White rice contains little of nutritional value; all the vitamins and minerals are in the husk, which is removed to make it look white, so why eat it, other than to fill a hole which I would much rather fill with dessert? For the last three decades in the West we have been told that brown rice is the thing to eat if we want the healthy rice option, and I have done, even though it tastes like the bits our pet rabbit leaves behind at the bottom of his bowl. A diet based on the consumption of white rice was, let’s not forget, the reason the Japanese sailors suffered from beriberi back in the nineteenth century. To my taste buds it didn’t have much by way of flavour, either. And I also knew that more and more Japanese were coming to a similar conclusion; consumption in Japan has halved since the early sixties. This is normal: a decline in rice consumption invariably coincides with an increase in a country’s GDP: the richer people get, the less rice they eat. Today, the Japanese currently rank a lowly fiftieth globally in terms of per capita rice consumption. Rice was, then, yet another of those traditional food products which younger Japanese people appeared to be rejecting, along with tofu and tsukudani, funa zushi, homemade dashi and sake.
This is why there was no rice-themed chapter in my first Japan book all those years ago. I knew at the time I should investigate it but the subject neither interested me, nor could I find a way into it, a story to tell about rice. Until, that is, I met Furukawa-san for the first time, which had happened seven months earlier, prior to me and my sons turning up in his fields to help with the planting.
I wasn’t sure what to expect of my first trip to Fukushima Prefecture. Of course, I had seen the footage of the devastation wreaked by the tsunami in 2011 but Furukawa’s farm was about fifty miles away from the coast, so presumably it had been protected from the flooding. Of course, I did ponder the consequences of any air-, water-, or land-borne nuclear contamination. After the tsunami, I know some expats in Tokyo had reacted by leaving the city for ever. One prominent Japanese food figure of my acquaintance had bought two different types of Geiger counter for use in his home in Tokyo; other Japanese people I asked admitted they had immediately stopped buying anything grown in Fukushima. Despite the assurances from the Japanese government that all produce was being screened for radioactive contamination, many had switched to sourcing their food from the western part of Japan, or overseas. (Oddly, whenever I asked these people about eating fish caught in Japanese waters, they expressed no reservations. ‘It’s OK, they are not fishing off the coast of Fukushima,’ I was assured. ‘But fish swim, right?’ I would think to myself. The bonito, or katsuo, for instance, migrates hundreds of miles up and down the Japanese coast each year. What was to stop contaminated fish from making their way down the coast to be caught off Shizuoka, for instance? But the conversation would usually mysteriously change at this point, and we would all tuck into our sashimi.)
Arriving back in November 2015 to spend a couple of days filming in Furukawa’s fields for the intro to that NHK New Year’s special episode, the city of Koriyama appeared unaffected by the 2011 disaster, at least physically. Small and low-rise by the standards of most Japanese cities, it had a slight Back to the Future feel, as if all development had halted around about 1988.
My first meeting with Furukawa-san, dressed in his regulation outfit of blue overalls and a John Deere cap, was staged and repeated a couple of times for the cameras: I disembarked from a taxi and strode over to meet him as he cut some rice stalks with a small scythe (we were visiting towards the end of the harvest time). Despite the artifice of the situation, I was immediately taken by his un-affected welcome to me and the crew. Furukawa’s broad, suntanned face fell naturally to a relaxed smile. He was fifty-eight years old and had been a farmer for forty of them, but looked ten years younger. Though he was busy finishing the harvest, he was patient as we repeated our conversations, again for the cameras, and I ‘helped’ with various tasks in the fields. Over the course of the day I was filmed cutting the rice stalks with a scythe, and stacking them in bundles up against thick, tall wooden poles to dry in the sun, in a traditional manner these days rarely seen in the Japanese countryside.
We broke for lunch. It was finally time for me to taste Furukawa’s rice. His daughter-in-law had prepared some onigiri – fist-sized clumps of rice pressed together in a triangular shape, and wrapped with a sheet of nori, usually with a small piece of something savoury in the middle of the onigiri – tinned salmon, konbu tsukudani, ume, or pickled Japanese plums. The onigiri rice grains glinted in the sun. They seemed to radiate their own light source. I took a self-conscious bite, watched by a dozen people and two cameras. The rice had a lovely, lingering sweet mineral flavour but I was failing abjectly to summon some kind of transcendent revelation, some ‘aha’ moment in which I suddenly understood why steamed white rice resonated so powerfully within the Japanese soul. It was just very, very nice rice. Excellent rice. The best rice I had ever eaten, for sure, but still rice. The homemade pickled ume I was also offered, on the other hand, were much more interesting. Rather embarrassingly, my reaction was far more demonstrative when I ate the plums than when I ate Furukawa’s rice. Oh dear.
We returned to the harvesting and conversation. I noticed his fields were full of insects – spiders, crickets, weird alien flying things – as well as frogs and lizards. He explained that most of his paddies were fully biodynamic. ‘There is no point in fighting nature, so I just leave it to the power of the soil,’ he said.
Furukawa started out as a flower farmer but had suffered from constant allergic reactions to the large amounts of pesticides they used, so had changed to farming rice. Over the years, he researched various kinds of organic farming until, in 2002, he attended a seminar about farming with Chinese herbal medicine, exactly the same type of bitter powders that are prescribed for humans.
‘I tried a tomato that had been grown with this method and, to be honest, it was nothing extraordinary,’ he said, offering me a taste of the herbal powder from a five-kilo bag (it was extremely bitter). ‘But I gave it to a one year old baby who hated tomatoes and usually threw them up, and the baby loved it.’
He started slowly to convert his fields to this new system, despite many strange glances and snarky comments from his neighbouring rice farmers. He scattered the powder – ground oyster shells is a key ingredient – on his fields as fertiliser. It wasn’t cheap at ¥100,000 (£700) per hectare and his yield was half that of his neighbouring farmers who used both pesticides and chemical fertilisers, but today Furukawa’s rice sells for ¥1,600 (£12) compared to low-cost rice which can be as little as ¥650 (£4). (For some fields he also uses a rather fraught and even more expensive process, which I witnessed when I visited the second time with my sons, involving a much larger, ride-on machine which simultaneously lays down rolls of black carbon paper and plants rice through the paper, and which, when it went wrong, which it often did when the paper got damp and torn, reminded me of my own efforts to put up wallpaper.)
Crucially, within two years of starting with the Chinese powders, Furukawa won the largest, most prestigious, and most rigorous rice competition in Japan, beating two thousand other entrants. As with Japan’s No. 1 restaurant that we had visited, Yanagiya, my thinking here is that any rice that is deemed the best in Japan has got to be up there among the best rice in the world, hence TGRFITW. Not only that, but Furukawa went on to win the competition for the next five years in a row – 2004, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08 – eventually beating 4,000 competitors in the final year. Finally, the Osaka-based rice growers’ union in charge of the competition begged him not to enter again, giving him a special diamond award in ’09 instead. It was a relief, actually, he chuckled. ‘Every autumn as the competition approached, I would get this unapproachable aura of pressure and stress around me. It got really crazy, I would get so irritable, it was better not to be nominated.’
His neighbours still think he is crazy, apparently, but among the rice growers of Japan as a whole he is a hero, a guru attracting young, idealisti
c farmers from across the country who visit to learn his methods, and is invited to give speeches up and down the land.
Did he enjoy rice farming, I wondered as the camera crew packed up at the end of our day’s filming. As with a lot of the shokunin I had met, I don’t think Furukawa had ever been asked this before, or perhaps even considered it. He paused and then said, ‘I do what I like. But doing everything by myself, in the fields and at home, is so tough.’ He used to be married, he said, and has a son and a daughter, but is now divorced. Later on, over a dinner at his house, he admitted to me that he only actually learned to cook his own rice after his wife left. ‘I would like to marry a strong woman, I would prefer to be number two in this house!’
Furukawa had invited us all to dinner after filming – more osechi ryori/New Year’s dishes in keeping with the programme’s theme. He lived in a traditional single-storey wooden building with an enclosed deck, or engawa, out front, and two open-plan tatami living rooms at its heart. Here, pride of place went to not one but two small shrines: one Buddhist the other Shinto.
‘I pray to Shinto gods once a day to say thanks for my health and peace in the family, nothing to do with the farm or money,’ he said as he showed me around. ‘I just want my family to be well.’
Fast-forward seven months to the following June, 2016, and Asger, Emil and I have come to Koriyama to help Furukawa plant rice. Eventually I do get the hang of his planting machine, although Asger and Emil master it far more quickly than I and are soon marching up and down the paddies in perfectly straight lines. With their help, we finish the two paddies before the light fades.
That night, over another dinner, this time of temaki – featuring, of course, his wonderful rice – back at Furukawa’s farmhouse conversation turns to the 2011 disaster.
‘I was at home with my grandson in the garden,’ he recalls. ‘I was watching my house shaking badly, the roof was breaking.’
Out of fear of contamination, people stopped buying his rice literally overnight, even in local shops. The ‘Grown in Fukushima’ label, once the mark of some of the best produce in Japan, suddenly became a curse. ‘It looked for a while as if I would have to stop farming altogether.’
The Fukushima authorities did what they could to alleviate the public’s fears, posting the results of all radioactivity produce checks online, but Furukawa went a step further, undertaking his own independent tests of his rice and posting the – completely safe – results on his homepage.
Still, sales ground to a halt. Farmers on the coast received subsidies from the government but not here in the centre of the prefecture. ‘The government tries everything to pay less,’ he says. ‘I don’t trust them. Nobody does.’
Furukawa was invited by supporters and well-wishers to move his farm to another part of Japan but he couldn’t abandon his home town, the place where he grew up. In the end, his business was saved by the Takashimaya department store chain. Its flagship branch in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, began promoting Furukawa’s rice and supported him financially. But still it took him two years and a lot of debt to return to any kind of economic stability. Many of his neighbouring farmers gave up; several committed suicide. Furukawa now has to sell his own rice directly as there is no longer a profit for a distributor. Happily, he told me that the phone had started ringing right after NHK’s New Year’s Day transmission of the programme we had made about him – a welcome boost for orders.
Beyond the impact of the 2011 disaster, I asked him why, if rice was so central to the Japanese psyche, consumption in general was in such a decline.
Most farmers these days are only interested in volume and efficiency, not quality. And the government is the same. A while ago, they reduced the number of different quality categories for rice from five to three, so the first category now includes what used to be second-grade rice. If you eat rice grown with chemical fertiliser, it doesn’t taste so good. People have forgotten the taste of good rice. They have begun to think rice has no flavour.
‘Actually, my main aim is safety, not flavour. If it is safe the consumer will buy it, but the good taste is a by-product of that.’ I had asked him something similar – what was the secret of his great rice – when we had been making the documentary the previous year. ‘The most important thing is gratitude,’ he had said back then. ‘There are gods that dwell in the rice, in the soil and in our tools. If you keep a feeling of gratitude for all these things, and use them with love, I think you will make something good.’
In my grand vision, my second visit to Furukawa’s farm was supposed to provide Asger and Emil with some important real-life lessons about dedication, diligence, discipline, all those ‘D’ words, which for me are tied in with the key Japanese principles of selflessness, community and hard work. But in the end, the lessons end up being largely for my benefit.
I had been anxious about whether Asger and Emil would be able to keep helping all day, whether they could handle, or be bothered with, the hard work, but though Asger would later admit the days with Furukawa-san had been the hardest work of his life (‘and, don’t forget,’ he added, ‘I used to have a paper round’), the reality was that my sons came to my assistance more than once. It was they who were anxious about me, they who were looking out for me. It was they who saved my skin. It turned out that they were better at just about every aspect of rice farming than I was, and they worked hard all day, not just doing the fun stuff with the machines, but raking dead straw from the fields and helping to lift great clumps of clay from the paddies: man’s work. By the end of the second day, as we surveyed four (almost) perfectly sown rice paddies, I think we all felt a slight proprietorial feeling towards them.
At one point, early in the first day, I had started to explain to Emil how to plant the rice by hand, something Furukawa had asked us to do in the corners of the fields where the machines had been unable to reach.
‘But he didn’t do it like that, he did it this way,’ Emil had protested, showing me. And he was right; it was I who had misunderstood. This kind of thing had happened before back home many times, of course, particularly with various technological challenges such as connecting the computer to the TV, or having it explained to me that my phone had a torch function so I didn’t need to take photos with flash just to find a keyhole in the dark. But I think that, somehow because this was old-fashioned physical labour out in field, the kind of thing I ought to have had an upper hand with, it was much more of a watershed; it was the moment when I realised for the first time that my sons no longer really needed my guiding hand; it was the moment, without being too soppy about it, that I went from Daddy to Dad.
As I stood there up to my knees in wet mud watching over my youngest son’s shoulder while he focused on planted rice by hand, that line from the Cecil Day-Lewis poem ‘Walking Away’ came to mind. Across a school playing field Day-Lewis describes watching his young son depart from him, essentially into manhood, and ‘… like a satellite wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away’.
Perhaps this, then, was my meaning of rice, this was what our days spent planting in Furukawa’s glistening green fields were supposed to teach me: stop worrying, they are up to it, let them go, off into the world. The world will be lucky to have them, as you have been.
HOKKAIDO
Chapter 32
Uni
We have one final trip to make, to Hokkaido, where our first journey in Japan had begun all those years ago. It is now summer, a couple of months since our rice-planting escapades. I arrive a couple of days before the rest of my family which gives me time to visit what I have been led to believe is the ultimate food destination in Japan: the port town of Hakodate.
Over the past few years I have read so much about this city, supposedly the greatest place for seafood dining in all Japan (which, given that Japan is the pre-eminent seafood nation, once again probably means in the entire world), thanks to its history as an important fishing port for some of the richest fishing grounds in Japan. Hakodate had the best sushi in Japan, a
ccording to one writer, while others had written breathlessly about the restaurants by the harbour in and around the Morning Market which were said to serve the most amazing donburi, a bowl of steamed rice topped with cured salmon roe, or uni, or crab or other seafoods, all for ridiculously low prices. I couldn’t wait. I was rather glad, actually, that my family would not be witness to what I knew full well would be a grotesque, unedifying overindulgence on the part of their paterfamilias, particularly as this was the height of Hokkaido’s uni season.
More than anything, I came to Hakodate with the goal of gorging myself on these golden orange tongues of delight: uni, my absolute favourite thing to eat in the world.
I arrive in the evening to find the Morning Market closed (the clue is in the name, I suppose). I wander by the old brick warehouses along the harbourfront, growing more and more dejected at the coachloads of Chinese tourists disembarking at the average looking conveyor-belt sushi restaurants and chintzy tourist boutiques selling glass dolls, music boxes and fancy chopsticks. There are large ‘Tax Free’ signs everywhere, which is rarely a sign of quality or authenticity. Is this what all the fuss was about? At the end of the promenade I come to a sign indicating the direction of ‘Japan’s oldest concrete telegraph pole’ nearby. Right now, it seems the more interesting alternative.
I check into my hotel a tram ride away on the other side of the narrow peninsula on which Hakodate squats, and ask for a recommendation for a sushi place. There is one nearby, the receptionist tells me, producing a map. By now almost dizzy with hunger, I find the restaurant, Sushi Kura, a tiny place with its chef working behind a half-filled counter. He takes one look at me as I stand in his doorway, my right index finger raised beseechingly to indicate I need just one seat, and shakes his head. He has no room. It is way past eight o’clock. The Japanese tend to eat out early, particularly outside of the big cities, so it seems unlikely that the empty seats will fill up from now on. ‘Omakase?’ I venture, meaning that he can serve me what he wants, and also hopefully reassuring him that I am not a total newbie when it comes to sushi, that I won’t cause any trouble. But no. The chef is adamant.
The Meaning of Rice Page 29