The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  Where did he stand on the age-old ramen conundrum: which is more important, the noodle or the soup? Most chefs I have spoken to say ‘both’, but Hayasaka is firmly in the noodle camp. ‘Because of the shape of Japan, long and thin from north to south with wide variation of humidity and seasons, local types of ramen have evolved with different noodles. In the south, you have a low hydrolysis rate because of the humidity. They don’t use too much water, so the noodles will be al dente, and so then the broth must be thicker, like tonkotsu in Fukuoka. In the north, you can put more water into the noodles, so the broth can be thinner and the noodles don’t overcook in the broth. So, you see, the noodle dictates everything.’

  When it came to finally trying his ramen, rather awkwardly, Hayasaka’s soup that day is not especially to my taste: it’s a bit watery, and the chashu is an unappealing grey colour. He has, though, done a great deal to rehabilitate the nobility of the ramen chef in my eyes and there are plenty of other wonderful bowls on offer at the festival. The best is the tsukemen by the restaurant Tomita, from Matsudo in Chiba just outside of Tokyo – noodles as thick as rope, dipping sauce the colour of oxtail soup and a massive chunk of tender chashu (as well the chef tells me quite happily, as a dash of MSG).

  I wish you could taste it because I yearn like Heathcliff yearned for Cathy, like Hachiko, the dog immortalised in a statue outside Shibuya Station yearned for his master, to taste Tomita’s tsukemen again. And that is the real power of great ramen.

  Chapter 22

  Tea

  The man in the white lab coat removes the bamboo ladle from the top of the brown earthenware water pot where it has been resting, carefully lifting the handle first, then the bowl in two separate, measured, tai-chi-like movements. He scoops some hot water and pours it over the dark green leaves in the broad, flat stoneware bowl. An infusion is permitted for just a few seconds before he covers the bowl with a lid, swirls the leaves and water, pours, and vigorously shakes the last drops, not much more than a thimble-full in all, of a luminescent golden liquid out into the small white bowl in front of me.

  I lift the bowl to my lips and sip. It is the most intensely delicious tea I have ever tasted. Rich and grassy, toasted, bitter, fresh and mildly sweet, it is like a distillation of the entire plant world.

  The second cup from the same leaves is infused for slightly longer with a greater yield. If anything, it is better than the first, deeper, richer with a pleasing bitter aftertaste. After the third serving, poured over ice and served in a tall-stemmed wine glass, I am buzzing. As a non-coffee drinker I am not used to this much caffeine and in my giddy state accept as perfectly reasonable the tea master’s invitation to now eat the leaves themselves with a drizzle of ponzu. They are delicious.

  Though I haven’t lived in England for over a decade and a half I still think I make a passable Englishman. I appreciate a good queue. I apologise if someone treads on my foot. I know how to pronounce ‘Magdalene College’ and ‘Holborn’. I eat my main meal of the day in the evening and cry during the opening titles of Dad’s Army – sometimes simultaneously. I feel at home in a pub, and still calculate currency transactions via sterling, which makes no sense whatsoever. I can deploy passive-aggressive politeness with Exocet precision; I still learn most of what’s happening in the world from the BBC; and I even own a pinstripe suit. But there is one aspect of Englishness in which I have always felt inadequate, a failure: in all the years I lived in England, and for many thereafter, I never drank a single cup of tea. Not so much as a sip. It wasn’t a religious thing, the rest of my family all drank tea, as did friends, I just never got round to it somehow. Lukewarm, milky-brown, sugary liquid just didn’t really hold that much appeal.

  This was often inconvenient. If you’ve just heard you have got the job, or you have lost your dog; if your aunt has died in a ballooning accident, or you’re feeling at a loose end; if it’s late morning, or mid-afternoon; if there is an ad break on television, or if it’s raining – for English people everywhere, whatever the situation, the universal solution is: ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ If you decline the offer, they literally have no idea what to do next. It hardly helped that I didn’t drink coffee either. I might as well have been Belgian.

  And then I came to Japan for the first time. I went to a sushi restaurant and, after I had finished my meal, was given a thick, ceramic beaker of a hot, clear, jade-coloured liquid. I waited for it to cool down, having by then already learned from painful experience that the Japanese have a far, far greater tolerance of high-temperature foods than other humans, and sipped tentatively. It tasted lovely: grassy and fresh with an arresting bitterness, a flavour I had never experienced before. This was bancha, Japanese green tea. Here I was, drinking tea! All grown up at last. And I liked it.

  Over the years since that first visit, I began to explore the world of Japan’s teas. Broadly speaking, at the bottom is bancha, which is a green tea made with the third or fourth harvest leaves. There are twenty-two grades of bancha alone, along with bancha hojicha, which is roasted, ideally over charcoal, and whose burnt-toast flavour is the closest I ever get to drinking coffee (although it actually has less caffeine than the other green teas). Kukicha is also considered a lower grade tea because it is made from the stalks of the leaves, although I sometimes prefer its punchier flavour; you can also get roasted kukicha – the wonderfully named kukicha hojicha. Higher up the price range you have the shincha teas, sencha and gyokuro, made from the first and second flush leaves. Sencha is the most common Japanese green tea but, depending on aspects of terroir, farming techniques, blending, ageing and processing, a top-notch sencha can be every bit as good as the supposedly more aristocratic gyokuro (which means ‘Jade Dew’). Gyokuro is the valetudinarian spinster of the tea world, grown beneath shade to protect it from direct sunlight, thus boosting its amino acid-rich chlorophyll levels.

  There are many more types of Japanese tea besides these – mugicha (made from barley), sobacha (as the name suggests, buckwheat tea), some rare black teas and, in terms of green teas, there is also the cheap konacha, made from the leftovers from sencha and gyokuro; kamairicha; kabusecha; koicha made with leaves from bushes over thirty years old, and some that don’t even start with ‘K’, like matcha, the type usually used in the tea ceremony. Matcha is made from gyokuro or sometimes sencha leaves that have been steamed and then stone ground to a powder, and is further divided into culinary grade, which is what we mostly get in the West, and the good, drinkable stuff.

  Each and every one of these teas are made from precisely the same plant (Camellia sinensis), which is also used to make the cloying, builder’s teas from which I had recoiled as a child, the only difference being that, for the most part, Japanese tea leaves are not fermented. As well as making green tea taste less musty and dusty than black tea, this has the added benefit of preserving their polyphenols, the powerful antioxidants which supposedly help in the reduction of cholesterol and fat in the body.

  Looking back, at the beginning of my belated tea education I should have started with a few more cups of bancha, gradually acclimatising my palate to the grassy bitterness of green tea, perhaps progressing to a sencha and then the more full-on flavours of kukicha with perhaps a little detour to the hojichas and genmaichas (forgot to mention these – they are green tea combined with toasted rice, originally to bulk them out and make them more affordable and, in the case of matcha genmaicha, with some matcha powder in the mix). Only then should I have ventured to the uplands of high-grade, first-flush gyokuro, perhaps then risking a full-on, proper grown-up cup of high-quality, stone-ground matcha. But I didn’t. My big mistake was to jump in the deep end with a cup of super-thick koicha matcha at a traditional café in Asakusa. Bitter, thick and frothy, it was like drinking toad bile and it set my tea adventure back by some months.

  Yet, slowly, like a rescue animal nervously nosing its way from its cage into the wild, I dipped a toe back into bancha after meals at restaurants before slowly scaling the ladder to the h
ighlands of gyokuro.

  These days I drink some form of Japanese green tea every morning at home but I can never quite replicate the clarity of flavour of good-quality tea in Japan. I wanted to find out why, which is what has brought me to Souen, a super-sleek contemporary tea house in a gallery complex in Nishi Azabu, in central Tokyo. Here, having studied his craft for twelve years at traditional tea houses and restaurants in the city, tea master Shinya Sakurai is, in his quiet, intense way, revolutionising the traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

  And not before time. I realise that, as a chronic Japanophile clearly guilty of fetishising many aspects of Japanese food and culture, I should love the tea ceremony, revere the Way of Tea, but, as we saw in Matsue, I don’t. Part religious ceremony, part meditation, part performance art, the tea ceremony supposedly embodies notions of aesthetics and good character which are, I’m afraid, beyond me. There is no disputing that I could do with more ‘harmony’, ‘respect’, ‘purity’ and ‘tranquillity’ in my life (these are the four tenets of the ceremony), but I just can’t quite see how watching a pedantic elderly woman take two hours to make a cup of matcha will enhance any of these things in my life.

  Sakurai-san’s tea experience is very different, although it still proceeds at a dignified pace. Starbucks it ain’t. I arrive stressed and rushed, having left Lissen, Asger and Emil exploring the many wonders of the nearby Tokyo Midtown complex – the three of them being more coffee people – and experience my usual difficulty finding the place in this quiet backstreet close to Roppongi but, as he begins to make what will be the first of several courses from his ‘tea menu’, Sakurai’s measured pace and ‘in-the-moment’ focus serves notice that I must readjust my mood to match his. Slow down. Focus. Enjoy.

  And enjoy I do, through servings of the thrice-infused gyokuro and then hojicha (with its aroma like a wealthy spinster’s mullion-windowed home) accompanied by some jewel-like seasonal wagashi and exceptional pickles for the roasted tea. The latter is a reminder that the kaiseki meal itself originally evolved from the tea ceremony, with small courses of savoury food being served between the teas to combat the effects of their bitterness on the stomach.

  To finish, Sakurai-san sieves some matcha powder (it has a tendency to clump together due, bizarrely, to static electricity) and whisks up a thick, frothy bowl of matcha, the caffeine levels of which leave me virtually seeing stars as, in the case of matcha, you actually consume the leaves in powder form rather than merely infusing their flavour into water. ‘This must be how Pete Doherty feels most of the time,’ I think to myself as I bounce giddily out onto the street.

  My one major takeaway from the tea menu at Souen is that, aside from sourcing tea from the best growers (in this case, the gyokuro was from Shizuoka, the roasted tea from Yame, close to Fukuoka), water is the key. Sakurai-san goes as far as importing super-soft water from Kagoshima in southern Kyushu. The temperature of the water you infuse the leaves in is also critical. He transferred the water from pot to pot to cool it to less than 50°Celsius in the case of the gyokuro, and 80°Celsius for the matcha.

  In Japan, tea is grown from Kyushu in the south-west, to as far north as Niigata, beyond which the climate gets too cold, but Shizuoka, an hour by Shinkansen south of Tokyo, is the country’s largest tea region and one of the most highly regarded in terms of quality.

  My tea education continued a few days later with a visit to a grower there, Yoshio Moriuchi, a multi-award-winning, legendary tea master, the ninth generation of a family which has been cultivating tea in Honyama, Shizuoka Prefecture, for almost two centuries. He even supplies the royal family.

  ‘Tea came to this part of Japan in 1214,’ Moriuchi told me proudly. ‘The climate here suits the plants so well,’ he continued. There are four very distinct seasons, with good rainfall and lots of fog which helps protect the leaves from the sun, making the tea sweeter – although a good cup should feature astringent, sweet, bitter and umami flavours all in one. Moriuchi also insisted I eat the leaves after they had been steeped, which by this point seemed perfectly normal.

  Moriuchi’s verdant, buxom bushes grow without pesticides (I notice that some of them are home to very alarming looking spiders), right next to the shops, houses and shrines of the town. He showed me how he and his wife steamed the tips of young leaves (for just twenty seconds at 70°C) and rolled them on something resembling a kind of metal-topped pool table in their shed overlooking a car park and convenience store. Tea-rolling is a highly skilled job – you have to keep the leaves moving constantly until each forms a perfect needle shape otherwise they get overheated and ruined, and during the process they lose about 60 per cent of their weight.

  Moriuchi-san is famous for his high-quality sencha, which sells for ¥5,000 (£35) for 40g. It has a refreshing, almost briny flavour – perhaps because it is grown quite close to the sea, but that cost may be one reason why fewer and fewer Japanese are drinking high-quality green teas. Even though every vending machine in the country sells cheap bottles of green tea (cold or, somehow, miraculously, also hot, depending on the season), consumption of green tea for home-brewing is down by 20 per cent from its peak. High-quality green tea is typically drunk to accompany a traditional Japanese meal, Moriuchi explained, and, as people eat less traditional food, they are drinking less green tea.

  Moriuchi’s teas are perhaps the best I have ever tasted, but during my travels in Japan I have occasionally stumbled upon the more obscure, local types of tea grown in tiny quantities and which rarely make it beyond their prefectural boundaries. My favourite is from southern Shikoku.

  When I was visiting the huge Sunday produce market in Kochi (the best market in Japan, at least that I have seen), the capital of the island, on my yuzu quest, I had chanced upon a stall selling a tea which looked like cannabis resin – small, brown blocks. A Western man was busy buying literally every single bag of it that they had, hastily thrusting handfuls of notes into the hands of the bewildered owner. I asked him what he was doing.

  ‘This is amazing tea, the most amazing tea,’ he said, breathlessly filling his holdall. ‘If you can find it in Europe, you will pay a hundred euros for fifty grams.’ The man, who was Spanish, was planning to open a museum dedicated to smells outside of Barcelona, he said, and he wanted the tea as an exhibit.

  The stallholder offered me a taste of what turned out to be a wonderfully sharp-sour, golden-brown brew. It was called goishicha, a rare tea made from leaves which were fermented, twice in fact; once with a mould called kabi and another time with a lactic acid bacteria, in large cedar barrels for up to thirty days. This turns the leaves into something that looks like peat, which is dried in the sun. The ‘peat’ is then cut into small squares, from which the tea’s name derives – the squares look like the black counters used in the board game Go. It was rich in umami but also had a gentle, tangy lactic aftertaste. I managed to grab the last bag before the Spaniard snaffled it up.

  There was one final stop on my Japanese tea odyssey: the place where it all began, which I was able to visit during this most recent journey with my family.

  Like much of its food and drink culture, tea came to Japan from China in the ninth century, albeit in very limited quantities and for medicinal use. But the widespread cultivation of tea bushes in Japan began a couple of hundred years later with a Buddhist monk.

  This was Myoan Eisai (sometimes known as Yosai Zenji), the Okayama-born founder of Japanese Zen Buddhism. He visited the home of Zen, Mount Tiantai in China, in 1191 and became infatuated with matcha and a firm believer in its medicinal properties, as well as its practical effects in helping monks stay awake during meditation. After his second visit he returned from China bearing tea seeds, or actual plants (no one is sure), with which he planned to begin its cultivation in Japan. In their book Tea in Japan, H. Paul Varley and Isao Kumakura call this ‘the most important event in the history of tea drinking in Japan’.

  The first place Eisai landed on his return from China was Hirado, on the north-east
tip of Kyushu. You’ll remember Asger and I had visited Hirado and spent some time stuffing our faces with Casdous – the super-light, eggy spongecake introduced by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century – but, afterwards, we also paid a visit to Senkoji, the temple Eisai founded when he returned to Japan in 1191.

  When I had first read about Eisai bringing tea to Hirado I had idly wondered if there were any remnants of this historic moment. A plaque or statue perhaps, or a tea shop. What I didn’t expect to find was a living monument to the birth of green tea in Japan.

  ‘I feel a connection with Eisai every morning when I pray for him,’ retired policeman, now Buddhist monk, Sokan Tanaka told us, as we sat on the floor of the Senkoji Temple in the hills above Hirado.

  Tanaka still used matcha in the way Eisai had: ‘Our longest meditation is in early December when we meditate for twenty-five hours over the course of a week. Sometimes we sleep sitting here. While we are meditating we drink green tea twice a day to help us stay awake.’

  When Asger and I visited it was freezing. I could only imagine how intolerably cold this wooden building with no central heating must be in December. But Tanaka had a solution: ‘If you fall asleep, the other monks will hit you with this.’ He pulled out a large stick.

  ‘Show me,’ I said. ‘On him.’ I gestured towards Asger who was kneeling on the tatami mat, looking idly in the other direction out of the window.

  Tanaka wore indigo-dyed monk’s robes tied with a neat bow across his chest. His head was shaved, revealing cauliflower ears – evidence of the fact that he had once been a judo champion. He brought the stick gently but firmly down on Asger’s back. My eldest son gave me a look which indicated that, between this and the bakery, he preferred the bakery visit. Why, Asger asked Tanaka levelly, was this something people chose to do voluntarily?