In terms of the kaizen approach, I once read something interesting about the whisky industry. When the US drinks company Jim Beam merged with Suntory, the American partners were constantly irritated by Suntory’s efforts to get them to modernise and innovate. While the Japanese were keen to find improvements, the folks at Jim Beam saw no reason to change a recipe which had worked for decades. There are, of course, plenty of Scottish distillers who maintain a similarly vice-like grip on the past by adhering stubbornly to tradition. Dewar’s slogan for its White Label whisky, for instance, is ‘It never varies’.
I ask Koyano whether he thinks that kaizen spirit of constant improvement is still alive in Japan. And if so, why, then, is the country’s economy declining?
‘I don’t think it has changed much, no,’ he answers after a few moments’ reflection. ‘But, of course, everyone’s economic situation was much worse after the war, so perhaps there was more desire, more drive then, we still had to work for just the basics, just to live. These days everyone more or less has a pretty good life.’
He still feels that there is room for improvement in terms of Japanese whisky. ‘I don’t think we have at all reached or surpassed the level of Scottish whisky. Scotland is still Japan’s sensei.’
Koyano and I are now standing outside a handsome, European-style house, like something you might find in a Dundee suburb. This was where Rita and Masataka once lived. Across the way is a museum dedicated to them and the history of the distillery they founded. Along with some fantastic 1970s adverts for Nikka featuring Orson Welles and Rod Stewart, there are many personal mementos from the couple, including ‘Masataka’s favourite table tennis bat’, ‘Rita’s favourite sewing machine’, ‘Rita’s favourite golf club’, and dozens of black and white photos of bear hunts, skiing holidays and fishing trips. There is a particularly arresting shot of Masataka riding an ostrich wearing a bowler hat (Masataka, that is).
The museum does its best to play up the extraordinary love story of the Japanese whisky obsessive and his young Scottish bride, a relationship which must have been severely challenged during World War II when Rita was put under constant surveillance as a suspected spy. As one caption puts it:
‘She dared to live in the Orient with only Masataka’s love to depend on. Rita thrust herself into a different society, defying her anxieties, always believing in Masataka’s dream … The couple now sleep on a hill similar to one in Rita’s hometown. The whisky distillery of their dreams can be seen clearly.’
Masataka died in 1979, having outlived Rita by eighteen years (they had no children). Their story has recently been used as the inspiration for a hugely popular, 150-episode morning drama series, Massan (Rita’s nickname for her husband), by NHK. It had been partly filmed here at Yoichi (really, they made 150 episodes, each fifteen minutes long), after which visitors to the distillery had tripled to 900,000 a year. ‘Yoichi people are very proud of the distillery,’ Koyano tells me. ‘Especially since the TV series which made the town a tourist destination.’
Koyana-san and I part outside the Nikka gift shop and bar where visitors are offered free samples of the company’s single malt and blended whisky. It is still morning so perhaps not the best time to be tasting hard liquor, but I take one of each of the drinks on offer and sit down by a window overlooking the distillery grounds. First, the single malt. I approach the tumbler with a little apprehension after Koyano-san’s description of it as ‘strong and dark’ as I tend to prefer lighter, smoother whiskies, but it is really excellent: delicate, sweet and fruity. My second sample, the blended whisky, is, however, as rough as moonshine and horribly bitter, borderline undrinkable, in fact (and an alcoholic beverage needs to be truly execrable before I reject it entirely).
It is not perhaps the highest note on which to end my trip to Nikka but as I totter, slightly tipsy, back to the station, I am glad to have seen the Yoichi Distillery. Its improbable existence and enduring success seems to me yet another example of Japanese bloody-mindedness, and a living tribute to the art of kaizen.
Chapter 34
Melons
I had another reason to be heading for Sapporo with a spring in my step. My family are joining me for this final leg of this journey in our own footsteps. Having travelled by plane, car, train, bicycle, bus, zip wire, various forms of ferry and boat, not to mention a rice planting machine, we had yet one more form of transport lined up to convey us around Japan’s northernmost island. I meet them at Sapporo’s New Chitose Airport, and we head off together to collect it.
I think I speak for my family when I say that the campervan waiting for us on the forecourt of a rental company just outside Sapporo is not the luxurious Winnebago of our dreams. I had envisaged a magnificent pantechnicon featuring all the technological wizardry Japan could throw at it – something Metallica might use to tour Canada in – but instead here is a gussied up, frankly hideous, Toyota van.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘Aren’t all campervans hideous?’ But this one comfortably surpasses the usual aesthetic shortcomings of the genre thanks to the orange and red decals besmirching its flanks, which make it look as if passenger and driver have vomited out of their respective windows. Inside, it has also lost the shower and toilet it clearly once boasted: all that is left is a rather smelly cupboard with a now incongruous loo roll still in place on the wall.
As we all squeeze in to take a tour with the rental company man, we discover that the vehicle is the opposite of the TARDIS. Somehow, it is even smaller inside than it appears from the outside.
Where will we sleep, we wonder. The man points to a parcel shelf above the driver, and two more narrow shelves at the back of the van above the rear wheels. There is then a brief blur of activity as he swiftly transforms the dining area into another bed but sadly none of us bear effective witness to this process; the consequence being that, later that night, as we are hoping to retire for the evening, we are unable to accurately replicate what he did. During the rest of our trip, whoever sleeps in that particular berth will slowly sink like a disappointing soufflé to the floor during the course of the night.
But still, we are excited to hit the road. We can go anywhere, camp anywhere, we are free as birds. Except for the thing with the bears, of course.
Looking back, it was a mistake to read up on the bears before we left home. Hokkaido is home to 3,000 brown bears, and these are not koalas. Hokkaido bears are a close relative of the grizzly, weighing up to 380kg. I read that there are around 80–150 bear attacks in Japan each year, and already this year four people have been killed. To distract myself from thinking too much about the bears, I started looking into the other dangerous residents of Hokkaido which, a quick Google reveals, include a very poisonous viper called the mamushi; a hornet the size of a hummingbird; and most chilling of all, a venomous, red-headed centipede, the mukade, which can grow as big as your hand and likes to live in shoes and cupboards. Whatever you do, do not read the comments under articles about mukade online. Or see The Revenant.
Like everyone, I enjoyed watching Leonardo DiCaprio have his guts ripped out by a bear in the Oscar-winning movie on the flight to Japan, but, boy, do I regret it at three o’clock that first night camping in the wilds of Hokkaido when, having ignored my insistent bladder for a good half-hour, I finally clamber down from my coffin-like bunk and tiptoe outside to take a hyper-alert wee, my head swivelling this way and that like a demented meerkat at every rustle from the undergrowth. (It turns out that on this occasion the rustling is an especially beautiful fox.)
Our first stop that first morning had been a farming region east of Sapporo, where I had arranged to meet a man who grows the famous and costly Hokkaido melons, known and puzzled over around the world.
Sometimes described as the Kobe beef of fruit, and requiring a similar amount of cosseting to the famous cows, this pure-bred special variety of cantaloupe melon is among the strangest of all Japanese obsessions.
We’ve all seen the travel shows where the disbelieving host
visits a store in Tokyo which sells these pretty green melons for over a hundred dollars a pair, packed in straw in elegant boxes to be offered as gifts. They really do exist. In Tokyo you see them in all the depachika, and in dedicated fruit stores which look more like jeweller’s than grocer’s. I recently read a report about melon thieves stealing an entire harvest from a farmer and, most famously of all, every year, there is an auction in the former Hokkaido coal-mining town Yubari, which grabs headlines around the world because someone invariably pays a ridiculous amount of money for the first melons of the season. This year a pair of these first-of-the-season, or ‘hashiri’, Hokkaido-grown melons sold for an eye-watering ¥3m (£22,000). That’s more than my car cost. A lot more.
I had long been fascinated by the mysterious appeal of these costly green orbs to the Japanese. What was so special about a fairly ordinary looking melon which, back home, was freely available in supermarkets for a couple of quid? Of course, not all Hokkaido melons sell for thousands of pounds, but many do sell for the kind of money I pay for a decent chicken, or bottle of wine. But why melons? Why not peaches, or figs? And why so much money?
To find out, we have come to Hobetsu, a little south of Yubari, where we will meet melon farmer Tomomichi Koboyashi. He grows a type of cantaloupe – the IK Melon – originally developed by his grandfather and father in the early 1970s and bred to be even better than those from Yubari. His grandfather had lived in Yubari, but moved further down the hill in search of better soil and climate. What happened next has gone down into Koboyashi family folklore.
‘My grandfather moved from Yubari to Hobetsu forty five years ago because there is not so much snow here, and it melts earlier, so we can get to market with our melons earlier,’ Koboyashi tells us as we sit on a battered sofa in his cluttered barn. All around us are perfect specimens of his green-skinned, orange-fleshed melons, carefully placed on old Persian rugs. ‘He was trying to cross an Earl’s Favourite with the Yubari king melon but, one day, one of the horses they used on the farm escaped and trampled over all his seedlings, mashing them all up together. My grandfather tried to salvage what plants he could, and, from those, the IK Melon was born.’ It is only after some cajoling that Koboyashi, a quietly spoken man in his mid-forties with a thick shock of bristly dark brown hair, red t-shirt and khakis, brings himself to admit that the IK Melon is ‘more excellent’ than the Yubari.
Today, he grows about 10,000 a year, selling them to neighbours and passers-by for ‘just’ ¥1,000 (£7) each, but they fetch many times that in Tokyo. He offers us each a slice, and we slurp happily away on the deep orange flesh. It is very good, at the absolute peak of ripeness, but also extremely sweet, perhaps too sweet for my taste, as in fact all the many other melons we try during our time on Hokkaido will prove to be. Koboyashi measures the sweetness of our melon with a refractometer: it scores a 12.5. At the height of the season, his melons can score as much as 18.
So, why melons? Why has this particular fruit been elevated to such a ridiculous status in Japan?
‘Because apples and grapes are autumn fruit,’ he says simply. I wait for further elaboration. We all look confused.
‘And melons are summer fruit?’ offers Asger.
‘Yes,’ says the farmer. ‘So the timing is right for Obon gifts, you see?’
Ah, now I get it. It just happens that the melon season coincides with Japan’s biggest gift-giving holiday, Obon, the few days of the year, in late July/early August, when people return to their family homes and tend the graves of deceased relatives. As we would later find out when we visited Yubari itself and see an exhibition about the history of the melon, back in the 1970s a concerted marketing campaign helped persuade the Japanese of the melon’s suitability as the perfect Obon gift. Above all, it is the fortuitous timing of its season that has so elevated the melon to the status of Gift No.1.
And the annual record-breaking auction? ‘That’s just a publicity thing for the grocer who buys them. He gets his company on national TV, it’s great exposure.’ And the melon harvest thefts? Koboyashi had not experienced this but he had heard of farmers who slept beside their greenhouses to deter thieves who usually struck at night, as did racoons, foxes and – gulp – bears.
Before we leave, Koboyashi-san gives us a quick lesson in how to assess a Hokkaido melon. It is all about appearance, little to do with flavour or aroma, so I should forget my usual supermarket habit of sniffing and pressing the base of the fruit.
Of course, the melon should be perfectly spherical and firm but ‘the netting should be elaborate and fine, not too raised’. He invites us to feel the outer surface, or ‘reticulation’, of two different melons, and it is true; on one the netting is raised and ragged, on the other smooth and fine. Crucially, the melon must still have its perfect ‘T’-shaped stalk in place. ‘The stalk tells you a lot even if you can’t eat it. If it’s not there, then the price goes down by fifty per cent. I know it seems crazy, but Japanese buyers have a stereotyped image of how a melon should look, and the stalk must be there.’ To that end, Koboyashi always aims to get his melons to market the same day they are harvested.
‘I love melons so much, sometimes I talk to them without realising it. I want to grow better and better melons,’ Koboyashi tells me as we clamber up into our campervan. ‘I want to develop a new type of melon that will give my customers emotion when they try it, I want them to be moved by it, experience real joy.’
As we drive away, I ask Asger and Emil what they think of Japanese melon worship. ‘They are absolutely not worth the money,’ says Emil. ‘Not even close. Mormor’s [his Danish grandmother’s] raspberries taste much better. Never judge a book by its cover, and never judge a melon by its skin.’
‘Or its little branch-ey thing at the top,’ chimes in Asger.
Chapter 35
Bears
We leave Hobetsu and head east, our mouths agape at the grandeur of Hokkaido’s scenery.
The ‘mountains tumbled together in most picturesque confusion, densely covered with forest and cleft by magnificent ravines’ is how Isabella Bird described the island in 1878, a description which still holds true as far as I can see. Through forested mountains and lush valleys we sweep along immaculate, largely empty highways. It is a staggering, Lost World-type landscape with volcanoes steaming silently in the distance. Closer to our first campsite, outside the city of Obihiro on the great Tokachi Plain on the southern coast, the scenery transforms from hyper-Austria to prairie farmland, with cute Midwest-style barns, and bucolic fields of potatoes and corn.
That first overnight – the one with the foxy fox encounter – brings a rude introduction to camping, Japanese-style. Japanese campsites have virtually no facilities, we discover. At this one, there are no showers. Not a single one. The idea, we eventually figure out, is that campers are supposed to traipse to the nearest onsen hotel, about half a mile away, to wash, but the onsen does not open until midday. It is interesting to see the Japanese out in the wild, though, an unusually intimate perspective which Lissen compares to ‘being backstage in Japan’. Japanese campers seem rather more reserved than I recall European campers from my childhood holidays. Though we encounter not a single foreign camper during the entire time we are in Hokkaido, no one approaches us or even acknowledges the existence of these foreigners in their midst. Still, it is not easy to blend in. The rules for rubbish disposal make the Brexit negotiations seem straightforward; not only that, but just to keep us on our toes they change from campsite to campsite (at one, we are encouraged to bring our refuse to reception, for instance). And, at virtually every site we arrive at the campsite staff seem utterly mystified by our arrival: ‘What could these strange foreigners in a campervan possibly want at a campsite at 7 p.m.?’
At around ten o’clock that first night, just as we are all ready to clamber into our various cubbyholes, having feasted on convenience store sushi and spent a fraught hour trying to make up our respective bedding areas, the campsite police trundle up, complete with fla
shing red light on their toy-sized van. We all freeze, as if in the closing gambit of a game of Twister. What could they want? What rule have we transgressed? And what will be our punishment? It turns out the ‘police’ have chosen this late hour to come and check our passports.
We soon come to realise that Japanese campsites are more like overnight stops than destinations in their own right. Japanese campers bring all their belongings with them and set up shop like very neat Bedouins, with separate tents for cooking and sleeping, and mosquito net gazebos for dining. Everything they might conceivably require is brought along with them just in case. One morning I am woken by a neighbour cleaning his campervan with a power wash he’d packed specially. Funny what people choose to do on their holidays.
Sadistic GPS aside (and, I can tell you, within those three words is contained all the misery in the world), driving in Japan is a doddle. It helps that I proceed in blissful ignorance of the meaning of a large amount of the official roadside signage. In my defence, some of it is deeply perplexing. What was the sign with a centipede in a running race warning of? Or the one with the skiing potato? At one point we pass a sign depicting a mushroom playing golf. At least the Japanese drive on the correct side of the road and road signs are helpfully subtitled in English. Meanwhile, their petrol stations are the perfect embodiment of ‘omotenashi’, or good service: you feel like a Formula One driver making a pit stop as two or more men scurry out to tend to your vehicle, giving the windscreen a thorough wash, whether it needs it or not. And then there are the fabled Michi-no-eki – the unusually well-appointed roadside service areas with takeaway stalls and shops selling local crafts and produce. Paradoxically, though some have showers and are tourist destinations in their own right, none actually sold petrol. The Japanese are exceedingly polite motorists, but, boy, are they slow. They rarely exceed walking pace, which suits us fine. All the more time to take in the view.
The Meaning of Rice Page 32