Indigo Days

Christmas Eve in Japan

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy: The Kitchn                                                                 Photos by Kenji Miura                                                                                                                                                                        

I spent my first Christmas Eve in Japan eating hand-rolled sushi and sipping sweet sparkling wine. Oh, and I had a slice of the obligatory Christmas Cake…a cloyingly sweet concoction of generic sponge cake smeared with whipped “cream” and adorned with winter strawberries. At least we didn’t have the bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that many Japanese eat on Christmas Eve (instead of turkey?). The family I was visiting knew me better.

They knew that my love of sushi had inspired me to want to learn Japanese, thus propelling me to Japan the summer of 1988. My friend prepared a large platter of freshly cut sashimi, along with some other garnishes that I have forgotten (shiso leaves, daikon sprouts, green onion?). She had flavored some hot white rice with vinegar, a little sugar and a touch of salt and had snipped nori sheets into quarters. Each person grabbed a quarter piece of nori, slapped on some rice (with a dab of wasabi), laid a slice or so of sashimi across the rice, maybe some green onion, rolled it and munched it down (after dipping a corner in soy sauce). This is called temaki-zushi and is the most cost-efficient way to enjoy good quality sushi. It was the first time that I could eat as much sushi as I wanted without worrying about the bill. I was captivated.

But it still seemed a tad odd to eat sushi on Christmas Eve. The next day was Christmas, yet not one person uttered the words, “Merry Christmas.” I ate breakfast with my friend and her two children (the husband had already left for work), and made my way back to my train feeling deflated. Was that all there was to Christmas in Japan? Walking through the train station building, the department stores were still madly hawking Christmas wares, eking out the last bit of revenue they could. It was December 25, business as usual—people walking busily through the station, no feeling of Christmas to be had. The desolation that overwhelmed me was palpable and it was that day that I stumbled into the realization that I was culturally a Christian, despite being brought up as an atheist. This realization took a few weeks to set in, but the trigger was that empty Christmas Day twenty-three years ago.

The next year, Tadaaki and I got married right before Christmas. We went to midnight mass at Saints Peter and Paul Church on Washington Square in San Francisco, and spent Christmas Day at my sister Pam’s house in Gilroy with family. Then left for Puerto Vallarta.

I always looked at Christmas Eve as the dress rehearsal for Christmas. Despite my newly found spiritual leanings, for me Christmas and Christmas Eve are all about the food and the gathering of friends and family. Some years have been harder than others (deaths or births coinciding), but I’ve managed to keep both traditions alive here in the Japanese countryside. No Kentucky Fried, no Christmas Cake, no sweet sparkling wine.

For the last 21 years I have invited Tadaaki’s closest high school friends and their families for a late afternoon Christmas Eve dinner. We have skipped a few (because of deaths or births), but not many. Though now our family celebrates on December 23, not December 24. I thought it heresy when one of the friends suggested changing the date because he had to work on the 24^th (the 23^rd is a national holiday). “You can’t change the date of Christmas Eve…then it won’t be Christmas Eve!” I shot at my husband (a long-suffering cultural buffer between me and some of the more crazy-making Japanese customs).

Then I stopped a beat and considered. Christmas Eve on December 23…hmmm…what a great concept! Moving the date would give me an extra day in between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to clean up the previous dinner and cook the next. Hah. Moving the date removed a huge weight from my being and an incredible feeling of relief washed over me. I could move the date because I lived in Japan, because I was the one making the holiday happen. What once sometimes seemed like an overwhelming responsibility (to be solely in charge of creating a holiday feeling in a non-Christian country whose idea of Christmas is comprised of made up “traditions” like eating fried chicken and mass-produced, gooey cake on Christmas Eve), no longer binded me. Many people think of Japan as a restrictive society. I’ll go along with that, but if you pop out of the circle and walk your own path, you may get a little flak at first, yet pretty quickly people give up and let you be.

We usually eat duck on Christmas because we have ducks on our farm. And we always have gougères and small producer champagne from France or the U.S. Gougères and champagne are the one constants in our holiday meals, for I do not like feeling constrained into a boring repetition of obligatory holiday dishes. But then, I don’t like feeling constrained into anything, and that is why I feel so free here on the farm in Japan. Nobody thinks I’m an oddball for only eating what we or our friends produce, because nobody notices. I am already an oddball because of my blond hair, and most people don’t look much further than that. And so I go about my life quietly, making my own choices, no recriminations, no comments. It’s an odd kind of life, but one that suits me. I no longer crave the battles that we Americans so love to wage. And now it is my husband who gets energy from a good knock-down-drag-out. Funny, how life goes in a circle. For in some (small) ways, I have become more Japanese than he.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gougères

Makes 20

This recipe is from one of my favorite cookbooks, Patricia Wells’ Bistro Cooking. My copy of the book (an early one) has thick deckle-edged pages and a convenient flap-style cover for marking your place. The recipes include such gems as pan bagnat and salade frisée as well as overlooked classics like blanquette d’agneau and pot-au-feu.

½ teaspoon salt

¼ pound (120 g) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 cup minus 1½ tablespoons (130 g) unbleached all-purpose flour

4 large eggs

¾ cup (60 g) grated Gruyère cheese

 

Preheat the oven to 425˚F (220˚C) and rub butter on 2 large cookie sheets.

Measure the flour into a medium-sized bowl and whisk to break up any lumps and lighten.

Bring 1 cup (250 cc) of cold water to a boil over medium-high heat with the salt and butter in a medium-sized heavy saucepan (preferably enameled cast iron). Remove the pan from the heat and add all of the flour, stirring quickly and strongly to form a smooth ball without flour lumps.

Replace the pan on the heat and cook the dough over medium-high heat, again stirring quickly and strongly. Try to smash the dough across the bottom of the pan to help cook the flour and dry out the dough a little. This should only take a few minutes depending on how much dough you are working with. You should see some whitening in places indicating that the flour is cooking.

Remove from the heat and add two of the eggs and half of the grated Gruyère. Beat on medium speed until the eggs are emulsified then add the other two eggs. Beat until all of the eggs are completely incorporated into the smooth dough.

Spoon heaping soupspoons of dough onto the buttered cookie sheets—leaving enough space to puff up (maximum about 12 to 15 per tray if you are making multiple batches). Sprinkle with the remaining half of the Gruyère cheese.

Bake in the middle of the oven for about 25 minutes, until golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve immediately on a pretty plate lined with a piece of attractive cooking paper artfully folded in half (to absorb the steam).

 

Community

                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                                                                             Photos this post by Kenji Miura

Community. What is that?

This summer with an early September book deadline nipping at my heels, I was in the last mad dash to get my manuscript finished. And as I wrote, I thought a lot about community.

For I have many.

I cancelled the annual summer party (much to Christopher’s disappointment) and never did end up staying abreast of weeding my field (much to Tadaaki’s disappointment). But in the midst of this crazy-busy summer we had three different sets of visitors: Rachael Hutchings of La Fuji Mama blog, Mark Wideman, a friend of Outstanding in the Field, and Casa Brutus magazine with Todd Selby (aka The Selby) as photographer. Visitors coming mean I have to clean the house. That’s a good thing. It also means taking a day or so out of my life, not particularly prudent this summer, but completely rewarding for the renewed energy derived from exchanging ideas with people from outside our locale.

We don’t get out much. Truly. I invite friends over for Slow Food or holiday events and the occasional agricultural celebration, otherwise we don’t do much socializing. No movies. No small dinner parties (at our house or at a friend’s). It is just not part of our daily life. We may go out to the ramen shop or local Italian restaurant when no one feels like cooking; or Soba Ra or Ro when we have birthdays or visitors. But the basic model is: stay home, work at home, eat at home. Home is where life is.

 

 

One reason for this is because up until a few weeks ago, we lived with Tadaaki’s mother. As a farm wife, she was not used to going out to eat, so always a reluctant participant (or flat out refused to come). Though she did like Soba Ra (Western chairs for comfortable seating and phenomenal Japanese food). Baachan (as we called her), climbed into the bath on Monday, November 14, and slipped peacefully away from us. We are still a bit shell-shocked, but manage to make it through each day—now so much more quiet without her fretting or fussing about this and that. Dinnertime is positively a ghost hour. She used to be the center of attention with all of her foibles. Baachan drove us to distraction, but damn we miss her.

So, I guess first, community is family. (And that extends to my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews in California.)

After that, community is those with whom you spend your daily life. The little SSU! kids are my community. As are Alyssia, my teacher, and Yumiko, my assistant.

 

But this summer I began to think about my community in terms of the people from whom I buy my food. The fishmongers. The local farmers we use to supplement what we grow. The ladies at the farm stand who are excited to hear when magazine people come or we do a big event. And the people at Yamaki, our local organic tofu/miso/soy sauce place where I bring foreign visitors and where I

buy gobs of products to bring to the U.S. as presents (mainly for restaurant friends). The fact that what they make is so well appreciated gives the people at Yamaki a great feeling of pride. And conversely, I am so deeply thankful (and proud) to have such a place in the next town. It is a mutual relationship.

 

Besides my writing and blogging community, I also have my childhood and school friends (many of whom intersect more than one of these worlds). It is so much easier to stay in touch now because of email, facebook, and twitter. (Not that I do…)

 

And then I have a community of food people out in the world. Some in France (the Dordogne and Provence), some in Italy (Piemonte), some in Portland, Oregon, but most in Berkeley, California through Chez Panisse. Chez Panisse is not just a restaurant that happens to make the food that most matches how I like to eat. Chez Panisse is a supportive food community from whose midst have come scores of luminaries in the food world (of course), but more importantly, thousands of other just plain people who were innervated by their time spent mentoring in such an unusual learning environment. As for me, Chez Panisse (and its extended family) is a community of friends with whom I share the same love of that elemental part of food. A love and an appreciation of where the food comes from and a commitment to let that food become what it should be on the plate without heavy-handed manipulation. And it is a place I can relax and be myself.

 

When friends from Berkeley converged on Japan in October this year, it was a chance to bring two of my main communities together. They were here for a food and art installation project called OPENharvest, organized by the OPENrestaurant group on the U.S. side and Foodlight Project in Japan. I had consulted on the initial planning stages, but the project had taken on a different life under the auspices of the uber-plugged-in Tokyo crew. Out of my purvey. Instead, I set up a series of farm and mountain visits in our area of Western Saitama to introduce our local ingredients to the people who would be putting together the food. And over those two days I got a chance to introduce the members of one of my most important communities from the U.S. to the members of my most important local community. And in those meetings, despite language differences, there was a visible kinship and innate understanding between the members of those two completely disparate, but completely similar communities. As I knew there would be.

And in the middle of the fray, my dear Portland friend, Giovanna Zivny, and her quirky husband, Pavel, arrived. We made the food and antique rounds for a couple days then crossed paths in Tokyo at an edible street fair that OPEN had organized in Shibuya. Tadaaki was there pounding mochi in a traditional get-up that I had never seen before and the young Tokyoites, enthralled with the mochi making, took turns at wielding the mallet. The food was spectacular on that night…especially the deer burgers and the sardine sandwiches.

 

I never did become much involved with the OPENharvest Tokyo events. Again, out of my purvey. But I kept busy supplying the cooks with organic pork and vegetables, local dairy, and Tadaaki’s eggs. And I came away from the whole project with a deep feeling of warmth for having hosted food people I respect and like in our small part of Japan and for having seen their appreciation for our way of life and for our local friends and producers. It’s not the typical life that can be easily understood by my fly in/fly out visits to the U.S. (especially all dressed up, eating at Chez Panisse). But our life is part of what makes me me and just as I need to go back periodically to the U.S. to be normal, so I want my friends in the U.S. to see how I am in Japan (ripped jeans, garden clogs, floppy sweater…house in constant disarray). It gives me a feeling of being whole, not just showing one side.

So….Sylvan, Sam, Jerome, Charlie, David, Kelly, Sasha, Yuko, Chris and Melissa, Yoko and Kayoko…thanks for coming out to Saitama and thanks for sharing our life for a couple days.

And thanks for getting it. 

(here's a video of the mochi pounding party we did at our house where Bay Area friends and local friends met over a shared interest in funk)

Radiation in Japan

Above photo: Hiroshi Furukawa photos                                                        Below Map: Just World Map

The first thing that people asked me when in the States in early June was, “How bad is it in Japan?”

I gave the only possible answer, “Bad. Very, very bad.”

Radiation is here to stay and it won’t abate anytime soon.

But what exactly does that mean?

Tepco is nowhere close to getting the situation under control and in their efforts to keep cooling the melted down reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, they are creating massive amounts of highly radioactive water with no place to store it. Efforts to filter, then recycle the water have not been highly successful. So far.

Radiation is slowly seeping into the air and leaching into the ground supply. The dismal prognosis is that we could be living with these low-grade radioactive releases for perhaps a decade or more.

For us, 215 kilometers from Fukushima Daiichi, it’s hard to gauge the long-term effects. Now four and a half months after the Tohoku Earthquake, life in outer Saitama meanders along as if it all never happened. No one really talks about the radiation or the fact that tens of thousands of people from Miyagi prefecture are still living in shelters all over Japan. We continue to eat local produce, and as it stands now, there is no immediate threat. I love how we are told there is no “immediate” danger from the radiation.

But then, what else can we do? Where could we possibly go? And do we really need to? Recently, my 16-year-old son Andrew somehow convinced me that riding a scooter to work would be safer than riding a bike. Having just read an article on the high risk of cyclists being hit by passing motorists, he caught me at a good moment. I weighed the risks, and gave in to letting him buy a scooter. Does he have a better chance of getting killed on the scooter than getting cancer at 46? Definitely.

Risk is all around us. And if any of you are parents, you will know the agony of letting our child go out on the street on his or her bike for the first time alone. Or of letting our teenagers drive, or even go out with friends. What are they doing? Are they drinking…smoking…or, god forbid, drugging?

So perhaps we are all playing Russian roulette with the future health of our children, but one thing I am certain, every other part of our life is pristinely “clean.” We live in an 80-year-old traditional sod and wood farmhouse that breathes real air (and dust) from the outdoors. We do not use air conditioning (even in the sweltering summer), or forced air heat. We eat simple foods with no additives or chemicals. We do not buy prepared foods.

In the last 23 years, I have seen Japan embrace convenience stores and readymade foods with a vengeance. While this food certainly (on the surface) appears more healthy than the typical fast food available in the United States, make no mistake that the so-called well-balanced bento box meals available at convenience stores on almost every corner in Japan are laden with chemicals and preservatives. It’s cheap food made cheaply. 

Maybe now is the time to take back the heart of Japan. Maybe now is the time to go back to a simple farm diet. Miso, soy sauce, salt, and vinegar. Those are the true preserving agents of Japan. People can’t do much about the increase of radiation in their lives, but they can do something about what they put in their bodies or in the bodies of their children. Now is the time to embrace clean food.

So where can people find this clean food? Farmers.

Sadly, farming in the Kanto region (eastern Japan) has taken a huge hit because many Tokyoites are boycotting food from the whole region. Kind of mind-boggling when you think about the fact that parts of Kanto are certainly further away from Tokyo than parts of Kansai. You can’t just boycott a whole region. It makes no logical sense. Also it is effectively destroying lives of farmers who have no problem with radiation on their crops. But Tokyoites as urban dwellers have little connection to, or understanding of, the land or of the people who have been growing the food that has been consumed in their city for generations.

I find it ironic that Fukushima Daiichi was built to supply energy to Tokyo, and not used by the local inhabitants. Ironic that some people in Tokyo can turn away from the people and area that kept them supplied with food and energy. Ironic and sad.

But I suppose it’s all about ignorance and lack of transparency. The truth is, there have been many lies told about the situation at Fukushima Daiichi. A source in the Chinese embassy reports that the Japanese foreign office gathered heads of foreign embassies together a few days after the earthquake and advised them to evacuate their citizens. This news comes as no surprise to me as on March 17, I had reported via Facebook,

“The American government took a sharp right turn on its stance early today, deviating from the Japanese party line, by urging American citizens in a 80 km radius of the nuclear reactor to evacuate or stay inside (as opposed to the 20 km-30 km advised by the Japanese government). But realistically, there is nowhere for the Japanese to go, even if they did start advising more drastic evacuation.

Late this afternoon, the American government took an even stronger position and has initiated "authorized evacuations" for American citizens who want to leave Japan.

More rumors circulate that Tepco families at Fukushima Daiichi left right after the earthquake. And the head of Tepco was MIA for a couple weeks post-earthquake. The Japanese press (which relies heavily on ad revenue from nuclear power related sources) was mild in it’s reporting of the nuclear disaster. The foreign press was vilified for being sensationalist, and foreigners despised for “escaping,” were called “flyjins” (a take off on “gaijin” or “foreigner” in Japanese).

But most unconscionable is that the Japanese government did not tell its citizens about the huge release of radiation following a hydrogen blast on March 12 in Reactor No. 1, until two months after the release. So in the end, were those foreigners so wrong to leave? No. In fact, they should have left sooner. WE should have left sooner. On Tuesday, March 15, I got an email from my older sister Pam telling me to send the boys to the U.S. When I mentioned it to my husband Tadaaki, he looked at me and walked away without a word, having given no credence to Pam’s (apparent) over reaction. Thursday night, he started to think otherwise, and by Friday, Tadaaki’s position was that I should leave with the boys and he’d “hold down the fort” with his 83-year-old mom, and our cat and dog. Oh, and the 3000 chickens.

Tadaaki tried to pack Baachan (granny) off onto the bullet train to Kansai to stay with his brother, as he had some wild idea of grabbing the cat and dog and jumping into his van to outrun the imminent nuclear blast. Once his gas ran out, he was prepared to run. Oh yes, another point was that, mysteriously, gasoline was hard to come by, so no one could get very far even if they wanted to. Mysterious.

But, all that doesn’t matter any more, because obsessing about what happened in the past is pointless. Life is now and we should not let the presence of radiation consume us. Who really knows, or who can really understand, how much radiation is around us, or what that means in the long run. I certainly don’t.

 

 

 

I check in periodically to NHK World: Society & Others and I get updates from the New York Times on the nuclear disaster. Otherwise, I read the Japan Times twitter feed and sometimes click to the links. If I’m feeling like it.

Right now I have the field calling my name as the weeds are already starting to engulf. The hot, hot unusually dry spell that lasted for most of June and July segued into a cool typhoon. Bringing what I hear was “black rain.” Oh dear.

No time to worry about the black rain since there’s nothing I can do about it, so I carry on with our lives. My Japanese Farm Food manuscript and photos are due September 1^st, and I’m thinking in a more positive vein. I’m thinking about how simply (and naturally) we live and about how clean the air is in our house and this little agricultural area in which we live. And I’d not trade this way of life (radiation and all) for life in the Bay Area where I grew up, because even there I feel far removed from the farm and this “real” way of life.

And as for the Tokyo people who are shunning Kanto produce…well Tokyo can be a fickle town. But then the sense of community has been long lost in urban areas. And that sense of community is really what created the collective energy that enabled Japan to rise up from the ashes of World War II. I wonder if now there will be a renewed interest in recapturing the rural customs of cooperation and mutual support.

I hope so.

After the Quake

Photo: Tokyo Insider

[originally published on The Rambling Epicure, April 25 as From Tokyo: Quirk of Fate After the Quake]

 

Just moments before the Great East Japan Earthquake began to shake I was thinking about food.

While making my way towards Tokyo Station to catch the bullet train back to my local area 100 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, I was toying with dropping by my regular sushi shop near Tokyo Station for a palate cleanser (to chase away a disappointing sushi lunch earlier). Though really, I was wishing I could stay in town for dinner. Alas, I knew this would not sit well with husband Tadaaki, as I had just gotten back a couple days earlier from a quick trip to the U.S. And I had been gone way too much this last year.

Nonetheless, the idea took hold.

That morning I had sat in on a brain storming session exploring logistics of bringing the next edition of Cook It Raw to Japan. As the talk flowed around me, my nascent desire to “experience” Yoshihiro Narisawa’s provocative Japanese influenced French “food” swelled into an obsessive urge to eat at his Minami Aoyama restaurant, Les Créations de Narisawa that night. Impractical, crazy, costly…impossible. Or so I thought.

When the ground of the massive station building where I stood stopped rippling and the initial terror had passed, the other passengers and I all waited quietly with backs leaning against the station walls. All eyes were fixed on our cell phones in hand, trying unsuccessfully to get a signal. No one said a word.

I emailed my 14-year-old son Matthew, home sick from school that day, and got a return email immediately. The house and family were fine.

At that point I still thought the trains would be running again. The JR announcements were telling us there had been a “big earthquake,” and to wait as they checked the train lines, so I dutifully waited for 45 minutes before realizing it was pointless. And so I made my way through underground walkways to Tokyo Station and began to realize the enormity of what had just happened.

Student groups trapped on their way through Tokyo for the annual School Trip were seated on the floor as teachers gave instructions. The bullet train would not be running that day (or the next).

My first thought was getting a hotel (and that I could stay for dinner). I had already squandered a crucial hour waiting for the trains to run, so the streets had swollen with commuters by the time I surfaced outside of Tokyo Station. I only knew of a few hotels and was not sure which side of the station they were located. Tokyo Station is a massive behemoth spanning multiple city blocks. When I finally got my bearings, it was getting on towards 5pm, already 2 hours after the earthquake. The hotels were full, so I lined up for the payphone to call Les Créations de Narisawa. My iPhone battery was dying, I was getting cold, and I knew I needed to get to a safe haven to recoup my energy before the night ahead of me. I needed food and I needed good food.

The minutes slipped quickly away and the hour hand of my watch was edging toward six. I glanced over at the hoards waiting for taxis and optimistically told the restaurant I would try to get there by 7:30, but gave them my email for contact.

I now had a destination and nothing would deter me from getting there. Nothing.

The line for taxis looked insanely long and seemed to feed in from different directions. I dithered. I stood in line for a while, still unable to commit: wait it out or find another way. I tried to gauge how long it would take by talking to others around me in line—I’m not sure what we were thinking. We somehow believed that if we stood there long enough, the taxi would take us where we wanted to go. But what exactly was, “long enough?” One hour…five?

The alternative was unthinkable. Walk.

But I didn’t have all night to passively wait. I had less than 2 hours to get to my asylum away from the massive surge of humanity that had filled the sidewalks and streets. I knew I could handle a night on the floor of Tokyo Station, but desperately needed something to ground me in the chaos. And the only thing that does that for me is a quiet room and thoughtful food.

So I set off walking. Power walking, that is.

Thanks to a fellow “traveler” met early on in my trek, I got to Minami Aoyama in about an hour and a half. We stopped one time on a pedestrian bridge over Aoyama Dori (a main thoroughfare). The vast sea of lights before us was from the cars that barely inched forward. No taxis were getting through that night. Walking had been a good decision.

Photo: Christian Science Monitor

A flute of champagne in hand, my iPhone charging, I heaved a huge sigh of relief. I was “home.”

For the next two hours, a surreal dinner like I had never had before unfolded. It almost seems obscene in retrospect: tree bark, tree sap…bread baked before my eyes in a small stone capsule. Unusual and whimsical morsels from land and sea played together on the equally fanciful “plates.” I was the only customer that night. Perhaps I was the only one crazy enough to take refuge in such a place. Shut off from the outside world, none of us in that hushed room of Les Créations de Narisawa really knew or understood the gravity of the earthquake and all the horror and devastation it had brought. Nor had any of us imagined the unthinkable happening as it has happened at Fukushima Daiichi.

That night at Les Créations de Narisawa, I was caught in a soft little bubble, coddled by the staff. All of us unaware of what awaited us when the bubble burst.

At 10 o’clock, I stepped back out into the brisk night and started my return voyage. Long (useless) waits for trains, a night spent shivering on the marble floor of Tokyo Station, and more endless lines later, I finally got home late the following day. And for now we are safe, though 215 kilometers does not seem far enough from Fukushima Daiichi. But hundreds of thousands of Japanese are still in shelters and many will not be able to go home for many years to come.

And in the aftermath, we try to pick up our lives. I am planting seeds for the summer and looking towards the future. I am trying to organize food for a shelter in our prefecture and to offer a family the vacant teacher apartment at our school, but the wheels grind slowly here and accepting help from outside sources means someone has to manage that. There seems to be an absence of organization to deal with donations and the shelter contacts prefer money or instant ramen over real food like a big pot of stew from farm chickens and local (non-irradiated) vegetables. But that’s Japan, it’s all about the face to face meeting, not phone arrangements. I suppose a road trip is in order.

 

Tokanya

All Photos this Post by Toshiji Tomori

I skirted the gray block wall along our driveway and rounded the corner onto the street in front of our house. I could barely make out the figures in the dim light of the lone streetlight, and only the flash of Tomori-san’s camera illuminated the ropes pounding on the pavement. “Tokanya, waradepo yomochi kutte, buttatake!” (Tokanya, straw gun, eat mochi in the nighttime, shoot!)

 

 

A car came up fast behind me and I yelled, “Car!” and stepped aside quickly as the driver did not show signs of slowing. “Car…Car!” The figures scattered, but took up their cries right after,“Tokanya, waradepo yomochi kutte, buttatake!” Thwak. The crack of the “straw gun” on the pavement wakes up the sleeping winter bugs and kills them (metaphorically). After the rice harvest, in the late autumn we make “straw guns” called waradepo for Tokanya, an ancient farming rite to send off the rice field god to the mountains. Our friends come over to help us pound mochi and we eat in the garden at torch light.

Normally celebrated the 10^th day in the 10^th month in the lunar year, it should have been held the day before (November 15), but Tadaaki kindly agreed to wait a day so that I could participate. My JAL flight now gets into Haneda airport too late to get home to Saitama, so I spent the night at the airport hotel and hopped the train in the morning. Feeling a bit discombobulated, I set to unpacking with uncharacteristic haste (usually my bags hang around the tatami room for a couple weeks as I slowly chip away at them). This time I was determined to wipe the traces of my third and last overseas trip this fall and reenter life in Japan without the typically bumpy transition period.

But the publisher discussions and book contract were both in limbo, so I too felt “in between.” When I got home that morning, I asked Tadaaki if there was anything I could do to help. He shook his head and told me, “It’s under control. Yoshie is coming at 4:00 and the rest of the people are coming around 5.” So I went back in the house to unpack.

 

 

My editor friend Kim Schuefftan showed up at 4, then disappeared. I went upstairs for a while only to come down and find a strange girl in the kitchen. Not Yoshie. Tadaaki has a fairly loose style to his events and gives little instruction to his helpers. I never did learn the girl’s name, but she did bumble about in our kitchen. Yoshie eventually showed up with another friend in tow, and at one point all three girls were stirring and skimming the soup together. I never have understood why it takes so many people to do one task here. I guess it is the sense of comradery and also the feeling that if one is not working, one is being lazy or warui to the group.

Warui is roughly translated as “bad.” The usage is fairly common, however, since this is a completely Japanese cultural concept. If someone does something for you, your response will often be warukatta, ne. Oh I was so bad to have received this from you…oh it was so bad of me to put you out for cooking this for me. My mother-in-law uses it a lot. Me, not so much. Bad American wife, I guess.

And I suppose as the “wife,” I should have been the one feeling badly for not helping, but already the plan was out of my control, careening along without direction. Tadaaki tends to whoosh in, give a few minimal cooking commands and then spin back off to the eggs, chickens, or deliveries. I am the opposite, completely controlling in the kitchen and not one to let people go willy-nilly. When I make the kenchinjiru, I like to slice the vegetables myself because I want them all to be the right size and thickness to cook at the same pace. Good enough is not where I look to end up. Each ingredient deserves to shine, so the finished dish should not be messed up by unwitting mistakes of well-meaning, yet untutored assistants. But if the cooks at Chez Panisse could let me blunder about in their kitchen, I suppose I should be more forgiving (and flexible). Though I do relax the “rules” when it comes to little kids—but then I’m just serving ourselves and not a crowd of thirty or forty hungry adults.

 

 

It used to be that the countrywomen all spoke the same language of food and knew how to prepare the same dishes. Today that is not true, as most young women do not learn to cook from their mothers, and there are few farming families passing along traditions. Mothers (and even grandmothers) work, so supermarket prepared foods regularly appear on the table; and convenience store foods are eaten in the car on the way home or in transit to study school. After all, there is no mess in the kitchen if one eats in the car or re-heats in the microwave. At a recent Japanese food event in Napa, there was much talk of seasonality and local foods in Japan…but the reality is much more bleak. Though I suppose those convenience store bento meals are better balanced than MacDonald’s and actually look like real meals, as long as you don’t mind inferior ingredients, MSG, and preservatives. Did I mention that I’m not a fan of convenience store or prepared foods? But then our kitchen is never pristine, so that’s the trade off.

 

 

Tokanya, manju stealing at Jugoya and even mochi making at New Year have all virtually died out in Japan. Our family never gave up on mochi pounding in the garden at New Year, but it wasn’t until recently that Tadaaki revived Tokanya and Jugoya in our house. Having home businesses, trying to grow food for the family, and bringing up three small homeschooled sons stretched both Tadaaki and me to the thinnest point where sometimes I wondered when we would break. Yet somehow when I did not have energy, Tadaaki did and visa versa. So we survived those years. Unfortunately, mushroom hunting and wild berry gathering in the mountains did not. Though somehow we managed to keep river trips and fishing expeditions alive in the summer. I guess it was the cool water in the impossibly sweltering summers that pushed me to get on board these excursions. In contrast, climbing up the mountain with little babies did not seem as appealing (or practical).

 

 

But all of this takes energy. And as I look around me, I realize that most (though not all) of our friends who are trying to live off the land or revive dying country customs are all transplants from the city (me included). I suppose we do not have the weight of generations past pulling us down a bit and I suppose we bring some naïve energy to the equation. But then I look at Tadaaki and Suka-san, carrying on the farming life, college degrees in hand. A new generation of farmers who choose the land, because the land chose them. They both live and breathe farming in a way that we transplants will never be able to, yet we transplants also bring a fresh wind to the area, and so our partnerships have a spirit of dynamism backed by mutual support and respect.

 

And as I stood there on the street that night of Tokanya, I thought about how the old customs clash with the new. About the cars zooming down our old neighborhood street no longer lined with old farmhouses—now razed for large prefab versions that the younger couples favor. And about Tadaaki leading the kids and friends as they banged their “straw guns” on the pavement—as if they owned the street and the cars were the intruders. And I thought about the shishimai dancers who had come to celebrate the sending off of the rice harvest gods and that we can do this because we do it together. We fight the fight to keep those traditions alive because that is the heart of Japan and without them there is no life.

 

Kenchinjiru (Country Soup with Vegetables): Traditionally, this was a vegetarian soup made with root vegetables, tofu, konnyaku, and perhaps dried shiitake for depth of flavor. But we often make a broth from our Christmas duck carcasses for the kenchinjiru we make at New Year…because we have them. In this case, add some sliced ginger and a few generous stalks of Japanese negi (substitute thick spring onions or thin leeks) to the fresh duck bones (I use the term “fresh” loosely because actually we freeze the raw carcasses whole in Ziploc bags). Alternatively, I like to make a stock from the cooked bones of roasted chickens that I stuffed with garden thyme branches and Mochizuki-san’s lemons, quartered. Our chickens are so sublime that I add nothing but water along with the thyme sprigs and drippings off the cutting board. I tried to cook the soup all night but the gas alarm company called my mother-in-law in the middle of the night and she crept upstairs to wake my husband. He has now nixed the overnight cook method. This deeply flavorful chicken soup makes an unforgettable ramen broth for homemade ramen; also I see it as a base for a mochi-less kenchinjiru. For a vegetarian broth, I would add a generous piece or two of konbu kelp to a large pot of cold water and bring it almost to a boil before removing the kelp and then proceed to make the root vegetable soup.

To prepare: scrub equal amounts of carrots, gobo (burdock root), and daikon with a rough brush (tawashi). Slice into thin rounds, half rounds or quarters depending on thickness of the roots. The vegetables should be fairly uniform in thickness and size, as you will be cooking them together and eating the soup with chopsticks. Peel and slice the same amount of taro root (satoimo) as you did for each of the other vegetables. Keep the daikon and taro each in separate bowls. Cut horizontally through a block or two of best quality soft tofu (in Japan use momendofu), then crosswise into 6 x 4 pieces (thus creating a dice). Slice usuage into ¼” strips (Tadaaki cuts them again horizontally to make pieces, I prefer them a little long and dangly). If the usuage is not fresh, pour hot water over to take off any unpleasant odors—or maybe just skip it.

Film organic canola oil in large soup pot, and sauté sliced carrots and gobo for a few minutes before adding the sliced daikon. Stir and sauté a minute or so longer, then add hot homemade broth (duck, chicken or konbu kelp). Throw in the sliced taro and bring to a boil and cook until the vegetables are getting soft, but not falling apart. Slide in the tofu, usuage and konnyaku (see below), and simmer a few minutes more until heated through. Season with organic soy sauce to taste and serve with a bowl of white rice on the side if there is no mochi in the soup. Pass shichimi togarashi (7-spice powder) for those who like a little extra kick.

Optional konnyaku: Fill a large pot half way with water, toss in a small handful of salt and bring to a boil. While the water is heating, tear the konnyaku into 1½” round misshapen blobs (a little bigger than bite-sized). If using mochi, slice konnakyu instead into thin strips (1½” x ¼”). Boil konnyaku pieces for 15 minutes in salted water, drain, and reserve.

Optional mochi: drop pieces of hot mochi into soup and eat immediately.