Speaking with the various Hokkaido uni fishermen I met, I would often touch on the perplexing issue of identifying the gender of uni. I never got the same answer twice and it came to be a kind of game for me to hear their different explanations. Some told me uni can be both male and female simultaneously: hermaphrodites. Others said they changed gender during the course of their life, or even during a season. You can tell the sex from the shape of the mouth, one added, but declined to elaborate. Another told me that pale yellow urchin tongues indicated it was male, while the deeper orange was female, which is definitely not true. His friend shook his head and told me that pale tongues were a sign of stress, which might be true, although their feed also has an impact. Basically, bafun tend to have darker orange tongues, an almost rusty, reddish orange, while murasakis’ are more yellow. Another fisherman said female uni tasted better than males, which I think might be true (the females of every species often do taste better) though his friend disagreed and said there was no difference. My conclusion so far is that sea urchins are born asexual, but at some point they do pick a team and stick to it. The only real way to tell – if you’ll forgive the graphic nature of what follows – is to open it up, remove its gonads and see what kind of goo they spontaneously expel: a white discharge is sperm, orange is eggs and thus a female.
As Fujino and I chat by the harbourside the last uni boat struggles in under the power of its elderly, hollow-cheeked fisherman. Its outboard motor has broken down and so he has to punt it in using his uni pole. His equally aged wife in white wellies and rain gear, bent double by arthritis, struggles down the slippery, algae-covered concrete ramp to the water to help him bring the boat in. The two have probably spent their lifetime on these waters, in this harbour, and now those lives are approaching their end amid yet more struggle. As the mist rolls in, it is all a bit Hemingway-esque: the old man and the sea urchin.
The couple take their harvest into the processing hall where the other fishermen plus a crowd of about fifty helpers are now seated hunched on empty soda crates next to open tanks housing live flounder, clams, scallops, octopuses and sea cucumbers, which look like weird, spiky sausages. Though they can survive in their natural habitat for up to two hundred years, uni are sensitive creatures and do not last long out of the sea. Once landed, they must be opened as quickly as possible so that their precious edible innards can be preserved. The helpers are all cheerily scooping out yellow tongues from the spiny shells of the uni using special long, thin spoons, like something a dentist might use to check your molars, and rinsing them with plastic sieves in buckets of chilly sea water.
I sit down alongside Fujino-san who, together with his son, has brought in by far the largest haul today. His group of helpers are gathered in a circle dressed in a colourful array of anoraks and plastic overtrousers; some are wearing white rubber gloves, others have bare hands. They have only an hour or so to ‘fillet’ several large piles of spiky black balls but they seem relaxed, chatting and laughing.
Fujino scoops out a tongue from a purple uni for me to try. It is sublime. The most delicious thing I think I have ever tasted: simultaneously sweet but rich with umami and a subtle briny after tang and a rich, smooth, creamy texture. I ask if he is going to taste, too?
‘I never tire of eating uni, but I don’t eat a lot. It’s a precious product and, also, they are very high in cholesterol,’ he says. But all around, the helpers are, I notice, happily popping the broken pieces from imperfect uni tongues into their mouths. This, it turns out, is their renumeration for their efforts today. Remarkably, they are all working here for no pay, as is always the case. Fujino only ever pays them a small petrol allowance. The helpers, some of whom have been coming here to prepare sea urchin for twenty years and who include his wife, Fujiko, apparently enjoy the camaraderie, as well as the free samples. ‘It’s very normal in farming and fishing communities here on Hokkaido,’ says Fujino. ‘We all help each other.’ His son is kneeling on the floor on a piece of old polystyrene cracking the purple uni open using a special, spring-loaded trowel-like implement which splits them neatly in two. The helpers then remove the tongues with the spoons or tweezers, pecking at them like birds, and rinse them in the sea water before placing them in small metal pails. At one point, someone finds a baby uni. It is carefully placed in a separate bucket to be taken back out to sea by the son. In front of me is a pile of the discarded shells, their spines are still twitching (which they will continue to do for a few hours, I am told). The son turns his attention from opening uni, lifts a rubber-booted foot and crunches down the empty shells to make room for more.
Would I like to try? Fujino asks, handing me a bucket, a sieve and a uni spoon. I pick an urchin from the pile of newly opened shells; its spines tickle my palm as they continue to twitch. It smells of fresh ocean brine, sea spray, iodine. Inside are the familiar golden-yellow tongues but these are criss-crossed by brownish tubes which, I soon realise when I accidentally burst one releasing barely digested lumps of seaweed, are the creature’s intestines.
Suddenly, a miraculous find: one of the other fisherman’s helpers approaches Fujino, shyly offering an uni in his hand. It is different from the long-spined, purple uni we have been working with. This one is brown with spines more like the bristles of a nailbrush, just a centimetre or so in length. It is a rare bafun uni. Would I like to try it, gestures Fujino? I would. He opens it, and offers me the two halves from which I scoop a couple of precious tongues, rinse them in my sea water, and then eat.
In all honesty, I wouldn’t say the bafun uni is better than the murasaki uni, but its darker orangey lobes have a subtly different flavour – sweeter, less iodine, a glorious taste, the kind of taste that forces you to close your eyes so you can enjoy it in blissful isolation.
Once you have processed your uni there are various ways to preserve the tongues. In the days before refrigeration, they would use the itauni method, covering them with salt for eight to twelve hours so that they expelled their water, then preserving them in shochu. Refrigeration and quicker transport methods revolutionised the uni trade forty to fifty years ago, allowing uni tongues to be preserved for up to a week – in effect, this technology created the domestic, now global, market as it exists today. Alum preservation is also widely used, although some say it makes their flavour a little astringent. Alum will be used for the uni we are preparing that day, Fujino tells me, disapprovingly (he hates the taste but concedes it dissipates after about twelve hours). A sterilised sea-water technique has recently been developed to avoid the alum flavour.
Once all the uni have been emptied, we carry the small tin buckets full of golden lobes to another hall on the harbourfront. The elderly couple with the broken outboard motor have worked alone, and though they had only a small catch are the last to finish, bringing their meagre two pails of uni tongues into the bidding hall just in time. Here, their contents are strained into colanders for the wholesalers to inspect. For an uni lover, it is a mesmerising sight: seventy-one buckets full of uni arranged in neat rows. I have never seen so much sea urchin in my life. A handful of younger, slightly better dressed men are inspecting them: these are the wholesalers.
The actual ‘auction’ had taken place a few moments earlier without me noticing. The wholesalers had bid, not for individual buckets, but for the right to be first to choose, and so now they place their cards with their name on the buckets they fancy. Today, the uni are selling for ¥7,000–9,000 (£48–62) per kilo: there is roughly half a million yen-worth (£3,500) on the floor of this shabby warehouse. It will be worth a million once it gets to Tsukiji where the lobes will be arranged by hand in neat rows on faux-wooden trays, but by the time it is served, typically as a topping for gunkan maki – sushi rice wrapped in lightly toasted nori – on the freshly planed cedar counters of the finest sushi-ya in Ginza? Heaven knows. Many millions.
After the uni are sold, Fujino invites me home for a cup of tea. He lives beside a gorgeous sandy beach and earns extra money renting out his front
garden for visitors’ parking. Inside, his house is a homely jumble. I take the sofa, he sits on the floor cross-legged with ease, straight-backed like an ancient yogi. As his wife makes me tea, we talk about the future of Hokkaido uni. A black cat with an infected eye, like a pale blue marble bulging from one side of its head (a fish bone injury, apparently), jumps up onto the low table before us.
‘Every year, two or three fishermen retire and they are not replaced. There is no one to replace them,’ he says as he sips his can of coffee. ‘I plan to stop in about three years. Eventually, this whole community will vanish. The shops and schools have already closed. It’s such a pity, especially as the price of uni is only going up. Last year, and for a long time, I was getting six thousand yen per kilo, this year it’s nine thousand.’
As if warming seas and dying fishermen were not enough to contend with, Fujino and the other uni fishermen I spoke to had also spotted smugglers in these waters. The smugglers weren’t usually after uni; rather, they mostly sought abalone but above all sea cucumbers, not so popular in Japan, but highly prized in China.
‘Yes, I’ve seen smugglers, and I called the coastguard,’ Sumio Kawaji, the fisherman I met at Suttsu told me later. ‘But there are only two coastguards for this whole stretch of coast and, anyway, if the smugglers see them approaching, they just throw their catch in the sea. And even if they get caught, the fines are not so bad. It’s a big business. Yakuza.’ The smuggling had started around ten years ago. Fujino’s son had helped capture eight yakuza sea cucumber smugglers the previous February – he had seen the lights of their boat at night from his house. They had been caught with 100kg of sea cucumber on board. ‘I was very angry at them,’ the son had told me back at the harbour. ‘It is against sustainability.’
Sustainability is not a word you hear much in Japan, so it was heartening that the uni fishermen seemed at last to be concerned about the continuation of the local uni population, and their livelihood. Let’s hope they are not too late.
Chapter 33
Whisky
The first thing I hear as I leave Yoichi Station is the sound of bagpipes coming from a small shop across the road. Incongruous in a small Japanese town on the Hokkaido coast you may think, but actually it makes perfect sense. At least one man considered Yoichi to be as close as you could get to Scotland while still in Japan.
The man, Masataka Taketsuru, is a legend in the world of whisky. Born the third son of a sake brewer near Hiroshima, when he was eight legend has it that Masataka fell down the stairs and broke his nose, an accident which is said to have miraculously granted him a superior sense of smell. At Osaka University he studied zymurgy – or fermentation – but became more interested in Western-style distilled spirits than sake. Against his father’s wishes, he went to work for Settsu Shuzo, an Osakan spirit manufacturer which at that time was struggling to recreate the newly popular spirits first introduced to the Japanese by Commodore Perry (who brought with him a 110-gallon barrel of whisky when he sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853, as a gift for the Emperor). In 1918, following a few unfortunate incidents – the result of trying to make liquor using fruit juices and perfume – Settsu Shuzo sent him to Scotland to learn the mystical art of whisky-making (reading between the lines, Masataka’s fastidious precocity seemed to get up a few people’s noses at the company, and they wanted to get rid of him).
Aged just twenty-four, and with hardly any English, he sailed to Scotland and enrolled at the University of Glasgow as the first Japanese to study the chemistry of distilling. On graduating, this mustachioed, bespectacled Japanese man did the rounds of various distillers to ask for an apprenticeship. The first few turned him down but eventually he was taken on at a couple of places – Hazelburn and Longmorn – to learn the dark arts of whisky-making.
Over two years, Masataka learned about distilling and blending, but that knowledge was not all he took back with him from Scotland. While giving a judo lesson to the brother of a university friend, he met a young Scottish woman, Jessie Roberta ‘Rita’ Cowan, with whom he fell in love and, much to her parents’ disapproval, married at a registry office.
By the time Masataka returned to Japan with his new bride, the original company that had sent him to Scotland was struggling with the economic depression following World War I and no longer had the funds to start up an ambitious whisky programme. Masataka found himself unemployed, and he and the pretty, pale Rita survived for a while on the money she earned teaching the piano and English language classes. Eventually, another company, Kotobukiya (later to become drinks giant Suntory), took him on and in 1923 he helped to start the Yamazaki Distillery, these days a fabled whisky maker whose premises you can still see from the window of the Shinkansen from Kyoto to Osaka at the base of Mount Tennozan, an area famed for the quality of its mountain water.
In 1934, after a dispute with the man who owned Yamazaki, Masataka left to found his own distillery, Nikka, in Yoichi, up here in Hokkaido. Dai Nippon Kaju (the Great Japanese Juice Company), as it was then called, launched its first whisky in 1940, running a sideline in apple juice (which continues to this day) to cover their costs before the first bottles were ready.
I have arranged to meet Yoshikazu Koyano, who works at the distillery, which I arrive at after a short walk from the station. He has kindly offered to show me around. The Nikka complex is made up of a dozen or so grey-stone, red-roofed buildings which do actually look like something you might find in the Highlands.
To make whisky, Koyana explains, barley is first left to sprout, a process which is then arrested by drying. They originally used locally sourced peat for the drying at Yoichi, but now import the barley ready sprouted and dried from Scotland. The malt is then cracked and mixed with hot water, and yeast is added to commence fermentation. The yeast is Nikka’s own.
‘That is very important,’ says Koyano. ‘It gives a very aromatic, strong flavour.’ We are standing inside one of the still houses. The copper stills look like giant ear trumpets. They are coal-fired, straight, pot stills, he says: the coal creates a higher temperature which enhances the toasted, almost burnt notes which characterise Nikka whisky, and the straight pot captures all the flavours rather than just the most volatile ones caught by stills with a bulge in the middle. Together, these factors make Yoichi whisky darker, with a stronger flavour.
We visit the casks where another little piece of Hokkaido magic takes place. ‘We are close to the sea here, and the ocean breezes affect the whisky while it ages in the casks. It gives our whisky a slight ocean flavour,’ my guide tells me. They produce 40,000 litres a day, the most expensive of which is the twenty-one-year-old Taketsuru, which retails for ¥15,000 (£103) per bottle, but has been known to fetch five or six times that at auction.
In recent years, Japanese whisky has pretty much conquered the world. There is little argument that they make as good, if not better, whisky here than in Scotland, Ireland, America or anywhere. As we walk through the distillery grounds, I ask Koyano what he thinks the great secret has been behind the success of Japanese whisky.
‘My feeling is – and it’s not just Japanese whisky, but many things – that we Japanese take an idea about how to make something, and then try many different ways, trial and error, until we come up with something acceptable. Japanese distillers have been forced to rethink or learn processes for ourselves. We start with the traditional way – like using coal to fire the stills – but in other areas we are not afraid to be innovative with different wood for the casks, different distillation methods.’
What Koyano is talking about here is ‘kaizen’, the Japanese notion of constant, gradual improvement and, he’s right, you find it everywhere. Kaizen is the basis of how all those chefs and farmers I have met on my travels operate, the ones who strive each day to make the best yakitori, the best ceramic plates, grow the best rice, or mix the best cocktail that they possibly can, identifying weaknesses in their technique or produce, constantly refining the process, honing their skill, questioning every aspect
of their work. Kaizen is most famously associated with Toyota’s inexorable rise during the 1970s and 1980s which reached its apogee with the launch of luxury Mercedes-basher Lexus, developed following painstaking analysis of European brands, what made them great and how they could be surpassed. One characteristic of kaizen, which is perhaps unusual in what is otherwise often a very strictly hierarchical society, is that it involves everyone in the production chain, from the tea lady to CEO. All are aware of their role in achieving excellence, and in the relentless drive to improve upon it.
It is a philosophy which has certainly rewarded the Japanese whisky industry. In 2001 Nikka’s Yoichi Single Cask won Whisky Magazine’s Best of the Best award, probably the most seismic moment in contemporary whisky history; it won Distiller of the Year in 2015. The same year, the Yamazaki distillery made headlines around the world when its 2013 Single Malt Sherry Cask was named the best single malt in the world by the Whisky Bible (the whisky version of Robert Parker’s wine guide), which awarded it 97.5 out of 100 and described it as a work of ‘near indescribable genius’. It was the first time a Japanese whisky had topped the Bible’s list.
Domestically, too, the whisky market is booming. The first boom was in the golden years of the 1980s when the Japanese economy was rampant, but there has been a second boom more recently when the popularity of the whisky highball exploded, particularly with female drinkers. Since then, Yamazaki and Nikka have left the Scottish whisky industry reeling with their consistently high quality and, at the top end of the market, smaller Japanese distillers have also begun to create their own legends, like Hanyu, which makes the mythical Ichiro Card series of fifty-two different single malt whiskies matured in barrels made from a variety of woods and featuring playing card labels (a complete set sold for close to £319,000 at a Bonham’s auction in Hong Kong in 2015). Another small Japanese distiller, Karuizawa, makes probably the most expensive whisky in the world – £88,000 was paid for a single bottle of its 1960 production. No wonder most of Japan’s distillers are expanding as fast as they can, making the country now the world’s fourth largest buyer of barley. One recent trend is making whisky from home-grown, Japanese barley. It is still a very limited resource but more and more rice growers are reportedly switching to barley to feed the domestic whisky producers. Another trend is using unusual woods for the casks in which the whisky is aged: Yamazaki uses casks that have been used to make umeboshi – the sickly-sour Japanese plum wine – or ones which are made from the rare mizunara, a Japanese oak.
The Meaning of Rice Page 31