and our destination today. For an hour, I see not a single person from my window, only bamboo forests, mountains and rice fields on one side, white waves on the other.
Shimane attracts the fewest foreign tourists of all Japan’s regions but it does have one major attraction, a shrine, perhaps the oldest in the country (no one knows exactly when it was built), called Izumo Taisha, which draws several million people a year – not just Japanese visitors, but also Chinese and Korean. Izumo Taisha is dedicated to Okuninushi, the god of marriage, who is also god of the harvest, of business and of health. Oh, and he also created Japan itself. But mostly this is the shrine for single women to come and pray to find a partner and so, as you might imagine, it is also quite a draw for single men: a kind of spiritual speed-dating site, although there is not much evidence of anyone pitching the woo when we visit. It is, though, an extravagantly serene place, surrounded by massive cedars, with a vast inner sanctuary, off-limits to the public, and public prayer halls, the entrance to one of which is bedecked with a monstrous-sized shimenawa (the braided rice straw rope meant to purify buildings), the largest one in Japan. It hangs there like the cable for a straw suspension bridge.
Matsue has another cultural claim to fame. This was, for a while, the home of Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, the late-nineteenth-century, one-eyed, Irish-Greek journalist, who moved here in 1890, married a Japanese woman, the daughter of a local samurai (she was his second wife: his first was a teenage ex-slave, whom he met during his time in Cincinnati – an interesting man, Mr Hearn). Alongside a career as an English-language teacher, Hearn wrote numerous books about Japan, often decrying what he saw as the westernisation of the country following the end of the period of national closure. Though he and his writings are largely forgotten these days, Hearn was witness to a fast-vanishing, feudal Japan with which he was clearly enchanted. As he wrote towards the end of his life: ‘What is there, finally, to love in Japan except what is passing away?’
At the exquisite ex-samurai house, built in 1868, where he lived for fifteen months when he first moved to Japan, we meet Yumiko Tane, head of the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum.
‘Everyone in Matsue learns about him when they are growing up,’ says Tane-san, a petite, middle-aged woman with close-cropped hair. ‘I like his writing because he has such a strong sense of the five senses. When I read him, it’s like I see the images in my head. He really brings to life the colours, sounds – perhaps because he was partly blind. And as a Japanese person, it’s always interesting to see the things he noticed that we wouldn’t.’
Hearn particularly cherished the ghost stories and legends which abound in Shimane. In The Chief City of the Province of the Gods, the book he wrote about his first home in Japan, he retells a legend concerning Matsue Castle in which an anonymous maiden of the city was interred alive under its walls during construction ‘as a sacrifice to some forgotten gods. Her name has never been recorded; nothing concerning her is remembered except that she was beautiful and very fond of dancing.’ Hearn records that, since the castle was finished, there has been a law in Matsue prohibiting girls from dancing in its streets. ‘For whenever any maidens dance the hill Oshiroyama would shudder, and the great castle quivers from basement to summit.’
Hearn also records a fondness for the sunsets over Lake Shinji, Japan’s seventh largest lake beside which Shimane is situated: ‘… the light is gentle as a light of dreams: there are no furies of colour; there are no chromatic violences in nature in this Orient. All in sea or sky is tint rather than colour, and tin vapour-toned.’ The Shinji sunsets are still famous in Japan, although the sun does not put in an appearance during our stay.
Hearn left Matsue for the warmer climate of Kumamoto on Kyushu as soon as he could (I noticed his house had only paper screens, no glass), and the locals apparently gave his wife a hard time for marrying a foreigner, but it is in this forgotten-feeling city that his memory is most cherished in Japan today.
If you ask Japanese people for Matsue’s most important contribution to the culture of Japan, they will more likely mention the tea ceremony. The city’s particular ‘school’ of tea ceremony is considered one of the three greatest, along with Kyoto’s and Kanazawa’s. My limited tolerance of Japan’s tea ceremonies is a subject of record but I want to experience Matsue’s own version of this archaic and belaboured ritual because the city is the biggest consumer of matcha in the country and so I assume they are quite good at making it.
Matsue’s tea ceremony was created by the city’s late-seventeenth-century feudal lord, Harusato Matsudaira (also known as Fumai). As well as the pedantic and tediously overcomplex preparation of matcha, the ceremony features three specific types of apparently rare and valuable wagashi – wakakusa (which is coloured green), yamakawa (pink and white sugar blocks) and Natane no Sato (coloured yellow by rape seed flowers) – about which Fumai was inspired to write special poems.
We sample both the ceremony and the wagashi at Fumai’s own tea house which, remarkably, still exists up on a wooded hill overlooking the city.
It is a thin line between serene and mind-numbingly boring and I am afraid once again, for me at least (and I feel confident that I speak for my family too), this tea ceremony crosses that line pretty much within the first minute as our instructor, a stern, bespectacled woman, explains the absolutely vital importance in observing the difference in the pitch of the thatched roof of Fumai’s tea house compared to the angle of pitch in the roofs of other tea houses of the same vintage. The entrance, she continues, is 70 × 70cm, in order to force guests to bow upon entering. This supposedly renders all visitors equal but also, I can’t help feeling, perhaps undermines some of the basic principles of hospitality. Meanwhile, a toilet, built around the same time as the tea house, is located nearby to reassure guests during the endless bladder-bursting ceremony. However, our guide notes that it was built as a non-functioning toilet. It could be that I got this wrong, but after repeated questioning we are assured that it is, and always was, a purely decorative lav which also seems unnecessarily sadistic, even by the standards of the tea ceremony.
The matcha – when we finally get to taste it after the instructor invites us, first, to appreciate the smaller bubbles on its surface and note how they contrast with other tea ceremony frothing techniques which encourage larger bubbles, and then to spend an appropriate amount of time admiring the beauty of the bowl in which it is served, turning said bowl 90°clockwise, and lifting it to our lips in the prescribed manner with the palm of our left hand beneath it, then turning it back 90° – is nice enough, but the wagashi are almost intolerably sweet.
Afterwards, we are in need of simpler,
quicker fare. A local Izumo soba restaurant supplies it. Izumo soba is unique in that the entire buckwheat seed is ground to make the flour (usually the husk is polished off), and the noodles are served in the liquid in which they are cooked. It is a dark and satisfying bowl of noodles, a proper winter dish, but, as good as it is, the local soba is not among the legendary ‘Seven Delicacies’ of Lake Shinji, which are the real reason we have come to Shimane.
Around twenty-eight miles in circumference, Lake Shinji is separated from the sea by a thin sliver of land which, on a map, makes the lake look more like a lagoon. Matsue sits between Shinji and an even bigger lake, Nakaumi, to the east. Nakaumi is salt water, Shinji is ‘brackish’, meaning it mixes salt- and freshwater. This delicately balanced ecosystem is what makes it so special for the tasty creatures which dwell in it but, it turns out, it has also left them extremely vulnerable to environmental changes.
It is six o’clock the next morning and Emil and I are swaddled in all the clothing we have brought with us to Japan. We are sitting in a small dinghy with an outboard motor, piloted by Masaki Kawabara of the Shinji Fisheries Cooperative Association, rocking gently on the waves in the middle of the lake alongside another boat.
Junichi Yano, the man in the other boat, has been a shijimi fisherman for over a decade. The black, thumbnail-sized shijimi clams are the most famous of the lake’s Seven Delicacies. As we chat, Junichi lifts up a large metal, cage-like scoop on the end of an eight-metre pole, or ‘joren’. The pole itself I would struggle to lift, but the cage apparently weighs another 15kg: loaded with clams it can total over 25kg. The cage is deliberately weighted in order to plunge effectively into the lake bed to scoop up its precious prize: the umami-rich clams which are sought after the length of the country. As everyone in Japan knows, shijimi clams make the best miso soup.
‘You have to learn to use the energy from the currents to help you move the joren,’ he explains. The fisherman lowers the cage into the freezing water and a few moments later empties its contents with an almighty clatter into a sorting machine on his boat.
Junichi-san’s daily quota has been slashed by 40 per cent in recent years, but he still struggles to achieve it. He worries about the future of the clams because the lake’s delicate balance of salinity and oxygen is highly variable, depending on season and climate, and is being affected by increasing temperatures and pollution.
Later that day we taste the clams at Omoigawa, a near-hundred year-old restaurant known for its Seven Delicacies menu. The delicacies are seasonal so we only get to sample five – suzuki (sea bass), unagi, koi carp, shirauo (whitebait) and the shijimi clams, of course. Late summer is the time for moroge ebi, a type of shrimp, and amasagi, or smelt, a small, silver fish, the other two delicacies.
The carp is the best dish: the raw fish fillets have been sliced to resemble noodles, then dusted with fish roe. The whitebait are also excellent in an egg dumpling served in an oddly sweet dashi. And the shijimi-based miso soup is absurdly rich with a deep, meaty umami flavour.
Chef Nagao Tadashi prepares all this for us in a corner room of the restaurant looking out over the lake. After the meal we chat about the delicacies. He is not optimistic for their future as he confirms the lake has been hit by a triple whammy of recent warmer winters, dire pollution from local industry and pesticides from the rice paddies, which has been happening since the 1960s.
‘Just about everything is declining,’ he says. ‘Especially the amasagi, because it needs cold water. The lake is only about six metres deep at most, so it is more affected by the heat because the fish can’t go deep to keep cool. The local authority has tried to revive the stocks, but it isn’t working. This year the shirauo, which usually start in November, didn’t turn up until the New Year, and only in small amounts, and then in dribs and drabs in January.’ The unagi we had eaten wasn’t from Shinji as they no longer grow large enough to eat.
There seems to be a contradiction in the way the Japanese approach their natural surroundings. Most Japanese I know deeply appreciate nature and the seasons, and the natural world is of course inextricably intertwined with their national religion, Shintoism. My Japanese friends spend as much time as possible in the countryside and speak wistfully of one day perhaps retiring to Hokkaido or Okinawa, or walking the temple route on Shikoku. At the same time, I was hearing these stories of the desecration of Japan’s nature by its industry and farming. This is by no means exclusive to Japan, of course, but there is something distinctive about the Japanese’s relationship to the natural world. As Alex Kerr writes in Dogs and Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan, though worshipping nature and the seasons, the Japanese also do everything they can to control the natural world: channelling rivers, concreting over hillsides and cluttering their coastline with billions of those jack-like concrete sea defences. Though some of these measures might be misguided, they are a perfectly understandable reaction to the earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis, landslides and floods with which these islands are regularly and fatally beset, but there seems to be a curious tension in relations between man and nature in Japan.
I was determined to find a more positive story about Japan’s natural resources, a story of regeneration, sustainability or good husbandry. It came sooner than I expected, and on the shores of another of Japan’s great lakes, although this particular delicacy did have a bit of a stinky sting in its tail.
KANSAI
Chapter 14
Rotten Fish
We have left Matsue and taken the train to Kyoto where we are staying in a machiya, one of the city’s historic merchant townhouses. These atmospheric wood- and earthen-walled buildings are distinctive for being far deeper than they are wide on account of an ancient tax on shop fronts; this one also happens to house a working weaving factory so every day from nine to five we have the pleasure of watching the weavers work through the floor-to-ceiling window of our first-floor living room.
From Kyoto, the morning after we arrive, I take a local train alongside the western shore of Biwa, Japan’s largest lake, fifteen miles north of the city. I travel not in hope but in trepidation for I have a date with possibly the most feared and notorious foodstuff in Japan.
One of the things that surprised me the most when I first began learning about Japan’s food culture was the vast array of fermented or ‘rotten’ foods that have existed there for centuries. For some reason, I had got it into my head that, because the Japanese did not have a tradition of eating bread, cheese or dairy products (though they certainly do eat all of these things these days), or kimchi, they didn’t like any pungent or stinky foods.
I could not have been more wrong. Just how wrong had been confirmed by my first encounter with shiokara – salted and fermented seafood, guts included. Shiokara is typically made from squid, crab, or sea cucumber flesh and their innards, but anything fishy goes where shiokara is concerned, it seems. Initial encounters confirmed that shiokara was exactly what you would expect from rotten fish guts: slimy, stinky, putrid, fetid and gag-worthy, a substance so repellent it made andouillette (French pork colon sausage) or casu marzu (Italian maggot cheese) look like baby food. But at least now I had reassessed my preconceptions about ‘Japanese people only liking things that don’t taste of much and are preferably white’.
Of course, one moment’s reflection on the methods used to make soy sauce, miso, katsuobushi, sake, the various types of pickle, mirin, konbu and the fearful natto (fermented soy beans) ought to have alerted me to the fact that the Japanese are masters, perhaps the masters, of the preservation of foods and the enhancement of their flavour through the use of microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, yeasts and enzymes. Less well known is the fact that the Japanese have been making fermented fish sauce for centuries too (by the way, it is the best in the world) and, so, now, as young chefs with beards, tattoos and leather aprons in the West are suddenly becoming obsessed by all things ‘rotten’, it is to Japan that they are turning for inspiration.
I have worked hard to acquire, if not an a
ppreciation, then at least the ability to stomach the more aggressive of Japan’s fermented foodstuffs, but this new openness was sorely challenged during one recent meal. I was visiting Tokyo alone this time and had taken up an invitation to dine with Muneki Mizutani, the former editor of Dancyu magazine, Japan’s most popular food monthly. Towards the end of our meal the chef at the izakaya where we were eating started bringing out a few of his home-made fermented delights – crab, squid and sea cucumber ovaries. I considered making my excuses but it turns out that, as with everything else, there are also good and bad fermented fish guts, and these were genuinely excellent, the kind of thing you would eat even if you weren’t under unavoidable social pressure as a guest of one of Japan’s greatest gourmets. Of course, the sake helped, and I don’t mean that sarcastically; shiokara is made to pair with sake. The salty, yeasty, umami flavours created by converting fish protein into super-tasty amino acids harmonises especially well with sake, plus the booze cuts through the gloopiness of the guts.
These are the kinds of experiences I have come to expect when I dine out with Mizutani-san. He is easy to spot in a crowd with his thick head of prematurely white hair (he is in his early forties) and penchant for lumberjack shirts. A man of few words carefully chosen, he seems to know everyone in the Japanese food world which is why he gets to taste the special stuff, the off-menu stuff, the stuff food lovers crave.
That evening, as we tucked into the small dishes of rotting fish innards the conversation turned to what was, for me, a mythical dish in the same category, and supposedly the origins of sushi itself: funa zushi. This was an ancient method of preserving carp by salting them then packing them in cooked rice. The salt kills any dangerous bacteria and, as the rice decays, the fish are preserved by the lactic acid which this generates.
The Meaning of Rice Page 11