The Meaning of Rice

by Michael Booth

  ‘There is no answer to “Why do you do this?” It is satori [the Japanese for “enlightenment”]. It is a realisation of being alive,’ said Tanaka.

  Tanaka invited us into his home adjacent to the temple, where he told us a little more about his life. He first came to this part of Nagasaki Prefecture when he was working as a policeman. He was sent to police an anti-America demonstration when the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier) docked in Sasebo harbour, and he fell in love with the region. He returned years later as a monk with a mission to revive Eisai’s temple, the place where Zen Buddhism was first practised on Japanese soil, and where he now lives with his wife, Hiromi, tending the temple and teaching pottery-making to locals.

  As we sat around an open fire in the middle of the room, Hiromi offered us a cup of matcha, electric-green and frothy. I tasted it, expecting the usual bracing bitterness, but the drink was smooth and mildly grassy. I wondered aloud where it came from.

  ‘The tea we grow is mild, maybe because of the cool temperatures up here,’ said Tanaka.

  I paused, mid-sip. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is made from tea grown from Eisai’s tea plants. We have plants which are descended from Eisai’s growing just across the road. Fifteen years ago, there was a big tea ceremony here and some scientists took a DNA sample from the tea bushes we grow and compared them to the tea bushes from Mount Tiantai. They are the same, so I do believe our tea bushes are descended from the ones Eisai planted.’

  He led us across the small country road in front of the temple to a group of forty or so tea bushes growing on a gently sloping patch of land surrounded by trees. This was the actual tea plantation founded by Eisai. From here, the monk had travelled through Japan with more seeds and planted more tea bushes on his way to Kyoto, including at Shizuoka. Afterwards, Eisai wrote his own book, The Book of Tea, to instruct the Japanese on how to grow the plant and process the leaves into matcha via steaming and drying, and then how to brew and drink the tea in the Chinese manner. Over time, tea drinking became associated with the temples, both as an offering to the gods and to keep monks awake during meditation, before becoming an integral part of the tea ceremony so beloved of the idle samurai class.

  And it all started here on this hillside above Hirado. ‘Not many Japanese people know about this,’ said the monk as we thanked him and prepared to leave. ‘Not even locals here know the story but this is where green tea started in Japan.’

  Chapter 23

  Soba

  Let us linger in the past for a little longer, although not quite as far back as Eisai’s time. Let me take you back to a more recent era defined for some reason almost entirely by those words beginning with ‘D’: the shokunin words like discipline, dedication, decency, diligence, discernment and determination; back to a time when people took pride in their work, whether they were craftsmen, artisans, butchers, bakers or Bakelite makers. In the good old days, from what I understand because this is a little before my time, everyone made an unspoken commitment to doing their job as well as they could, to serving their customers to the utmost of their ability, and they did so in order not to display their achievements on Instagram or showcase their successes on Facebook, but simply because it was the right thing to do for their customers and, by extension, for society. They did it out of a sense of another ‘D’ word, duty.

  This, I suppose, is how many people imagine Britain to have been in the first half of the twentieth century. It is certainly true that, back then, there still existed a strong tradition of craftsmanship, things were still made in Britain, and they were made to last. Shops wrapped things in waxed paper and string, milk was still delivered to your door, and if you bought one of those new-fangled vacuum cleaners, you expected it to outlast you. Made in Britain stood for quality and durability. Yes, the Titanic sank, but look how well it has survived down there on the ocean floor!

  Read certain newspapers and you might think that such principles no longer exist in Britain. I don’t know whether that’s true but I do know that the ‘D’ words do endure in Japan. Over the years I have lost count of the Japanese people I have met working in the food industry who embodied what is, to British eyes, a perhaps old-fashioned dedication to their craft, people who work every single day towards achieving a probably ultimately unachievable perfection with humility and resolve. I want to introduce you to a couple of these people.

  The first thing I try to eat when I get off the twelve-hour flight to Tokyo is soba. Particularly ‘zaru soba’, which is served not just cold but chilled, with a dashi- and soy-based dipping sauce, garnished with spring onions and wasabi. Cold soba took some adjusting to, but I now think it is the best way to eat soba, and after a flight it always just feels like that’s what my body needs most: something pure, ascetic and tasting of health-giving minerals.

  The best soba I ever had was not at one of the classic, big-name soba restaurants, like Kanda Matsuya or Daikokuya; it was not even the incredible uni-soba at Honmura An in Roppongi (although, boy, was that great); it was at the humble two-up, two-down home of Yoshihiro Hibiya in Nakanoku, Tokyo.

  I was first taken to this anonymous little backstreet house, its exterior a mess of corrugated iron, air-conditioning units, gas pipes and shutters by some Japanese friends who knew I’d get a kick out of a multi-course meal based on buckwheat. And I did. Much as I liked soba, I never imagined it could be capable of holding my interest over six courses, but as my friends and I sat on the floor in Hibiya-san’s front room he worked alone in the open kitchen to the rear of the room, calmly creating buckwheat porridge, warm soba, cold soba, and other buckwheat-based dishes, serving us with a dazzling array of rare and delicious sakes to match. The purest of the buckwheat dishes Hibiya makes is the simple, unadorned porridge made with soba flour ground from three-year-old grains. It has a delicate, nutty, metallic flavour. It was the first soba dish he ever served me: an audacious way to start a meal, I thought at the time.

  So, when I wanted to learn more about soba and how to make it, it was natural that I should return to La Strada, the incongruous Italian name Hibiya-san has given his restaurant. (I once asked him about this but he said there was no great meaning behind it. He just liked Italy.)

  I was also intrigued by Hibiya himself, the soba loner, this buckwheat monk, who has dedicated his life to this hardiest of grains which can grow even in the most meagre of soils (hence soba’s traditional popularity in the Tokyo region where the soil is not so rich). Though friendly, he was a shy, intense man with long, centre-parted hair fringing black-rimmed glasses. When I turned up for my soba lesson he was wearing grey combat trousers, green crocs and a yellow t-shirt.

  ‘The most interesting thing is, if you want to make really good soba, then it gets more simple,’ Hibiya-san explained to me as he tidied his kitchen, not much larger than a standard Japanese domestic kitchen. He offered me a glass of water. I had arrived earlier than we’d arranged, just before midday, and had clearly roused him from his bed. Every surface of his kitchen and front room was covered in dirty crockery and sake cups from the previous evening’s guests.

  We stepped over the empty sake bottles by the door and moved to another kitchen upstairs. This is where he makes the noodles fresh every day for his guests, five days a week for lunch and dinner. In one corner of the room was a stone mill. He sat beside it and began by grinding some buckwheat grains, turning the top stone by hand to transform the buckwheat grains to flour. It was a painstaking operation. Ten or so of the pyramidal, pistachio-coloured grains would be nudged down the hole into the space between the two stones; he would give the heavy stone four laborious, slow rotations, then push a few more grains down the shaft. He used a flour-encrusted paintbrush to carefully assemble every speck of flour. I stood watching him, a sharp buckwheat grain on the floor sticking up through my sock into the sole of my foot.

  ‘My soba’s taste is the taste of this mill,’ Hibiya said, straining to push the grey, granite millstone. I assumed grinding by hand wa
s better because it didn’t heat the flour as much as an electric mill, but Hibiya wasn’t bothered by that. I got the sense that he just enjoyed the sheer bloody-mindedness of the physical graft; he relished having to transform the grains into flour through his own labour.

  He took the fresh-ground flour and mixed it with a little wheat flour at a ratio of 10:1 in a shallow, very wide red-lacquered bowl, (called a konebachi), then began to add a little chilled water, mixing with the fingers of one hand slightly splayed. The amount of water he uses changes depending on the humidity and the flour, he explained. Buckwheat is gluten-free so the wheat flour helps hold the dough together: without it, the noodles become very brittle and have a tendency to partially dissolve when you cook them. Now using two hands in a ying-yang motion he mixed together the flour and water to a crumb-like texture, added more water before, in a split second, bringing it all together to form a dough, dabbing it around the bowl to gather up the remaining crumbs so that not a speck was wasted. He now repeatedly smeared the dough on the bowl, as if preparing pâté brisée, until finally he was ready to make the noodles. He covered the lacquered bowl with a large wooden board, whipped out a thin, metre-long rolling pin, and swiftly began to roll the dough out to an even thickness of a little less than a millimetre. He had a very specific technique for rolling, curling his fingertips under his knuckles, and shuffling the hands out to the ends of the pin and then back into the middle until the knuckles of his thumbs met, then back out again.

  Next he bought out a smaller, heavier board on which to chop the noodles using a large, deep, oblong blade. I noticed the blade was strangely mottled, a result, he said, of the strong (and good) bacteria that live in buckwheat. He dusted the board with a special, coarser flour, called uchiko, then folded the flattened dough into thirds and chopped it with machine precision into slender shoelaces. He invited me to try but I ended up with something more resembling tagliatelle (this was not a complete catastrophe as it could be used in another of the dishes Hibiya serves, atsukezuri soba, made from broader noodles).

  The most recent trend in soba has been the ageing of the grains, vacuum-packed and frozen, sometimes for up to eight years. It made for a stronger, richer flavour and darker colour. This was necessary to counter the fact that the flavour of buckwheat has been getting weaker over the years because of climate change and soil depletion. ‘Japan is getting warmer, the soil is exhausted,’ Hibiya sighed. As a result, Chinese imports had increased, rendering domestic production less economically sustainable.

  I wondered how he had ended up as a soba chef. In his early twenties everyone had been telling Hibiya to settle for life as a salaryman, he said, and he had done so, at least mentally. But he took a last chance to travel in Europe before starting his working career, and it proved to be a life-changing decision.

  ‘Young people in Europe seemed to appreciate their own culture much more than I did mine. And worse was, they knew more about my culture than I knew about theirs.’ He returned to Japan, which was in the midst of a soba boom and became particularly taken by the way in which soba restaurateurs integrated so many other aspects of Japanese crafts into the work – the ceramics, sake-making, glassware and so on. There was another benefit: ‘They don’t drink sake in the afternoon in udon or ramen restaurants.’

  He allowed himself until the age of thirty to secure a career as a soba chef, training for seven years at four different, traditional restaurants in Tokyo. He is now thirty-nine. He opened La Strada four years ago, and quickly became a revered figure among the capital’s soba aficionados for his single-mindedness and the purity of his soba.

  Hibiya has much in common with the second food shokunin I would like you to meet, Tomokazu Horiguchi, of the Gekko mochi café in Minowa, in north-eastern Tokyo. To me, Hibiya and Horiguchi are twin spirits.

  I went to Minowa on a tip-off from a mochi connoisseur who, knowing how much I love these chewy-doughy rice dumplings with their ‘nodogoshi’ (‘good throat feel’), insisted that I experience them in what she said was their most Platonically perfect state. Horiguchi was doing something very special, my friend told me: he had perfected the increasingly rare art of handmade mochi.

  Gekko is in another of those slightly shabby, local shopping arcades or shotengai, the ‘Joyful Minowa Shopping Street’ to give it its proper name. Its neighbours include a fishmonger, a butcher’s, a grocer’s, tea shop, pickle store and one of those time-warp old men’s clothing stores for which I have a strange affection, selling patterned pullovers and sharp-creased slacks.

  In the tiny backroom kitchen, bending my head beneath clothes drying on a line, I watched Horiguchi-san, tall and slender with a long neck and receding, spiky hair, pound the mochi the old-fashioned way with a hefty wooden mallet.

  ‘Hand-made is better,’ he grunted as, having tipped out a large ball of steaming hot, just-cooked mochigome (glutinous rice, actually gluten-free) into a cedar tree trunk with a bowl hollowed out of its top half, he began pounding it into a single, smooth, homogenous pillow of rice. I watched, hypnotised, as the individual grains of rice were consumed within a dense, sticky singularity. He added nothing to the rice either before or after steaming it – no salt, no sugar, no flavourings. Wearing his white lab coat, he swung the croquet mallet up and over his shoulder and back down onto the rice with brutal yet controlled violence, in a kitchen so tiny it would not have been possible to do the same with a cat. A small fleck of rice flew from the bowl and stuck beneath the calendar pinned to the wall.

  After twenty minutes’ pounding, now satisfied that every single grain was beaten into submission, he gave the smooth white ball of ricey ectoplasm a loving pat, sprinkled some potato starch on a chopping board and, within a few minutes, had moulded by hand sixty-six bite-sized pieces of mochi and set them out in military ranks in front of him, each of them weighing precisely forty-five grams.

  Now forty-four, Horiguchi has been making mochi six days a week for over thirteen years. Reading between the lines, I think he might have had something of an early mid-life crisis around the age of thirty; that was when he quit his job in an electronics store and set out on his path to learn the traditional ways of the mochi maker. Out front, in the tiny, ramshackle café cluttered with mementos, stacks of old newspapers, mismatched wooden chairs and formica tables, there was a yellowing photo on the wall taken the day the Gekko café opened with Horiguchi outside the shop. In the photo he is wearing a samue and posing with his then new mallet and pristine cedar tub amid a display of floral bouquets traditionally given to newly opened enterprises in Japan. I don’t know why, but I found this photograph quite poignant. Horiguchi is not smiling broadly, as you might expect of someone about to embark on a new business venture. He looks humble, but confident. He is flanked by what I presume are four companions (co-owners and waitresses?) yet he still looks lonely somehow, as if he knows his will be a solo journey.

  Perhaps I am projecting. We actually said very little, he and I, during the morning I spent watching him work in his shop, but Horiguchi kindly followed up on some questions via email, which I had translated. One only achieved the soft, smooth, stretchy texture of his mochi through pounding the rice by hand, he wrote, it could never be achieved by machine. He uses rice from Aomori. It was tasty and sweet, better than any other he tried. Every day he takes 2.5kg of rice and turns it into 3.8kg of mochi, the steaming time varying according to the humidity of the day. In the summer, the rice contains less water, so it takes more time to cook.

  As I was watching him work in the cupboard-sized kitchen, the only sounds the gentle shuffle of mochi dough on floured board and the hum of the extractor fan, it had occurred to me that across this city, across this country, right at that very moment, there were thousands of men and women like Horiguchi-san; humble, unassuming, dedicated craftspeople carrying out their various tasks with precise rigour, doing what they do, making what they make, with no thought or hope of riches, fame or acclaim, just the goal of making noodles, or tofu, or patisserie, or sa
ke, or wine, or wagashi, or whatever it was, as excellently as they possibly could, working with the simple but, I think, noble aim of bringing a transitory moment of sensual pleasure or nutritional sustenance to their customers. There seems to me to be a profound dignity in that. I am sure there are mornings when all of them, Horiguchi included, wake up and have no desire to continue, occasions when the relentless grind of the repetitive slog wears them down, when bones are aching, wounds are fresh and the motivation for their drudgery is obscured by the dreary fog of tedium and tiredness, but still they forge on, the culinary shokunin of Japan, improving their craft by tiny increments, refining and honing, aiming higher for no other reason than that is their path.

  A few minutes later, Horiguchi had finished making the mochi and I was sitting at a table in the front room of his café, the only guest. He set three dishes before me, his entire menu: a savoury dish of mochi with grated daikon, a smattering of spring onion and a soy/dashi sauce; two mochi balls, one covered with kinako powder (toasted, ground soy beans) the other with ground black sesame seeds; and, the third dish, a ceramic matcha bowl with smaller, twice-steamed, gnocchi-sized mochi, with adzuki paste and matcha ice cream. This last dish in particular offered a combination of complex, bitter, sweet and umami flavours that was worthy of any Michelin star table.

  In truth, Horiguchi’s mochi needed no accompaniment: I would happily have scarfed them down on their own. Alone, they tasted ravishingly of fresh-cooked rice. And what rice: so sweet and nutty, so intensely pure and clean. I could never have imagined rice could taste this good, and then, of course, there was the mochi’s deeply satisfying, comforting, soft-chewy texture.

  For sure, I thought to myself, this was a meaning of rice. For Horiguchi it was the meaning of everything.