At just 140 miles long, Shikoku is the smallest and least visited of Japan’s four main islands. Even many of the Tokyoites I asked had never visited it, and even fewer foreigners make it here. It still has the feel of the remote hideaway it once was, cut off by the ever-churning whirlpools of the Inland Sea, its mountains home to pirates and exiles. The locals consider themselves a bit forgotten, outside of mainstream Japan and are pretty chilled by Japanese standards too judging by the welcome strangers receive in their izakayas. In Kochi I had people offering me drinks and food, which has never happened in Tokyo. (The local dogs are less friendly: Tosa, the old name for Kochi, is famed for its breed of Rottweiler-style fighting dogs. You can still see them fight at special venues in the prefecture.)
There is one other dish in particular which all who visit Shikoku are supposed to try: Sanuki udon, a bowl of thick, soft, white wheat noodles, served with a sauce rather than in a soup, as udon usually is in Tokyo (such distinctions being of great importance to the Japanese). I’d been told there was an ‘udon taxi’ operating in the town of Kotohira in Kagawa Prefecture in the north-east of the island. If you were lucky enough to hail it, the taxi would supposedly take you to the driver’s favourite restaurants. It sounded like one of the more fanciful storylines from the cartoon version of Sushi and Beyond, but, one morning, I struck out from Kotohira Kadan, the ryokan where I was staying, with a map of the city on which the receptionist had marked a couple of sanuki udon places. It was before eight o’clock, and there were no other pedestrians about, and few cars, so, imagine my surprise when almost immediately I was passed by the udon taxi. It disappeared out of sight before I had registered the plastic bowl of udon on its roof and so, cursing my slow reflexes, I carried on walking. But there it was, parked around a corner a few hundred yards up the street, as if it had sensed my quest and was waiting like an obedient dog. I climbed in, said the magic word, and a few minutes later I was sitting in Konpira Udon eating the most delicious bowl of udon noodles I have ever had, for less than three quid. The sauce, made from a blend of soy sauce and dashi, was intensely savoury, the noodles thicker than the thick end of my chopsticks, yet super-soft and tender, but the best thing were the bits of crunchy tempura batter scattered on top.
Afterwards, a few yards down the high street, having lingered wistfully for a few moments outside an ice-cream shop selling udon ice cream – the poster of which depicted a soft-serve cone, dripping with soy sauce and sprinkled with chopped spring onion (tragically, it was closed) – I stopped to watch another udon chef at work through the open window of his kitchen. He was standing behind his counter, writhing in a strange manner as if in some silent, serpentine reverie. This was Kiyotaka Iwasaki, and it turned out he was kneading his fresh-out-of-the-overnight-fridge udon dough with his feet to make it more malleable (I should add the dough was in plastic bags and he was wearing socks).
We started chatting. Iwasaki has been making udon for twenty-three years, he told me. Where was I from? he asked. England, I said.
‘I play guitar. I love Paul McCartney!’ he exclaimed, and sang the opening four notes of the Beatles song ‘And I Love Her’ with accompanying air guitar: ‘Do-do, do-dooo’. I responded with the opening line: ‘I give her all my love, that’s all I do’ which kicked off a kind of Beatles tennis match in which I would sing the first line or two of one of their songs and he replied with another. Now, that wouldn’t happen in Tokyo.
This would not be a proper Shikoku report if I did not mention the famed 88 Temple Route, a pilgrims’ trail upon which many retirees embark once they have finished their careers and which takes up to three months to complete. So, there, I’ve mentioned it. Not much given to spiritual perambulation, I was more intrigued by Kochi’s open-air street market. The largest market of its kind in Japan, it was founded in the 1690s and still runs for almost a mile beneath the palm trees which line the main street through the city centre. It is held each Sunday, with stalls selling local produce and products, fruits and vegetables, several of which I had never encountered before.
Citrus fruits are the star. There are hyuganatsu – the one with the edible pith – and the mellow, lime-like naoshichi, but it is the noble yuzu that I was there for. As this was November and in the midst of the harvest season, there were loads of them at the market as well as a wide range of yuzu products – juices, jellies, dried yuzu and various beauty products, too. The general consensus from the stallholders was that the best place to go to learn more about the fruit was the town of Umaji.
Umaji is the Amalfi of Japan, a one-citrus town. It is home to a thousand people, nearly all of whom are involved in growing or processing yuzu. Like Amalfi, it is one of its nation’s Most Beautiful Villages (in Umaji’s case this is an official designation, there’s a list and a website and everything). It is located up in the hills an hour and a half from Kochi. I followed the road beside the narrow, fast-flowing Yasuda River, every once in a while spotting small yuzu orchards amid the densely forested hills beyond, tiny constellations of intense yellow stars amid the autumnal foliage. (Is there a tree more beautiful than a Japanese maple in autumn, its leaves at once candy-red, lemon-yellow, lime-green and peach?)
The Umaji Yuzu Information Centre was my first stop. Mr Momota Nagano, the manager, introduced me to the myriad products they make from this little fruit. Everything is used, juice, zest, pith and pips, he said. The juice goes into various soft drinks, ice creams and candies, as well as shochu and yuzu liqueur, and there is also a tea made from yuzu juice, honey and sugar. The tea looks like jam but dissolves in hot water and is very popular in Korea. There was actual yuzu jam too, and yuzu-ponzu, yuzu-dashi, yuzu-mirin, yuzu-soy sauce and yuzusco, a yuzu tabasco. The yuzu-miso was amazing, the citrus cutting through the umami-meatiness of the fermented bean paste; and, uniquely, the locals also use yuzu-vinegar to season sushi rice. They put the squeezed hulls of the fruit in their baths to release its heavenly perfume, and they even sell the pips, toasted to be ground to a powder for use in beauty treatments. They pluck the precious blossoms for face cream, and eat the spring leaves in a clear soup (they are said to taste spicy with a faint flavour of yuzu). But my favourite yuzu product, aside from the juice and zest, is yuzu kosho, a pungent condiment which originated on Kyushu only fifty years ago. It is made from salted chunks of yuzu pith and chilli and is perfect with fish or rice, and beef, too. I think it could be the next big thing in terms of Japanese food products internationally. Predictably, in this food-obsessed country, yuzu tourism is also adding income for the villagers of Umaji.
The yuzu trees blossom in the first week of May. From late October for a few weeks the 190 growers in the valley together harvest over 700 tonnes every year, worth around £17m. Pruning starts when the harvest is over, from December to March. As Nagano-san and I stood in the Yuzu Information Centre yard, there was a constant stream of dinky little Daihatsu trucks filled to the brim with little spheres of sunshine arriving and departing. They weigh the trucks as they arrive, he said, and weigh them when they leave having deposited their load.
As a result of the growing demand in Europe, a couple of farmers have started growing yuzu in southern France, but cultivating yuzu trees is a long-term proposition, fraught with challenges, as I discovered when I visited yuzu farmer Hiroyuki Shimota in his orchard a little further up in the foothills above the village.
Now in his sixties, though looking closer to fifty, Shimota turned to yuzu farming when the rice paddies became too strenuous. In recent years Japan Agriculture, a government-funded organisation, has encouraged more and more older Japanese to become yuzu farmers with grants, saplings and advice but the challenges sounded endless.
He explained that, being in a valley, the yuzu don’t quite get the ideal amount of light which is why Umaji yuzu are not perhaps as pretty as yuzu grown elsewhere. On the other hand, the chilly climate creates fruit with a more intense flavour. The harder the trees have to fight to survive, the finer the flavour of their fruit, although it is
a thin line between that and a dead tree. The wind is also important, as it blows away insects, and so offerings and prayers are regularly made to appease the wind god. Yuzu trees quite like a bit of frost from time to time, which was encouraging as far as my plans to cultivate a tree at home were concerned, but then came the bad news for this particular nascent yuzu farmer.
‘It takes fifteen to twenty years before a yuzu tree bears fruit,’ Shimota said, casually flicking a large caterpillar from his baseball cap. If I really want to grow my own yuzu tree from seed back home it was clearly going to require an unusual amount of dedication, not to mention a good supply of the chicken manure, old yuzu rinds and cedar sawdust which the trees prefer as feed.
I reached out longingly to fondle a fruit on a nearby tree, and impaled my finger on one of its thorns.
‘Watch out for the thorns,’ said Shimota as I sucked the blood. The thorns do not deter Shimota’s nemesis, the local deer, which outnumber the human inhabitants and chew the bark of the yuzu trees, nor do they trouble the wild rabbits which devour Shimota’s saplings.
‘I don’t make much money from yuzu,’ he told me when I asked if he enjoyed farming yuzu. He was now pruning a branch back, part of a regime to control the amount of fruit each tree yields to maintain quality. ‘But ninety-six per cent of the land here is forest, and it is very, very satisfying when I look across the valley and see these yellow fruit defeating the forest.’
As usual, after my visit to Shikoku I smuggled some yuzu home. This time I saved their pips after I had squeezed all the flavour out of the fruit and its zest. To myself I made a solemn, two-decade commitment that I would nurture my own yuzu tree from seed. Its fruit will be the best yuzu available in Europe, and they will be all mine.
Following instructions given to me by my new friends in Awaji, I carefully removed the thin outer casing of the pips, planted them in some good soil, and placed the pots on a window sill. Every day, I checked on their progress, watering them only when the soil dried out.
After two weeks, nothing had happened. Not so much as a sprout. I grew nervous as I had read that, if nothing shows after six weeks, then the seeds would never germinate. Six weeks came and went, yet the surface of the soil remained bereft of greenery. But then, a miracle. First one, then six green sprouts broke through, feeble at first but then more robust, and leaves began to form, dark green and glossy, unmistakably yuzu.
Over the next few days, five of the fragile saplings dropped their leaves but today, the remaining yuzu tree is flourishing at around eight inches high. At this rate, if I am lucky, I might have fruit just in time for my retirement.
CHUBU
Chapter 18
The Greatest Restaurant in the World
Humour me for a moment. If we accept that Japan is the greatest food nation on earth, inhabited by the most discerning eaters, and with the most advanced restaurant culture in the world (Michelin certainly agrees, as do virtually all of the chefs I’ve ever asked), then it seems at least arguable that the very best restaurant in the world might also be in Japan, right?
I realise that the various, much-hyped global restaurant rankings, such as the San Pellegrino 50 Best, tend to focus on European and American places, but I don’t think anyone takes them very seriously (apart from the restaurant PRs who ensure their chef clients make the list). For many years, the best Japanese restaurant on that list was not even in Japan, for instance. Lima has more ranked restaurants than London. So, the 50 Best list, and its Francophile rival, La Liste (funded by the French government with the specific intention of giving French restaurants a higher ranking), are, I think we can agree, a bit silly.
Perhaps in this day and age it is to the hive mind of user-generated social media restaurant review sites that we should turn if we are to ascertain which are the best and worst restaurants in the world. Ergo, if we agree the best restaurant in the world is in Japan, then it is to Japan’s most popular open-source restaurant ranking website, Tabelog, where actual diners review and rate the actual restaurants they actually pay for, that we must look to find the best restaurant in the world.
The most popular online restaurant site in Japan is tabelog.com, with over fifty million visitors every month. Many Japanese use the site’s score out of five based on an average of users’ ratings as the single most important criterion when choosing where to dine, especially when trying a new place. Almost five million diners have gone to the trouble of placing a review on the site and, interestingly, given the petulance and score-settling that plague user-generated review sites in the UK and USA (and which render them virtually worthless), the Japanese tend to score in the middle zone – a mark in the middle-to-high threes is the norm. Legendary sushi restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro in Ginza, Tokyo, considered by many to be the best sushi restaurant in the world, scores 3.95, for instance.
At the time of writing, and for some time now, the restaurant with the highest score on tabelog.com, indeed the highest score of all time – 4.6 out of 5.0 – is not some temple to French cuisine with a three-hundred-dollar tasting menu, linen tablecloths and a wine cellar worth more than the GDP of a small African nation, nor is it one of those six-seater sushi places in Ginza which hang up if foreigners phone to make a reservation, nor is it even one of the rarefied and venerable kaiseki restaurants in Kyoto where you have to know the CEO of Toyota to get a table. No, the highest ranked restaurant of all time on the most popular open-source restaurant review site in the greatest food country in the world is a, by all accounts fairly rough and ready, restaurant which specialises in grilling game meat over an open flame, located in the remote hills of Gifu Prefecture, north-east of Nagoya.
I first heard about this Valhalla a few years ago when I interviewed Yuko Yamaguchi, the multi-millionaire business genius behind the extraordinary global success of Hello Kitty. I met this striking woman in her early sixties (I’m guessing – her age is a secret) with her copper-coloured pigtails and gothic Lolita garb, in the boardroom of the colossal Sanrio Corp headquarters in western Tokyo. For the first hour or so I sat patiently as she explained the success of her cloyingly cute, mute, pink cartoon cat and Sanrio’s latest, somewhat improbable strategy for luring young male Japanese to the brand. But I had heard she was a famous bonne vivante, so what I really wanted to know was, which were her favourite restaurants? Eventually, Yamaguchi-san did give me a few great recommendations in Tokyo (Kohaku, a fabulous contemporary kaiseki place in Kagurazaka, was one), but when it came to naming the absolute best restaurant in Japan, her face softened at the memory, and she whispered the name Yanagiya.
Needless to say, at this point I wanted to dine there more than anything and when, some years later, I found out that my family and I would be passing relatively close by on our way from Kyoto to Nagano, I thought I would try to make a reservation.
I ought to have known that it is never as easy as that with the best restaurants in Japan and, so, of course, Yanagiya turns out to be an ‘ichigen-san okotowari’ restaurant, meaning ‘no first-time customers’. In other words, it does not accept reservations from any old schmuck who has the temerity to ring up out of the blue and offer to pay them money in exchange for food. That would be too simple. No, the message came back from the restaurant that I could only reserve if I had dined there before or had a personal recommendation from someone who had (plus there needed to be four or more of you in the group, although in this instance this was not a problem). Undeterred, I began to put out feelers via food-loving Japanese friends. When that didn’t work, I moved on to remote acquaintances and friends of friends. Eventually, I struck lucky through a chain of no less than five people across three cities, the last of which, my actual connection to Yanagiya, I had never met nor even heard of.
I am not especially proud of these tactics but my relentless relay-subterfuge is how the four of us now find ourselves disembarking at a rural bus stop some distance outside Nagoya, clutching a bus timetable kindly printed out by our hotel. For the last hour or so I have dilige
ntly ticked off the thirty stops on the list as instructed by my hotel concierge, hoping that, though they were all written in Japanese, I had not made a mistake. All I know is that we must get off at stop number 28 on the list, which, hopefully, is in the town of Mizunami.
Peering at it now in the dark, ‘town’ appears to be slightly over-stating what is really not much more than a few houses strung out along a mountain road. But where is Yanagiya? I had somehow assumed that the best restaurant in Japan would be easy to spot, perhaps illuminated by a celestial beam. It is not. The only sign of any life in Mizunami is the light from a small supermarket, but the young woman at the checkout knows nothing of ‘Yanagiya’, nor indeed is she aware of any restaurants nearby.
This is not good. Accusatory glances are shot my way by my family, and frankly hurtful aspersions cast on my ability to count beyond double digits, but to the rescue, as so often happens in Japan, comes an elderly woman bent double by arthritis. She knows exactly where we want to go, and even draws us a map.
We wave a grateful goodbye and, bus timetable now replaced in our clutches by her mystical hand-drawn sketch, head across the supermarket car park. After just a couple of turns we are lost in the dark again but, suddenly, out of nowhere, there she is once more, our guardian angel. She has been following us to make sure we make it to our destination and gestures at some faint lights high up above the village.
A steep climb later and we are welcomed at the entrance to Yanagiya, a sprawling, half-timbered wooden building whose welcoming lights glow softly from behind its paper-screened windows, by a pretty young woman with a baby in a sling on her back. Inside, the restaurant is divided into private rooms by more paper screens. If it wasn’t for the bottles of 2004 Romanée Conti at the entrance, one might mistake it for an ordinary country inn. Our shoes deposited in the pigeonholes by the entrance and replaced by tiny slippers, the young woman leads us inside.
The Meaning of Rice Page 15