Category Archives: food

by Joel | 31 October 2009 · 10:40 am

Japanese Soldier Ethnographer in Indonesia, 1944-45

From: Peter T. Suzuki and Reiko Watanabe Reiger (2003), A Japanese Soldier’s Ethnography of Molu Island (Tanimbar): Ken Sasaki’s Account (1944-1945), Archipel 66: 161-199 (doi: 10.3406/arch.2003.3789).

Moru Shima Ki: An Account of Molu Island by Ken Sasaki

Following is a description of my time on Molu Island from June 19, 1944 to May 20, 1945. Seven Japanese soldiers, myself included, were stationed there with a cannon. I never thought it would become the subject of my research because we were constantly engaged in the battlefront. My notes and sketches were of necessity brief, taken during times when I had the opportunity. The only things I carried away from Molu were my notes, 200 sketches, and 30 pieces of folk craft from the island. Only now am I attempting to assemble these and my disjointed memories (although I can remember clearly the beauty of the sea, which had the color of emerald green coral reefs) into a coherent account….

Kapala [Mal. kepala] means head or boss, soa means a blood relative. There are class distinctions and associated titles, such as orankaya [Mal. orang kaya] (upper class); kapalasoa [Mal. kepala soa] (head of a kin group); jurutolis [Mal. juru tulis] (his associate); togama (?); kapalakanpon [Mal. kepala kampung] (village chief). Those holding the titles of kapalakanpon or jurutolis are public officers in a village, appointed by family lineage or natural ability. In contrast, orankaya and jurutolis hold feudalistic power among villagers in a family clan and have general authority….

Religion

Seven villages of the eight villages in this island are Protestant. It seems that only Kilon is shunned by others since it is the only Muslim village. Their association with other villages does not seem to be congenial. In the past they followed a primitive religion in which they worshiped the sun and the moon as gods (Ubila) like any other village. They said they made commitments to Ubila. But later new religions such as Islam and Christianity were introduced into the island. It seemed that the power of religions influenced and also renewed everything such as food, clothing, housing, ceremonial occasions, and language.

It is hard to imagine a new religion having this kind of widespread effect in Japan. I could not help realizing how strong religious powers can be….

It is clear Christianity came to this island 35 years ago.

Even though the power of Islam could not change the lifestyle of the villagers much, Christianity rapidly changed people’s lifestyles on Molu, which had not progressed much from a primitive way of living.

People started being very enthusiastic about learning to read and write, wearing shoes, having lamps, wearing pants instead of grass skirts and singing hymns. And they started hiding necklaces and swords. Jacob told me that the younger generation would not believe the ways the older generation used to live, saying, “it is quite different today.”…

Language

The daily language of Molu is called Larat, the island just northeast of Tanimbar, but Larat is also the language of Tanimbar, Sera, and Fordata.

The languages of Tanimbar are divided into three groups : Sera, Yamdena, and Larat. Of course they speak to us in Malay, but since Malay is a second language which was taught at school, it is hard to understand much of high Malay.

High Malay is only used seriously by guru, who are priests and teachers in a village during the celebration of subayan.

They use the alphabet for writing, and since it became widespread, most adults under 50 years old have no trouble spelling….

Food

Rice, corn, bread, potatoes, and sago are served as main dishes. Side dishes are bananas, fish, and coconuts. Vegetables and fruits are melons, eggplant, tomatoes, squash, sweet potatoes, papaya, and pineapples. A large quantity of mangos is also grown….

Sago grows wild, and belongs to the palm tree group; it grows in flocks in damp ground. Mature trees about 20 years old are cut and smashed at the trunk with axes (111. 6), then washed with water, and soaked till the starch is precipitated. This fruit is also prepared in various ways, such as gruel (babeda), like rice (nasi), deep fried goren [Mal. goreng], toasted rice cake, and renpen which is baked (or cooked) in a stone mold. Sago can be substituted for flour. Renpen looks like a Japanese snack ; foxtail millet toasted until crispy. When it is still hot, it is plump and tasty. They steam the stored renpen, until it becomes soft and like konyaku, a Japanese food made of yam which is gelatenous.

Little food is stored in the village. Because they have different crops, harvest time spans the whole year. As long as they gather the food, they do not have to face starvation. Since they do not have to transfer food (sago) from one place to another, they do not trade and they do not store food. But since sago has a short life, its starch must be gathered right away and the juice (toman) from sago is eaten soon, otherwise it is prepared as renpen for a portable meal.

Fresh fish must be eaten the same day it is caught. They do not catch more than they need each day. And yet sometimes small fish are put between chopped branches and smoked on a fire. This is called ian-bata-batan, and used for soup stock. People eat cooked fish, but not raw fish. They do not have knowledge of preserving fish with salt. Making dried fish is not common, but they make dried octopus, which is prepared by cutting and then spreading it open….

Fire

Matches are known by the Moluans, but they are rare and considered valuable. Tobacco is lit by flint, rock, and metal much in the same way as in ancient Japan.

For starting general-purpose fires the Moluans use a method which involves rubbing bamboo :

Split dry bamboo into two and put on the ground or straw surface side up. Make a small crack on the center of the bamboo then shave some surface off from around the crack.

Rub with a bamboo spatula at right angles with the bamboo for about 15 minutes till the bamboo starts to smoke and starts on fire.

It seems this is an excellent way to start a fire since this island has plenty of bamboo. But this method requires two persons and great strength. People usually have a raised floor, which allows them to keep a pilot light burning constantly….

Hunting

Probably the only wild animal on Molu is the wild pig (babi). The garden plots on Molu are surrounded by a four foot-high fence made of logs and is designed to prevent wild pig incursions. Since most villagers are Christian, they hunt and are fond of eating the meat of the wild pig.

Usually a javelin is used for hunting wild pig. It has an iron tip, which is connected to the handle with a strong rope….

Luxury items

Among the islanders one of the most popular goods is tobacco (roko) [Mal. rokok], then chewing sirih comes next. Sirih is a tree leaf, which is similar to a pepper tree. Next in popularity is alcohol (sobi).

All men over the age of 10 years smoke tobacco. But it is common to see old women chewing tobacco also. Tobacco is produced in a mountain field. It is planted in places in the burnt field among the weeds. A weedkiller is used only on the roots of the plant. Of course no fertilizers are used….

Chewing betel nut: kimna is called sirih, sweet corn (betel—J.); only bigger lime is coral reef that is burnt and crushed; sirih-daun [Mal. daun sirih (leaf betel—J.)] is a creeper which is similar to yam (yamaimo in Japanese) leaf. As soon as it is put in one’s mouth and chewed for a while, it will bring a keen cooling sensation to the inside of the head, and will give you a sharp taste on the lips, and when one spits, it appears bloody red. Lips and teeth also take on the red color, and with prolonged use, turn a creepy-looking black. On Molu, it is very popular among both men and women, but only women over 15 years old are seen practicing this habit….

There is a tree, which is called karupatebu, which is similar to a hemp palm tree and a palm tree. This sugar palm tree is grown mainly for gathering sugar, but a wine can be brewed from it, too … By the way, comparing coconut milk to sugar palm tree milk, the latter has a rich white color and thickness like milk, and a greater sweet-sour taste. Nothing can beat its taste, not even the best versions of kalpis, and it has a pleasant intoxicating effect. However, the great taste of this version of kalpis enticed me to drink ten glasses of the tempting drink, and helped me to end up sleeping the night in the jungle.

During the ridiculous war, I secretly kept this wine in a water bottle for the contingency of a suicide attack, and I often gave myself encouragement by sipping it.

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Filed under food, Indonesia, Japan, language, Papua New Guinea, scholarship, war

by Joel | 14 September 2009 · 7:54 pm

Zhao Ziyang on China’s Agricultural Revolution

From Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, trans. by Bao Pu and Renee Chiang (Simon & Shuster, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2040-59:

After the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, there were good harvests several years in a row: 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, and 1984. The rural areas experienced a new prosperity, in large part because we resolved the issue of “those who farm will have land” by implementing a “rural land contract” policy. The old situation, where farmers were employees of a production team, had changed; farmers began to plant for themselves.

The rural energy that was unleashed in those years was magical, beyond what anyone could have imagined. A problem thought to be unsolvable had worked itself out in just a few years’ time. The food situation that was once so grave had turned into a situation where, by 1984, farmers actually had more grain than they could sell. The state grain storehouses were stacked full from the annual procurement program.

Two other factors contributed to the change. One was the elevated price of agricultural products. Farmers could make a profit from farming. The other was the reduction in the quotas for mandatory state procurement, which meant taking less food out of the mouths of farmers.

For more than two decades, farmers had not had enough to eat after handing over the grains they had produced to the state after every harvest. Of course, the reason that we were able to introduce this new policy was because the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee had decided that China could import grains. Comrade Chen Yun said the imports were allowed so that industrial crops could be preserved, but in fact, the imports fulfilled urban consumption demands, thereby reducing the rural mandatory procurement quota [purchased in part for urban markets]. The quantity of grain imports was huge in those years, between 10 million and 20 million tons. Major grain-producing regions could sell their surplus at a higher price and make a profit. Together, all of this gave rural areas instant prosperity.

These policy implementations came at a cost. While the prices of agricultural products had gone up, urban food prices could not be immediately raised, since urban workers had limited purchasing power. Therefore we had to finance additional subsidies for agricultural and other rural products. At the same time, foreign currency was needed to import grains, which affected the import of machinery. Plus, urban housing needed to be expanded. And since factories now had more autonomy, the wages and bonuses of the workers were raised. All of this involved additional expenditure. But these things all were part of the recovery process, which paved the way for the good situation of later years.

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by Joel | 13 September 2009 · 6:40 am

R.I.P. Norman Borlaug: Forgotten Benefactor

The man who sparked the Green Revolution has just died. Gregg Easterbrook profiled him in the January 1997 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Here’s an excerpt.

AMERICA has three living winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, two universally renowned and the other so little celebrated that not one person in a hundred would be likely to pick his face out of a police lineup, or even recognize his name. The universally known recipients are Elie Wiesel, who for leading an exemplary life has been justly rewarded with honor and acclaim, and Henry Kissinger, who in the aftermath of his Nobel has realized wealth and prestige. America’s third peace-prize winner, in contrast, has been the subject of little public notice, and has passed up every opportunity to parley his award into riches or personal distinction. And the third winner’s accomplishments, unlike Kissinger’s, are morally unambiguous. Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age.

Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted — for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine — 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food — has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as antithetical to the natural world.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of his work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding institutions have also cut support for the International Maize and Wheat Center — located in Mexico and known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT — where Borlaug helped to develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world’s population now depends for sustenance. And though Borlaug’s achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug’s long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.

The African continent is the main place where food production has not kept pace with population growth: its potential for a Malthusian catastrophe is great. Borlaug’s initial efforts in a few African nations have yielded the same rapid increases in food production as did his initial efforts on the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Western environmental groups have campaigned against introducing high-yield farming techniques to Africa, and have persuaded image-sensitive organizations such as the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to steer clear of Borlaug. So far the only prominent support for Borlaug’s Africa project has come from former President Jimmy Carter, a humanist and himself a farmer, and from the late mediagenic multimillionaire Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculture would be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms, not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug argues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa’s wild habitats, which are now being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue that inorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmental stress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to food production has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food for the world’s malnourished — whether they “should” have been born or not, they must eat — stands in danger of being forgotten.

THE LESSON OF THE DUST BOWL

NORMAN BORLAUG was born in Cresco, Iowa, in 1914. Ideas being tested in Iowa around the time of his boyhood would soon transform the American Midwest into “the world’s breadbasket,” not only annually increasing total production — so methodically that the increases were soon taken for granted — but annually improving yield, growing more bushels of grain from the same amount of land or less. From about 1950 until the 1980s midwestern farmers improved yields by around three percent a year, more than doubling the overall yield through the period. This feat of expansion was so spectacular that some pessimists declared it was a special case that could never be repeated. But it has been done again, since around 1970, in China.

Entering college as the Depression began, Borlaug worked for a time in the Northeastern Forestry Service, often with men from the Civilian Conservation Corps, occasionally dropping out of school to earn money to finish his degree in forest management. He passed the civil-service exam and was accepted into the Forest Service, but the job fell through. He then began to pursue a graduate degree in plant pathology. During his studies he did a research project on the movement of spores of rust, a class of fungus that plagues many crops. The project, undertaken when the existence of the jet stream was not yet known, established that rust-spore clouds move internationally in sync with harvest cycles — a surprising finding at the time. The process opened Borlaug’s eyes to the magnitude of the world beyond Iowa’s borders.

At the same time, the Midwest was becoming the Dust Bowl. Though some mythology now attributes the Dust Bowl to a conversion to technological farming methods, in Borlaug’s mind the problem was the lack of such methods. Since then American farming has become far more technological, and no Dust Bowl conditions have recurred. In the summer of 1988 the Dakotas had a drought as bad as that in the Dust Bowl, but clouds of soil were rare because few crops failed. Borlaug was horrified by the Dust Bowl and simultaneously impressed that its effects seemed least where high-yield approaches to farming were being tried. He decided that his life’s work would be to spread the benefits of high-yield farming to the many nations where crop failures as awful as those in the Dust Bowl were regular facts of life.

UPDATE: Easterbrook’s follow-up in the Wall Street Journal on 16 September is entitled The Man Who Defused the Population Bomb.

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by Joel | 29 August 2009 · 1:59 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Biwa masu, suppin

Our most elegant dining experience during our recent visit to Japan (in fact, one of our best ever) was at a kaiseki (“tasting menu”) restaurant in Nagoya that specializes in Kyoto-style haute cuisine. 京加茂 Kyoukamo is tucked away in a residential neighborhood near Hatta station near the western end of the Nagoya Subway Higashiyama line. Unfortunately I didn’t take my camera, but the restaurant has its own blog, which is well illustrated and frequently updated (all in Japanese). So here I’ll just introduce some of the vocabulary I learned there.

琵琶鱒 biwa masu ‘Biwa trout’ (Oncorhynchus masou rhodurus) – Our kaiseki meal was ‘meatless’ in the traditional manner—not vegetarian. There were several courses featuring fish associated with Kyoto summertime cuisine. One consisted of two small slabs of delicate flesh from pike eel (hamo, Muraenesox cinereus) and wintermelon (tougan) in a viscous sauce. The next fish was Biwa trout (biwa masu), native to Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture next to Kyoto. This ‘trout’ is actually a subspecies of the cherry salmon (sakura masu, Oncorhynchus masou). The final fish dish was grilled ayu (‘sweetfish’, Plecoglossus altivelis), served with the customary bluish dipping sauce of tade ‘dyer’s knotweed’ (a secondary source for indigo dye).

The rest of the wintermelon appeared later, forming a tureen for a refreshing cold soup with shrimps, whole tomatoes, and small okras in a drinkable aspic of fish stock and wintermelon flesh, well-flavored with dashi.

すっぴん suppin ‘(going out) without make-up’ – I prefer my sake dry, but Kyoukamo serves only pure, seasonal shiboritate (搾立て ‘freshly pressed’) sake, without carbon filtration, pasteurization, or the addition of alcohol, and made from rice grown without any artificial fertilizers (肥料 hiryou). Our first serving of sake was bottled by a female craft-brewer named Rumiko in Mie prefecture under the label Suppin ‘Without make-up’. The next serving was even sweeter, being made from even more highly polished rice. That’s when we asked about drier sake and got a pleasant and interesting—but unyielding—lesson about sake purity, followed by a sampling of the same sake served warm, which made it taste a good bit drier but also less flavorful. In any case, none of us wanted warm sake, least of all during a Nagoya (or Kyoto) summer. The final serving of sake was sweeter yet, leaving a lingering tingle in the mouth like a dessert wine.

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by Joel | 7 July 2009 · 9:06 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Two Teas, A Bug, OMG

Anybody who’s paid attention to my latest batch of Flickr photos will know that I took a short trip to Korea in June. Unfortunately, the rudimentary Korean I had learned before my last visit there on a wonderful junket in 1995 had faded to the point that I felt rather frustrated by my inability to say very much, despite my ability to read and sound out far more words in hangul than I can understand. However, I did manage to pick up a few new Korean words for things I ingested, plus one new Chinese expression that showed up repeatedly in the subtitles of an in-flight movie too silly to listen to.

This time I learned the names for two new Korean teas, one of which I’m sure I sampled during my last visit back in 1995.

오미자차 omija cha (五味子茶) ‘five flavor berry tea’ is made from Schisandra chinensis (Ch. wǔ wèi zi, Jp. gomishi), whose flavor, as its common name implies, is supposed to be sweet, tart, salty, bitter, and aromatic all at once. I found it to very refreshing.

솔잎차 ‘pine leaf (= needle) tea’ (松葉茶) is written sol ip cha but is often romanized solnip cha and it sounded to me like sollip cha (and not sorip, as it would normally be with an /l/ between two vowels). This tea was was also refreshing, mildly aromatic, not sweet, and only slightly bitter. The native Korean root for ‘pine’ is sol- in ‘pine needle’ (솔잎 sol-ip) but is truncated to so- in ‘pine tree’ (소나무 sonamu). The Sino-Korean root is song-, as in ‘pine flower/pollen’ 송화 song-hwa and ‘pine dumplings’ song-pyeon (served at Chuseok). It is cognate with (Mandarin) Chinese sōng and Sino-Japanese shō (as in shōchikubai ‘pine-bamboo-plum’). (I revised this paragraph in response to Doc Rock in the comments.)

번데기 beondegi ‘chrysalis, pupa’ (borrowed into Jp. as ポンテギ pontegi) – In 1995, I got the chance to sample fried grasshoppers, thanks to a little old lady selling them by the parking lot at Sokkuram Grotto in Gyeongju. This year, I came across cooked silkworm pupae on sale by the footpath to Jeondeungsa temple complex on Ganghwa Island. I was surprised that several others in the group I was with sampled them. They’re more chewy than crunchy, high in fat, fiber, and calcium, and not too salty. They used to be a very popular snack in Korea—for kids as well as adults. They were also eaten in China. Nowadays, they’re much more commonly used to feed koi (carp), turtles, lizards, and chickens.

我的天 wǒ de tiān ‘OMG’ (lit. ‘my heaven’) seemed to be a signature opening dialogue tic in the Chinese subtitles of Bride Wars, an in-flight movie I tried hard to sleep through on the long flight back via Narita. (I won’t blog about my trip to Narita-san Temple during my long layover, since I’ve already put so much effort into enhancing its Wikipedia article. Wikipedia and Flickr have been soaking up most of my blogging energy these days.)

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Filed under China, food, Korea, language, travel

by Joel | 19 June 2009 · 6:45 am

Japan’s Worst Century, the 700s

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 36-37:

Between 698 and 800, there were at least thirty-six years of plagues in Japan, or about one every three years. The most well-documented epidemic—and to judge by the mortality and its social, economic, and political effects, the most significant—was a smallpox outbreak during 735–737. It started in northern Kyushu, a certain sign of its foreign origin, but by 737 the virus had spread up the Inland Sea and on to eastern Honshu, aided, ironically enough, by the improved network of roads linking the capital and provinces. To its credit, the court tried to apply pragmatic principles to treat the symptoms of the disease, but to little effect. Statistics from various provinces scattered from northern Kyushu to eastern Honshu suggest that mortality was about twenty-five percent, meaning that a million or more persons may have succumbed. As a result of the depopulation, an entire layer of village administration was abolished. Another irony was that the death rate among the exalted aristocracy—living crowded together in the capital at Nara—was even higher, a full thirty-nine percent. At the end of 737, chroniclers wrote,”Through the summer and fall, people … from aristocrats on down have died one after another in countless numbers. In recent times, there has been nothing like this.” In the wake of the epidemic, government revenues plunged by more than twenty percent, even more draconian measures were implemented to stem cultivator flight from the land, and a guilt-ridden [Emperor] Shōmu approved large expenditures for Buddhist temples, statues, and other religious icons.

Epidemics certainly helped to reverse the long demographic expansion of the last several centuries, but two other factors contributed to population stasis. The first was crop failure and widespread famine, occurring about every third year between the late seventh and eighth centuries. Causes for bad harvests were complex, but various climate data indicate that the eighth century was one of the hottest and driest in Japanese history. In Western Europe, where there was a “medieval warm” at this time, the effect was to dry out water-logged soils and encourage the expansion of agriculture; in Japan, where farmers often depended upon rainfall as the only way to irrigate their paddies, the result was frequent crop failure and hunger. At ten to fifteen percent, mortality from a severe famine was lower than an epidemic, but, like pestilence, malnutrition also reduced fertility. Even in years when the harvest seemed adequate, the populace frequently went hungry in the spring when their supplies of grain were exhausted. More sophisticated means of watering rice paddies may have remedied the problem, but they were either unavailable or not applied.

A second factor leading to population stasis was the ecological degradation besetting the Kinai, the richest and most financially important region in the eighth century. Altogether, the government sponsored the construction of six capital cities and countless temples, shrines, and aristocratic mansions from 690 to 805. All these structures were built from timber harvested in the Kinai and adjacent provinces, and most had roof tiles requiring baking with charcoal in a kiln. During the second half of the eighth century, the shortage of lumber became so critical that planners began to recycle used timbers and roof tiles from older capitals, such as Fujiwara and Naniwa. When the court left Nara for Nagaoka in 784, for example, they used recycled lumber and tiles almost exclusively.

By the late eighth century, tile bakers were relying upon red pine to fire their kilns, a secondary forest cover that typically grows in nutrient-poor soil. Furthermore, the government began to note that the bald mountains in the Kinai and vicinity produced less rain and more erosion. In essence, the stripping of the forests throughout central Japan exacerbated the effects of the hot, dry climate and encouraged farmers to give up cropping altogether and flee to the seashores and mountains to forage as of old.

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Filed under disease, economics, energy, food, Japan

by Joel | 4 June 2009 · 7:52 am

Early Japan’s Peaceful Foragers, Violent Farmers

From Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, by William Wayne Farris (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2009), pp. 13-14:

Yayoi society was constantly at war, as historians have known from brief citations about the islands in Chinese annals. For example, of the five thousand skeletons surviving from the Jōmon era, practically none suggests a violent death, whereas among the one thousand skeletons preserved from Yayoi times, about one hundred betray signs of gruesome ends, including beheading and piercing with a dozen or more arrowheads. Iron and stone arrowheads are among the most common finds in Yayoi sites, and by the middle and late Yayoi, iron arrowheads were heavier and more deadly than ever.

Settlement location and structure also imply that Yayoi society was violent. Scattered throughout upland areas, highland settlements for just a few people probably served as lookouts for attackers. Some of these hamlets have pits containing ash, which suggests a system of smoke signals. On the flatlands, one and sometimes two moats with a V-shaped cross section encircle large settlements; as of 1998, about eighty moated villages have been found for the Yayoi period. At Ōtsuka in the Kanto, a trench measured twenty by one hundred thirty meters and was two meters deep. At Ōgidani near Kyoto, there were two ditches one kilometer in length; it is estimated that it would have taken one thousand ten-ton dump trucks to haul away the earth. Many moated settlements also used stakes, twisted branches, and earthen walls as barricades.

Why did the Yayoi resort to war so frequently? The reason is probably related to the importation of agriculture, which, even though it diffused slowly over the archipelago, soon produced classes of haves and have-nots. Villagers resorted to violence when their harvest was inadequate or when they wanted to take over a neighbor’s surplus grain and the lands that had produced them. The discovery of similar moated and walled settlements around the world from an analogous period, when agriculture was just underway, also supports such a view.

The invention of war went along with famine to comprise new ways for agrarian peoples to die. Malnutrition had been a problem under forager regimes, of course, but with the advent of agriculture and the consequent population growth, many more people were dependent on a new subsistence system and liable to starve to death. Known as the “spring hungers,” famine usually beset a family or village whose crop had failed or whose reserves of grain had been exhausted by the late winter. Along with the greater chance of extensive famine came war, which was really just theft organized on a village-wide scale. Every system of subsistence has its advantages and disadvantages.

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by Joel | 29 May 2009 · 10:01 pm

Rise of the American Sushi Chef

In the June issue of The Atlantic, sushi concierge and author Trevor Corson highlights the rise of American sushi chefs.

At Fin Sushi in Lenox [Massachusetts], Nick Macioge jokes with his diners and encourages them to get to know each other. Like a sushi bar in Japan, Fin is small and dominated by the counter. It’s not just the atmosphere. Macioge also tries to serve a more authentic meal. Instead of suggesting tuna, for example, he’ll talk his customers into sampling one of the most traditional sushi fish there is—saba, a mackerel that Macioge lightly marinates in salt and vinegar to bring the fish to the peak of flavor….

Macioge is one of a growing number of successful non-Asian sushi chefs. In 2005, Food & Wine magazine chose as one of its Best New Chefs a Caucasian sushi chef in Texas named Tyson Cole. A few months later, a San Diego chef named Jerry Warner was picked as California’s Sushi Master. Two years ago, one of the most high-profile Japanese restaurants in America, Morimoto, in New York City—operated by Masaharu Morimoto, an “Iron Chef” of Food Network fame—chose as its head sushi chef a young Caucasian named Robby Cook. And this year, one of the most talked-about sushi bars in San Francisco has been Sebo, run by chefs Daniel Dunham and Michael Black. (Black is half-Japanese and spent the first seven years of his life in Japan.) These chefs offer sushi fish so traditional that most Americans have never heard of them—which is why Dunham and Black chat across the fish case with customers about what they’re serving, just like the chefs I remember in Japan.

Exactly because these new chefs are rooted in American culture and society, they are well equipped to offer an experience that is, in important ways, authentically Japanese. Consider the case of Marisa Baggett, an African American chef based in Memphis. She told me her goal is to teach Americans in Tennessee and Mississippi to appreciate authentic sushi, but she approaches the task through the local idiom. She educates her customers about traditional sushi etiquette, using clever comparisons to southern manners. And she creates sushi with local ingredients such as smoked duck and pickled okra. This is a fair interpretation of authenticity—in Japanese, the word sushi can refer to just about any dish that includes rice seasoned with vinegar, sugar, and salt. Chefs like Baggett put the lie to claims by Japanese sushi-industry lobbyists that eating endangered bluefin tuna is essential to Japanese culture. Indeed, in Portland, Oregon, the head sushi chef at Bamboo Sushi, a Caucasian named Brandon Hill, has just had his menu certified by conservation groups.

Yum. Pickled okra or smoked duck sushi sounds pretty good to me. Pickled pig’s feet sushi might not be too bad, either. But let’s leave sushi and gravy to Hardee’s, shall we?

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by Joel | 5 April 2009 · 1:50 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Sawa-azami, Hime-gonomi

During our day-trip to Gifu, Japan, last summer, we picked up an easy-to-carry packet of a local food specialty from the gift shop of a hotel whose lobby we relaxed in while waiting to see the cormorant fishing that evening. The box languished in our cupboard until recently, when we finally used it as a side dish in a somewhat Japanese-style meal.

沢薊 sawa-azami (Cirsium yezoense) ‘marsh thistle’ – This particular species of thistle is not even listed under Cirsium in English Wikipedia. In Japanese Wikipedia, however, it is not only listed under azami (Cirsium); it even has its own separate entry as sawa-azami: Cirsium yezoense (Maxim.) Makino, a thistle found along mountain streams along the Japan Sea side of northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido (old Yezo country). Kamchatka, too, seems to have its own species of thistle, and several subspecies. This particular package of pickled thistle was labeled as coming from the Neo (根尾 ‘root hair’) region of Gifu Prefecture, right on the border of Fukui Prefecture, which faces the Japan Sea. And, speaking of root hairs: Did you know that another genus of thistle—Arctium, burdock—was the inspiration for Velcro? Don’t dis thistles! (I used to know a weekend sailor who named his sloop Thistle Dew.)

姫ごのみ hime-gonomi ‘princess-fond (= flamboyant)’ – The package of lowly thistles is labelled somewhat incongruously as both (一) coming from the inaka ‘countryside’ (田舎, a kanji combination I didn’t recognize, but a word I know well), and (二) fit for a princess, that is, for one who is flamboyant. The -gonomi part can also be written -好み, as in お好み焼き o-konomi-yaki ‘cooked as you like it’, which nowadays means something quite different from the better-known ‘cooked as you like it’: すき焼き suki-yaki. However, as far as I can tell, the following three constructions all describe the same type of showy, flamboyant woman: 派手好み hade-gonomi ‘flamboyance-fond’; 派手好き hade-zuki ‘flamboyance-fond’; and 姫ごのみ hime-gonomi ‘princess-fond’.

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Filed under food, Japan, language

by Joel | 21 March 2009 · 6:38 am

Wordcatcher Tales: Hamachi vs. Buri, Pāpio vs. Ulua

A delicious plate of hamachi kama (‘yellowtail collar’ [or ‘sickle’]), pictured below, serendipitously led me to discover that hamachi (魬) and buri (鰤) are merely different sizes of the same fish, the Japanese amberjack (Seriola quinqueradiata). Yellowtail is the usual translation in Japanese restaurants, but that name can also apply to a whole lot of other fishes (as well as other animals). You can tell you’re dealing with a highly commercialized and regulated industry when the difference between the smaller and larger fish is defined so precisely: hamachi weigh less than 5 kg, buri weigh 5 kg or more. The fry are called by yet another name, mojako.

According to Japanese Wikipedia, buri has a plethora of synonyms that vary by size and region. The term hamachi seems to come from Kansai; its match in Kanto seems to be inada. The names used on Japan Sea side are even more varied. (See here for a romanized glossary of Japanese fish names.)

This put me in mind of other types of jackfish (Jp. 鯵科 ajika, Carangidae) that have different names at different sizes in Hawaiian. Ulua refers to several types of large jackfish weighing 10 lbs or more, including the white ulua, or giant trevally (Caranx ignobilis); the omilu, or bluefin trevally (Caranx melampygus); and the kagami [< Jp. ‘mirror’] ulua or African pompano (Alectis ciliaris). At smaller sizes, the same fish are called papio. (Papio papio is also the genus and species name of the Guinea baboon.) In older Hawaiian usage, the smallest ones were called pāpio(pio); the somewhat larger ones, pā‘ū‘ū; and the largest ones, ulua.