In this often hilarious yet deeply researched book, food and travel writer Michael Booth and his family embark on an epic journey the length of Japan to explore its dazzling food culture. They find a country much altered since their previous visit ten years earlier (which resulted in the award-winning international bestseller Sushi and Beyond).
Over the last decade the country’s restaurants have won a record number of Michelin stars and its cuisine was awarded United Nations heritage status. The world’s top chefs now flock to learn more about the extraordinary dedication of Japan’s food artisans, while the country’s fast foods – ramen, sushi and yakitori – have conquered the world. As well as the plaudits, Japan is also facing enormous challenges. Ironically, as Booth discovers, the future of Japan’s culinary heritage is under threat.
Often venturing far off the beaten track, the author and his family discover intriguing future food trends and meet a fascinating cast of food heroes, from a couple lavishing love on rotten fish, to a chef who literally sacrificed a limb in pursuit of the ultimate bowl of ramen, and a farmer who has dedicated his life to growing the finest rice in the world… in the shadow of Fukushima. They dine in the greatest restaurant in the world, meet the world champion of cakes, and encounter wild bears. Booth is invited to judge the world sushi championship, ‘enjoys’ the most popular Japanese dish you have never heard of aboard a naval destroyer, and unearths the unlikely story of the Englishwoman who helped save the seaweed industry.
Sushi and Beyond was also a bestseller in Japanese where its success has had improbable consequences for Booth and his family. They now star in their own popular cartoon series produced by national broadcaster NHK.
Michael Booth is the author of five books, including the international bestseller, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, winner of the British Guild of Travel Writers award for Book of the Year, and Sushi and Beyond, which won the Guild of Food Writers award.
Also by Michael Booth
Just As Well I’m Leaving
Doing without Delia
Sushi and Beyond
Eat, Pray, Eat
The Almost Nearly Perfect People
To my family
‘The whole of Japan is a pure invention .… There is no such country, there are no such people’.
Oscar Wilde
A decade ago, in the autumn of 2007, I boarded a plane with my wife and our two sons and flew to Tokyo.
We were living in Paris where I had spent twelve months learning the techniques of classical French cooking at the Cordon Bleu school and then working in Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. I had wanted to learn how to cook without recipes, without the guidance of Jamie, Delia or Nigella, and I did, but along the way I had consumed about as much butter, cream, sugar and pastry as any man’s elasticated waistband could accommodate. I was, if not jaded by dishes like blanquette de veau and lièvre à la royale, then definitely feeling the effects of the calorific overload brought on by an excess of classical French cooking. My stomach was now entering rooms before the rest of me. Bits kept moving after others had stopped.
By way of an antidote, a friend had given me a copy of Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, back then one of the few books on traditional Japanese cooking available in English. Its recipes – seasonal, light, healthy, modern and, as the title promised, simple – were a revelation.
Inspired to find out more about what the Japanese ate and how they prepared it, I had booked four open tickets to Tokyo. My family and I ended up spending just over three months travelling the length of the country from Hokkaido in the chilly north to subtropical Okinawa in the south, exploring the dazzling diversity of Japan’s food culture, dining with sumo wrestlers, meeting Japan’s most famous food TV stars and discovering the secrets of how the centenarians of Okinawa lived well into three digits, among other adventures.
I wrote a book about our journey, Sushi and Beyond, but, rather than getting Japan out of my system, the whole experience only made me more eager to return. A new world had opened up of unfamiliar ingredients and strange techniques, a world which was utterly alien, often tantalisingly inaccessible, yet never less than beguiling. From the edible aquarium that was Tsukiji fish market, to Tokyo’s smoky yakitori alleyways, I was captivated. From the minimalist kaiseki restaurants where I held my breath between courses for fear of disrupting the flower arrangements, to the ascetic temple food of Mount Koya, I was perplexed yet fascinated.
I knew that on that first visit we had only really scratched the surface of Japan’s extraordinarily refined culinary landscape. We had visited fewer than a dozen of its forty-seven prefectures; so much about the Japanese – what they ate, and why – remained a mystery. That chronic sense of missing out had barely diminished over the years despite several return visits on my part to write food and travel stories for newspapers and magazines.
In the decade since our first visit to Japan there had been several major developments on the country’s food scene. There were headlines around the world when, in 2007, the first Michelin guide to Tokyo awarded more of its precious stars to the Japanese capital than to Paris. Whatever one’s views of the value of Michelin, it seemed that Tokyo was now the world’s food capital, and subsequent guides, not just to the capital but to other Japanese cities, have reinforced the country’s status as the most starry in the culinary firmament. Then, in 2013, UNESCO granted Japanese cuisine ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ status. This also made headlines globally and, although I suspect it meant more to the Japanese than it did to the rest of the world, as a result still more foreign chefs have visited Japan in the years since and been inspired by Japanese techniques, ingredients and presentation styles. Japan is, for instance, the source of all the snazzy open-kitchen counter restaurants and fixed multi-course menus which have come to define ‘high-end’ dining in London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and elsewhere; and the Japanese were doing the local/seasonal thing long before anyone else. Meanwhile, the fooderati – bloggers, social media and conventional food media – had gone crazy for ramen, and were slowly discovering other Japanese fast foods and ingredients. Had this given the Japanese a new pride in their so-called ‘B-kyu gurume’ (B-class gourmet) foods about which Tsuji and Japan’s food elite had always tended to be rather sniffy? At least the Japanese had finally woken up to the branding potential of their food culture in terms of tourism and, as a result, there had been a record growth in foreign visitors in recent years, many of whom I suspect came primarily for its food. The tourist boom is likely to continue with the Olympics, awarded to Tokyo for 2020. How had the Japanese reacted to all this attention? How were its restaurants preparing to welcome the world, I wondered.
On 11 March 2011 an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck just off the Pacific coast of eastern Japan, destroying entire towns and killing over 18,000 people. It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan and I suspect many around the world shared my horror as they watched the footage of the destruction of an entire region of the country. Since then, we have also witnessed the stoic resilience of the Japanese people in recovering from 3/11 but, among other things, the earthquake, tsunami and ensuing nuclear disaster devastated what had been an important food-producing region of Japan. What have been the long-term effects of the disaster?
So, ten years since our first visit, it seemed time for my family and I to return to Japan for a new journey, to delve deeper into the country’s food culture, to see what we’d missed, and get to know the Japanese a little better.
On landing in Tokyo, we will transfer straight to Okinawa, a three-hour flight south. After some days there we will head north to the first of Japan’s four main islands, Kyushu (the other three being Shikoku; the largest island, Honshu; and Hokkaido in the far north-east). Kyushu has been calling to me for years now. On that first trip we saw only Fukuoka in the north-east of the island, but ever since I had been hearing rumours that there were some extraordinary things to eat there. This time I want to drive from Kagoshima in the south up the western coast of Kyushu to, among other places, Nagasaki, which has a unique, internationally influenced cuisine dating back centuries. Crossing Kyushu, heading east, we will hop over to Honshu, the largest of the Japanese islands but, instead of then taking the more travelled Inland Sea coast route via Hiroshima to Osaka, we will travel along the Japan Sea coast through Shimane Prefecture. This is the ‘other’ Japan, a sparsely inhabited region rarely visited by Westerners; actually, it is rarely visited by the rest of the Japanese. On route from there to Tokyo we will stop in Kyoto to sample a rather fearful delicacy, as well as revisit Osaka, one of the most thrilling food cities in the world, from where I will take a detour to Shikoku.
Nagoya, Gifu, Nagano and Japan’s wine region, Yamanashi, are all on our radar too; each of them has a range of weird and wonderful specialities. You could spend a lifetime eating in Tokyo, of course, but we will also see more of the prefectures of Kanto, eastern Honshu, including, of course, Fukushima. Finally, there will be Hokkaido – the ‘end of the world’ to many Japanese, beyond which lie frozen seas and frosty Russia. On our first trip to Hokkaido we had only seen the main city, Sapporo – lovely, lively and liveable, but really just the gateway to what I knew was one of the great landscapes, and the source of so much stunning produce and seafood.
On that first visit almost ten years ago my sons, Asger, then six, and Emil, four, had been not much more than toddlers. Now teenagers, they have somehow managed to avoid reading Sushi and Beyond so their memories are based mostly on photographs and family mythology (‘Do you remember that time you pushed a sumo over in the training ring?’, ‘How we laughed when you projectile-vomited those fermented squid guts’, and so on). I was curious to see how their reaction to Japan might differ now they were proper humans, and in particular I had a feeling that Japan might offer a few worthwhile lessons for two boys heading rapidly towards manhood.
There are a few qualities I have observed about the Japanese and their society over the years that I want my children to witness, characteristics that have struck me as impressive but increasingly rare in the West: things like dedication, duty, diligence, discipline, determination (for some reason, they all begin with the letter ‘d’). I wouldn’t say my children are particularly lacking in any of these but, equally, I reason, it won’t hurt to see them in action. So many people in the Japanese food world – chefs and food producers, artisans and farmers – have dedicated their lives to tending and perfecting their small patch of the culinary landscape without much consideration for wealth or adulation. Though it is true that my children will be missing some school to travel for around ten weeks in all (we live in Denmark where they are slightly more relaxed about this, as the Danes are about most things), I am convinced that there will be educational value enough in arranging for them to meet some of these ‘shokunin’, as such artisans, or craftsmen, are known in Japan, and watching them at work.
The suitcases are waiting in the hall. I have taken out the rubbish, unplugged the TV, checked that the passports are where they should be in my bag five times now. I am just brushing my teeth one last time before we leave for the airport for our flight to Tokyo when my wife walks into the bathroom.
‘Have you seen this?’ she says, showing me her phone. ‘There’s been a major volcanic eruption in Kyushu. And North Korea has just launched a long-range missile test over Okinawa.’
And so our journey begins.
The Queen of Okinawa is not happy.
‘Japan needs a detox. We have the highest levels of additives in our food in the world,’ she says, for some reason dropping a handful of dried chillis into the glowing hearth in front of us. Within a few seconds our eyes are streaming from the smoke. Hers remain unaffected.
She exhales imperiously. ‘Our nutritionists in Japan are still telling us to eat margarine, so I don’t really trust their advice any more. My children have never eaten instant ramen or micro meals and, now, my guests are like my children. I opened this place to change the eating habits of the Okinawans.’ She sets four frothing glasses of a foaming, purple-coloured liquid before us. Emil’s nose twitches suspiciously.
The last time we visited Okinawa, a decade ago, it was to uncover the secrets of the Okinawans’ longevity. The islands of Japan’s southernmost archipelago were becoming famous for having the greatest proportion of centenarians in the world. Gerontologists had been flocking there to find out why so many Okinawans lived beyond a hundred years. The reasons, we discovered, included strong social cohesion and genetics but in particular a diet which was low in fat with lots of seafood, tofu, seaweed and vegetables, along with specific additions like turmeric, jasmine tea and mineral-rich black sugar. Crucially, the Okinawans didn’t eat too much of anything. Calorific restriction, embodied by the local saying ‘hara hachi bu’ (eat until you are 80 per cent full), kept their intake much lower than the Western, or even the mainland Japanese average. But already the indicators for the future health of the islanders had been looking less rosy. The generations following those who had survived World War II were ditching the traditional Okinawan diet in favour of Western foods introduced by the occupying US forces: burgers, fried chicken, Spam, and the famous (and quite horrid) Okinawan taco rice. Today, the Okinawans are the biggest per capita consumers of KFC in Japan with a bucket of the Colonel’s chicken a common gift at parties, birthdays and – forget silver tankards – christenings. The younger generation of Okinawans are consuming considerably more calories than their parents, and exhibiting troubling levels of obesity, heart disease and diabetes as a result. In fact, as I was now learning, the Okinawans are the unhealthiest people in all Japan, and have lost their longevity crown to the prefecture of Nagano.
‘The most dramatic impact of the Western diet on the Japanese people has been felt here in Okinawa,’ the Queen of Okinawa continues. ‘That’s because this is where the US military first came, and they have had this big base here ever since. The first fast food restaurants in Japan were here. The younger generation just don’t realise what they are doing.’
The ‘Queen’, I should clarify, is Kiyoko Yamashiro, a sixteenth-generation descendant of ShÕ Hashi, the first king to unify the Ryukyus (as Okinawa was once known). I should also point out that Kiyoko does not refer to herself as the Queen of Okinawa although she has a decidedly regal bearing with a straight back; her hair held in a tight, imperious bun; and bold lavender lipstick.
At her restaurant, Garamanjyaku, Kiyoko is serving us a multi-course ‘detox’ lunch. She had been inspired to develop this healthy alternative when a thirteen-year-old friend of her daughter’s dropped dead from a heart attack while playing baseball. This alerted her to the dietary horrors consumed by young Okinawans, which she has vowed to change.
‘I noticed teenagers eating all this fast food and additives. They looked healthy enough but they were not healthy inside so, over the last years, I started to use more and more herbal medicine in my cooking, and going back to the traditional diet,’ she tells us as we sit around the open hearth or ‘irori’.
Kiyoko’s food uses only local ingredients and has its roots in Okinawan royal cuisine and the pre-war, Chinese medicine-influenced traditional diet of the islands in which specific foods are supposed to bring particular health benefits, or treat particular ailments (called yakuzen – or Chinese herbal medicine food). To this she has added her own, self-taught, Ayurvedic, macrobiotic spin. Okinawan royal cuisine usually features pork, but Kiyoko’s food is vegan, for instance. Her menu includes items such as ‘Enzyme juice of seaweeds’ and ‘Salad with lettuce, chia seeds and coconut oil’ and okra. Gwyneth Paltrow would love it.
I am not at all convinced that any food has the power to cleanse or detoxify the body but, as I take a tentative sip of my purple foam drink, I grudgingly admit to myself that Garamanjyaku’s food – Sanskrit for ‘pure throat, good taste’ – is as likely a candidate as any.
We had landed the day before, straight from Tokyo, and woke that morning heavily jetlagged. Though it is a thrill to be back in Japan, some of us are feeling a little tired and emotional, but the approach to this traditional Okinawan wooden house via a steep pathway overhung with plants and trailing flowers somehow transforms our mood before we even reach the door. The building itself is all but engulfed by rampant greenery. It feels like the nest of some great flightless bird. Inside, it looks more like a private home than a restaurant with shelves full of mementos, toys and old magazines, and a random jumble of wooden furniture, some Japanese, some Western.
‘Are you sure this is a restaurant?’ Asger had whispered as we entered. But after a long-haul flight in economy seats designed by the Spanish Inquisition it felt like exactly the kind of first meal on Japanese soil we should be eating.
Okinawa is usually depicted as a subtropical paradise of golden beaches, turquoise seas and verdant jungles, but the main island, Okinawa Honto, is a bit of a mess. In the hasty rebuild following the devastation of World War II, quality architecture was not a priority and the ensuing cheap, concrete development means that, today, urban Okinawa is pretty much an expanse of irredeemable eyesores. Garamanjyaku is located amid the worst of it, above the town of Kincho Kunigamigun. Home to a massive US military base, its centre is a sleazy maze of bars and hostess clubs whose chief culinary highlight is the aforementioned taco rice – minced beef with white rice, in a taco.
Yet, as we now sit and talk and eat, I feel far removed from all that. We are presented with several intriguing vegetarian courses, all served on banana leaves. Unfortunately, the predominantly bitter, vegetal flavours do not hold so much appeal for my children and several times Lissen and I have to reassure Kiyoko that they are ‘just not very hungry’ as they toy with some unidentifiable clumps of matter. I struggle, too, I have to admit. Among the more challenging items is a tea infused with various leaves plucked from the garden, including mugwort and one called chomeiso, the ‘long life’ plant, according to Kiyoko. For me, the tea is borderline undrinkable. And then comes the foaming purple drink.
‘It is fermented brown rice and beni imo, with a little black sugar,’ Kiyoko says. Depending on the weather, the mixture is left for up to two weeks to lactate and bubble, she adds. It is one of the more interesting flavours from the meal – sweet and funky with the floral taste typical of beni imo, the magical, Okinawan purple sweet potato.
Lissen and I have been fascinated with this vivid-coloured tuber since our first visit; indeed, for my wife, over the years, the fascination has become a certifiable obsession. Whenever we had reminisced about Japan, Lissen would always return to the subject of the beni imo and, if anything, she clung even more tenaciously to the idea of one day growing purple sweet potatoes herself at home.
She would describe this in that misty-eyed way that some people talk about one day fixing up a hammock or learning how to meditate, never mind that growing her own Okinawan purple sweet potatoes in our garden was an improbable ambition for a woman who a) only ever ventures outside to drink coffee on a sunny day, and b) other than watering house plants to death has never shown the slightest interest in horticultural matters in all the years I have known her. But return she would, again and again, to the subject of her beloved Okinawan purple sweet potato.
I know of no other person who would consider a visit to a potato research centre as a ‘treat’, but Lissen is thrilled to the point of agitation the next morning as we have planned a visit to Yomitan, Okinawa’s purple sweet potato capital and the first place potatoes were cultivated in Japan. And if she was excited before the visit, it was nothing compared to how she felt when we left …
On Okinawa, the beni imo is credited with all manner of health benefits, mostly on account of its high levels of vitamin C and betacarotine. Its history here dates back to the turn of the seventeenth century, and has become intertwined with that of islands themselves. The sweet potato arrived via a circuitous route from South America to Spain from where it was taken to the Philippines and then China. In 1605, a local government officer, Noguni Sokan, visited China with a trade delegation. He brought some sweet potatoes back and tried to grow them in his garden back in Okinawa. It was a great success and the crop spread rapidly throughout the Okinawan archipelago. Thanks to the English sailor William Adams (of whom more later), it reached mainland Japan in 1615 where it also flourished, particularly on the south-western island of Kyushu.
Noguni Sokan is still considered a great Okinawan hero; his sweet potatoes have been credited with saving the islands from starvation several times during their typhoon-ridden history, and there is a shrine and annual festival in his honour. Today, the sweet potato is the second biggest crop here after, oddly, chrysanthemums; it is a bona fide Okinawan icon. Kit Kat chocolate bars even make a purple potato version exclusively for sale in this part of Japan, and in Japan the fides don’t come any more bona than that.
The last time we had visited Okinawa I had been led to believe that Okinawa’s frequent typhoons meant that its soil was constantly being replenished by nutrient-rich water washed up from the surrounding, coral-filled ocean. The theory was that the calcium from the coral ended up being distributed on the farmland of Okinawa and this was why the Okinawan purple sweet potato was so delicious and healthy, and possibly also why the locals lived so long. It turns out that this is completely false.
‘No, the soil is not at all rich on Okinawa, it is not fertile at all, I’d say it’s about a third as rich as the soil in Kagoshima [the next prefecture heading north, on the island of Kyushu],’ says Ichiro Shiroma, as we stand in the well-ordered greenhouse laboratory where he works. ‘Also, sea water is really not good for sweet potatoes. The whole coral mineral deposit theory just isn’t true.’
Shiroma-san is uniquely placed to pronounce on all this as he used to be an oceanic researcher but is now a soil specialist in charge of the purple sweet potato research project at the local government agricultural centre here in Yomitan. He carries out soil analyses for local farmers to help them adjust fertiliser levels, but his main mission is to create the ultimate Okinawan purple sweet potato: one which is both deeply purple in colour and rich in flavour. At the moment, the two goals seem, frustratingly, to be mutually exclusive. You either get a lovely purple-coloured potato with not much flavour, or something which tastes great but is orange or white.
The current crop of purple sweet potatoes grown on Okinawa are a recent variety, created only around eight years ago after a decade of experimentation. ‘They were bred by the prefecture to stay purple even when they were cooked – most coloured potatoes lose their colour when you boil them – but they don’t really taste of much,’ Shiroma, in his early thirties and dressed in a pale-blue boiler suit and baseball cap, continues. ‘Our customers locally, the bakers and people who make purple potato products, just wanted a strong purple colour but actually, the pure white potatoes they used to grow after the war had the best flavour. They add lots of sugar to compensate for the lack of flavour with the purple potatoes and mix in some of the better tasting, pale potatoes. The purple one, that’s the special potato for Okinawa today.’
Shiroma collects thousands of seeds during a season but only about one in a thousand is suitable for propagation. He shows us a selection of locally grown potatoes, all of which look pretty much like the large, orange variety of sweet potato grown in the United States until he cuts them in half. Though some of them are off-white, others glow with that extraordinary bishop’s-mitre purple we had come to associate with Okinawa.
We chat a little more about the challenges of growing purple sweet potatoes, and Shiroma shows us some test tubes, each containing a slender green sprout rooted in a centimetre of clear gel. With a slight catch in her voice, Lissen mentions her decade-long dream to grow Okinawan purple sweet potatoes back home.
‘Here, how many do you want?’ Shiroma says offering her a tray of test tubes.
My wife and I look at each other. One of the world’s leading sweet potato experts is offering us some of his … sprouts? Saplings? (Still not sure what you call them.) We cannot quite believe our fortune and, disregarding considerations of how we will transport and care for the plants while travelling through Japan, not to mention concerns about the legality of importing live plants – and potato plants at that – into Europe, we greedily accept eight test tubes, four of which Shiroma says ought to produce a purple crop and four light-coloured.
One day, some months hence, I imagine us blending the two to make the most perfect, sweet-tasting, luridly purple cakes and ice creams with which to dazzle friends and family but over the coming weeks these eight Okinawan sweet potato plants will prove somewhat burdensome. Though we observe the strict instructions from Shiroma-san not to open the tinfoil that covers the top of the test tubes until the leaves have outgrown them, and not to water the plants under any circumstances, they struggle to cope with life on the road. One by one, the first four potato plants turn brown with stress, then curl up and die. Yet Lissen refuses to relinquish the four survivors.
‘Once I get them home, we can get them in some proper soil and really care for them,’ she insists a couple of weeks later on in our journey, holding a glass tube containing a sad little brown splodge up to the light. Sadly, when it comes time to fly home, Lissen will judge only two plants worth saving – two plants which must bear the hopes and dreams of a novice potato grower.fn1
In the years since we first visited Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost archipelago has assumed the status of some kind of Shangri-La in our family’s collective memory, thanks to its seemingly computer-generated sandy beaches, cloudless skies and quite unJapanese, chilled-out vibe.
Our first few days reinforce this impression as we are now staying at the Busena Beach Terrace, a luxury hotel which once played a key role in that mythology. The first time we were in Okinawa we had been travelling on a very tight budget and had regarded this splendid, beachfront resort from afar, like medieval serfs outside the palace gates. One day, we had dared to venture up its lengthy, winding driveway – really we just wanted to take a sniff at how the others lived – but had been gently shepherded back down again when the staff spotted us and, quite rightly, judged us to be unworthy of their frictionless service, complicated swimming pool and array of fine-dining options. This time, though, we have managed to bag a room at a heavily discounted, off-season rate.
The first morning, we encountered an old friend at the Busena’s vast and dazzling breakfast buffet: umi budo. One of the most surprising foodstuffs I have ever encountered, umi budo is a type of seaweed, nicknamed ‘sea caviar’ or ‘sea grapes’ – minuscule, fragile, green tendrils bearing tiny spheres, like a briny rosary. When eaten, the spheres make a satisfying, crunch-pop on the roof of your mouth – a sensation called ‘puchi puchi’ in Japanese – before washing your palate with a delicate, fresh flavour of the ocean.
I had only eaten umi budo a few times since that first visit to Okinawa, only in Japan, and always at posh restaurants as a garnish dressed with a little ponzu. I am entirely lacking in self-restraint so, usually, when I find a food I like, I gorge until I am sick of the sight of it, but scarcity had prevented this happening with umi budo. I am determined to rectify this oversight during our time on Okinawa, and also have many questions about this strange little plant. Why, I wonder, is such an amazing and distinctive product not more widely available? I’d imagine chefs everywhere would go crazy for its texture and flavour. How did it grow? Is it farmed, or wild?
Okinawa’s centre for umi budo production – and therefore Japan’s, and perhaps even the world’s – is the island of Kume, a little under an hour’s flight from Okinawa’s main island. Kume-jima is both a gourmet paradise and an actual, real paradise, with lovely beaches, tropical coral reefs and forested mountains. As well as the umi budo, it is famous for its miso cookies, for its sea salt, its sugar cane, for a special type of prawn, for raising goats (rarely eaten elsewhere in Japan, goat meat is common on Okinawa) and its cows. Many of the cows which end up as ‘wagyu’ or ‘Kobe beef’ are actually born on Kume-jima or some of the other islands of Okinawa, where they benefit from the warmer climate at birth before being shipped to famous cattle regions on Honshu, like Matsukawa, where the chillier weather encourages them to take on the incredible fat marbling for which Japanese beef is renowned.
We have some spare time during our first morning on Kume-jima so borrow bicycles from our hotel and head out through the sugar cane fields. We ride along virtually empty roads for most of the way accompanied only by massive butterflies, passing a beni imo farmer just as he is pulling a big bunch of purple sweet potatoes from the thick, red soil. Then, suddenly, in the middle of this bucolic scene, a stadium comes into view, packed with people. It transpires that many of Japan’s baseball teams are visiting Okinawa on their winter training break, and Tohoku’s Rakutan Golden Eagles have been billeted on Kume. We sit and watch the players practising for a while, alongside groups of cheering schoolkids up in the bleachers.
(Much later in our trip, inspired by this experience, we go to see the two main Tokyo teams, the Yomiuri Giants and the Yakult Swallows, play at the Tokyo Dome. Sadly, our Kume-jima experience had misled us: baseball turns out to be extraordinarily dull. The scoreline that day was essentially binary code – 1:0, 0:1, 0.1, 0.0, etc. It made Test cricket look like cage fighting. But the food at the stadium was wonderful: elaborate bento, sushi, tonkatsu, curry rice and tako yaki, with beer ‘girls’ circulating with tanks of draft beer on their backs. Based on the food and the atmosphere we would definitely recommend a Japanese baseball game if you get to Tokyo, just don’t go expecting any kind of sporting spectacle.)
For lunch we have been recommended an Okinawa soba restaurant, Kumejima Soba, in Nakadomari, the island’s capital, a small, dense grid of breezeblock houses clustered around a harbour. The ‘soba’ is actually ramen – that is, not buckwheat noodles served with a dipping sauce as the name suggests, but wheat noodles served in a soup. This is not a mistake; in Okinawa ramen is called soba, and they are actually in the right. It’s the rest of us who are wrong. In the time before ramen came to Japan from China in the late nineteenth century, ‘soba’ was the generic Japanese word for all kinds of noodle. So it was natural that when ramen arrived in Japan, probably via the port of Yokohama, it was called ‘shina soba’, or ‘Chinese soba’; indeed, some places in Yokohama still call it that. And, so, even though Okinawan soba noodles are made with wheat flour rather than buckwheat, they still stick to the old name.
More importantly, I discover that Okinawan soba ticks all my personal ramen preferences. The noodles are almost udon-thick and the broth is typically made with things from the sea rather than just pork bones boiled for days: things like konbu (dried kelp), katsuobushi flakes (bonito fillets, smoked and dried) and niboshi (dried sardines). There are some pork bones too, this is Okinawa after all; there’s always some pork somewhere in the mix. I could definitely see Okinawan soba becoming the next big thing in the ramen world, although it will probably have to change its name.
Kume-jima has other surprises in store. It is a rock-pooler’s paradise; we spend most of the rest of the day marvelling at the tropical fish which get trapped in the petrified coral beach on the north side of the island. That night, we enjoy a traditional Kume dinner at our hotel featuring satisfyingly large quantities of umi budo, served with a ponzu gel (ponzu – the dipping sauce which blends soy sauce with citrus juice, typically yuzu), and also as a garnish for steamed chicken and rice. It is the perfect hors d’oeuvre for our visit the next day to the Kume-jima Deep Sea Water Development Company (KDSWDC), a rather boring name for a rather extraordinary place, just a twenty-minute taxi ride from our hotel.
Here, in hundreds of tanks of water, they nurture great forests of bulging, ripe sea caviar – 180 tons a year. Each tank contains three tons of chilly deep-sea water pumped in from a couple of miles off the coast. This water is the secret to what is probably the best umi budo in the world. Unfortunately, the chances of the rest of the world getting hold of some remain low, at least for the time being.
‘It is incredibly fragile, it doesn’t keep much longer than a week. Our biggest challenge is trying to keep that freshness, that amazing popping texture.’ Plant manager Tsukasa Nakamichi is giving us the lowdown on the tribulations of being the world’s leading sea caviar farmer. ‘If you freeze it, it liquefies. If you brine it, or dry it and rehydrate it, you lose the flavour.’ Umi budo also needs to be kept relatively warm, so air-freighting is difficult. Nakamichi simply cannot meet the demand and, yet, the more the world gets to taste his umi budo, the more it wants. Already in Tokyo they are paying over ¥10,000 per kilo (£62), and though the demand is going global, so far the furthest he has been able to export is Hong Kong.
A dozen or so women in sun hats and elbow-length rubber gloves are sorting and hand-trimming harvested strands. The air is filled with a bewitching briny aroma.
Nearly all umi budo consumed by humans is farmed. The only place in Japan where it grows wild – in tiny quantities and during the summer only – is in the waters around Miyako-jima, which falls into the same climate band as parts of the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, where umi budo also grows. In the wild it usually grows three to five metres underwater in the sand-filled hollows of coral or rock, although it has been found thirty metres down. Umi budo is very tricky to harvest from the wild because it grows amid a dense cloud of its own waste. You have to dive blind to pick it – one reason why, in olden times, fresh umi budo was considered a highly prestigious gift.
It was only twenty years ago, after many years of trials, that an Okinawan man called Mekaru finally developed a technique to farm umi budo on land, growing it as the kind of filling of a sandwich of one-metre-square rubber nets suspended in the sea water, and fed with fish food. The idea was that this new industry would give older Okinawans less physically demanding work to do compared to traditional farming or fishing, but initially it could only be farmed during the winter when the water was cool enough – which is where the deep sea water comes in. This production plant, which opened on Kume-jima eleven years ago, is the only place where they can harvest year round, because it pumps in that chilly deep-sea water during summer maintaining an optimum 25°Celsius in the tanks.
‘I see it every day so I don’t eat it very often,’ Nakamachi laughs when I ask how he likes to eat it. ‘It’s great with just a little shikuwasa juice [a tiny, mandarin-like fruit indigenous to Okinawa].’
As we talk, I notice a wall of photographs of dignitaries who have visited the plant, including the Emperor and Empress and the former US ambassador to Japan, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK.
‘I tried to stop Mrs Kennedy eating it before we had cleaned it,’ says Nakamichi, looking at the photo. ‘But she said she had a strong stomach, and took some anyway.’
I understand her impatience. Standing here, surrounded by tons of glistening, fresh umi budo, larger and more bulging and vital than any I have seen before, it is all I can do to stop myself scooping up handfuls of it and cramming it into my mouth. Sensing this, Nakamichi-san prepares a plate piled high with umi budo, plus some sachets of ponzu to accompany it.
The texture is almost startling – slippery bubbles resist slightly before popping against the roof of my mouth, releasing their intense ocean flavour. Umi budo has huge potential as caviar’s vegan cousin, a new, rare seafood delicacy to rank alongside bottarga or sea urchin. I tip back my head and shove great handfuls into my mouth, all notions of decorum cast aside.
Who knows how long it will be before I get the chance to taste umi budo again, I think to myself, and reach for the plate once more.
I shall never set foot in Australia, the wildlife is just too homicidal. You probably feel the same way. That’s sensible. Best leave it to the Australians. It is odd, then, that I feel so relaxed in Okinawa as by all accounts it too is infested by poisonous snakes. Odder still, then, that my family and I are about to enter a dark, dank underground limestone cave, thirty metres deep, whose entrance is overhung with trailing vines that all but scream ‘Lair of the giant serpent!’
The snakes of Okinawa are called ‘habu’. A particularly aggressive type of olive-brown pit viper, habu resemble rattlesnakes but without the rattle and can grow up to eight feet long. With the exception of a couple of the smaller islands, they are found throughout Okinawa and, according to the websites I read open-mouthed and appalled before we left, they love dark, damp underground-type abodes precisely like this.
A habu bite can be fatal if untreated. A couple of hundred Okinawans get bitten every year, although only one or two die as a result. There is a bounty on the snakes on many of the islands. As one local put it to me, ‘If you see a habu, you have to kill it.’ A while ago someone hit upon the idea of releasing mongooses in a campaign to reduce the habu population, the Rikki-tikki-tavi solution. The problem is, the snakes are nocturnal while the mongooses sleep at night. Now, they are dealing with the twin problem of the snakes and a rampant mongoose population.
The last time we were in Okinawa we met several people with snakebite scars and encountered dead snakes ourselves in irabu jiru, snake soup, a memorably unpleasant dish with all too readily identifiable chunks of snake floating in it (they even left its skin on, all black and scaly). There were also dried snakes on sale in the market in Naha, dead ones squished on the roads, and, most creepily of all, we also saw dead habu coiled and poised as if about to strike in the bottom of bottles of the local spirit, Awamori. They looked like medical specimens in a veterinarian training school, but I had been curious ever since about what the snakes’ presence in the bottles of alcohol actually contributed to its flavour.
Awamori came to Japan in the early fifteenth century not from China or Korea – the route by which most culinary and farming innovations arrived – but from Thailand, where they still make a similarly potent rice liquor, often home-made, moonshine-style, called Lao Khao. Long ago, when the production and sale of sake was strictly controlled by the Ryukyus’ royal family, awamori offered Okinawans an alcohol fix which bypassed taxes and restrictions.
I had always vaguely assumed that awamori was just another form of shochu, the other, more popular, clear Japanese spirit, originally Korean and primarily produced on Kyushu from barley, rice or sweet potatoes. Both awamori and shochu are cheap and strong, and though awamori is indeed often classified as a shochu, it is a completely different drink. In fact, many awamori connoisseurs claim it to be the superior of the two on account of its richer, more complex flavour although, equally, others wrinkle their noses at its earthy aromas and sometimes medicinal flavour.
Awamori is still made from long-grain indica rice imported from Thailand. The rice is washed, steamed and fermented using koji, a type of fungus (Latin name: Aspergillus oryzae) used in the fermentation of several Japanese foodstuffs like sake, miso and soy sauce. Awamori uses black (‘kuro’) koji as opposed to the yellow koji used for sake, or the white koji more typically used for shochu, and the rice is crushed rather than polished, as it is with sake. These may seem like minor differences, but rice polishing is extremely important when it comes to the flavour and quality of sake; meanwhile, the black koji ferments better with the non-glutinous long-grain rice than yellow koji would. The ageing of awamori traditionally takes place in ceramic pots though more often these days it happens in metal tanks and, in a new innovation, sometimes in oak barrels, usually for around three years, often for much longer.
I had assumed the inclusion of a snake in the bottles of awamori was a tourist thing but in this, as I was to discover during a week in Okinawa in which I diligently tasted numerous brands of the drink, I was only half right.
Back to the cave. The opening is at the end of a narrow concrete path behind an electricity generating station. Old leaves cover the top steps and tree roots push through the rocks around us, lending it an abandoned mine-shaft feel. A metal staircase spirals steeply down between the jagged limestone walls into the darkness.
Emil leads the way followed by Asger, Lissen and me, our guide, slightly worryingly, following behind. For the first few steps, I focus on my feet and the main sensory input is the sound of dripping water, but as my eyes adjust to the light I can see that the walls are filled with shelves lined with bottles. Each bottle is covered in a thick layer of dust and has a postcard-sized white label dangling from its neck, like the O-mikuji, the fortune-telling notes written on pieces of paper and tied outside Japanese shrines and temples.
The cave is the storage facility for the Kin Awamori Distillery where, our guide tells us, they keep fourteen thousand bottles, the oldest of which has been here for twenty-eight years. Asger notices some of the labels bear the names of Japanese cities – Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo and so on. ‘It is a tradition for people from around the country to buy a bottle of awamori for a new-born child and leave it here until their twenties,’ explains our guide. She tells us that the caves have always been used to store awamori because they maintain a steady temperature of around 18°Celsius.
During World War II the bottles were joined by the local population. Up to three thousand Okinawans sheltered here during the American bombing raids. ‘One time, a baby was born down here,’ she says. ‘So three thousand people came down, and three thousand and one people left.’
Occasionally, amid the racks of bottles there are also locked, mesh-fronted cupboards stacked with white plastic tubs. These contain the notorious fermented Okinawan tofu, ‘tofuyo’ – firm tofu fermented using a red koji – which I had had the misfortune to encounter on our last visit to the islands. Tofuyo is a noxious, cheese-like substance usually served in sugar-cube-sized chunks with a toothpick on the side. You are only supposed to taste tiny morsels using the toothpick but, unaware of this, on my first encounter with tofuyo I had taken a whole cube in one go and instantly regretted it. It was a frightful mouthful, with a throat-burn akin to a Roquefort which has been left too long on its own in a warm cupboard.
I had wondered whether the caves imbued the tofu with special bacteria as happens with Roquefort, which is also stored in limestone caves, but clearly the plastic tubs would prohibit this. The real reason they are kept here is, as with the awamori, the caves provide a steady chill away from the subtropical heat above ground. The tubs usually remain underground for six months to a year, our guide tells us, but tofuyo can be aged for longer, for years, even. From the seventeenth century until 1868, the Ryukyus, as they were still known, had stronger ties to China than they did to Japan and tofuyo has obvious links to the still popular Chinese fermented, or ‘stinky’, tofu. Oddly, the practice of fermenting tofu doesn’t seem to have caught on much elsewhere in Japan (although they do have a tradition for something similar in Kumamoto, a prefecture on Kyushu), perhaps because for a long time the technique for making it was kept secret among a few people here.
Understandably, given my previous encounter with tofuyo, I am a little wary about trying it again when our guide offers us a tasting in the Kin Distillery store after our (in the end, snake-free) tour of the caves but, eaten in the correct manner in dainty morsels using a toothpick, it is really not bad at all, with a miso-like, sweet, fermented flavour – perfect for accompanying awamori. Not everyone agrees with me on this.
‘It is pure evil,’ grimaces Emil when he tastes some. ‘Like a mouthful of evil.’
‘It tastes like the devil’s poo,’ adds Asger.
The next stop on our awamori exploration is the Zuisen Distillery in Naha, the capital of Okinawa’s main island. Zuisen is perhaps the most famous of all awamori makers with a history going back over a hundred years – it is probably not a coincidence that the Thai honorary consulate is on the premises.
The sweetly cloying aroma of distilled rice fills the air as we pass the red porcelain dragons on the gateposts outside and are met by Gaku Sakumoto, the company’s CEO, who shows us the black koji used for his awamori – it looks like mouldy black rice – and explains the special ‘couth’ method they use during the ageing process by which evaporated awamori is topped up with the previous year’s batch, similar to the way grappa is made.
Sakumoto has kindly arranged for me to try a few of their awamori.
The three-year-old has what I believe oenologists would call an ‘aggressive nose’ (it stank). Those aromas dissipate when awamori is aged in the traditional, porous clay pots but the fatty acids responsible for the smell tend to be trapped in the new-fangled steel tanks and glass bottles. The six-year-old awamori is still a little rough for me; it is as if someone has taken the water left over from cooking white rice and used it as a vodka mixer. But the ten-, and seventeen-year-old awamori are progressively better, until we reach the twenty-one-year old, which is lovely, smooth and chocolatey, rather like a single-malt whisky.