Little Adventures in Japan: Rice, Soba, and Wasabi

Nagano seen from its shrine

I’ve spent the last several days in Nagano and Matsumoto, towns nestled in the mountains near the Japan Alps.  Roughly three hours from Tokyo, both are big jumping off point for hikers and climbers, and I saw lots of people with heavy boots, backpacks, walking sticks, and a few layers of clothing in the mid-90’s weather.   One local train I rode was packed with hikers, including a group of five muscular teen-aged boys with packs that seemed as large as they were.  I’m not sure I ever was a serious hiker, but I certainly am not in this kind of weather.  Instead, I took advantage of the area’s other attractions.

 

I went to see Matsumoto’s castle, one of the four great castles in Japan.  Unlike most castles, it is made of wood and is black in color, not stucco and white.  It is also one of the few “original” castles left in Japan.  That means that the same materials and techniques used when it was originally built were employed when it was restored.  Whatever parts of the castle were still in good condition were kept, so I got to touch 400-year-old wooden pillars. 

Ripening rice

My volunteer guide

The castle was interesting, but talking with my volunteer guide was even more.  I’ve learned to ask for a volunteer guide; you get to know about a person as well as the place.  As we sat and rested at the top of the castle, we talked about his rice farm, which I suspect has long been in his family.  I’ve been watching the rice fields all year, so asked him whether the fields were always full of water.  “No,” he said.  “As the rice grows, you change how much water there is.”  Once the rice has been planted (in water) and is several inches high, you alternately drain and fill the field.  When the rice starts to ripen, though, you keep the field filled with water to encourage big grains.  Right now, for example, he has to keep adding water because of the summer heat.  Then in early September you once again drain and refill the field until late in the month, when you drain it so that a machine can harvest the grain.  This ritual makes for delicious rice, and his field will more than feed his family for the entire year.

One day I took a bus to a village near Nagano to take a soba class.  Soba (buckwheat) is another Japanese grain staple, and is delicious cold in this hot weather.  I went to what was a soba factory, surrounded by fields of buckwheat.  There was a workshop filled with individual tables, each with a shallow lacquer bowl resting in a hole cut out of the table.  One woman was working on her soba beside me, and eventually three other pairs of people joined. 

An instructor showed and told us what to do (in Japanese, of course, so I followed the visual instructions).   Not surprisingly, making soba is both art and ritual:  how you use your hands to mix the flour and water, knead the dough, roll it out, and cut it.  Naturally, as a gaijin I was the messiest of the lot.  But I probably had the thinnest soba noodles, only because I kept rolling the dough until someone told me to stop (I hadn’t picked up how big my rolled out circle was supposed to be).  Afterwards, someone cooked the noodles, rinsed and cooled them, and presented them to us for lunch.  The soba I made was delicious!

Another day I went to Daio Wasabi Farm near Matsumoto, which turns out to be the world’s largest.  I must say it was quite impressive and was jammed with tourists, something I would not have imagined.  Wasabi, Japanese horseradish, is a root vegetable that needs to be grown in very clean water, so Matsumoto is very proud of its farm.  The plant grows in beds of raised gravel, surrounded by moving water and shaded from the sun by mesh screens.  To me the covered fields, which seemed to be in a shallow river, reminded me of a Christo project.  It was quite a scene, with the added touch of Burt Bacharach music playing in the background.

The harvested roots seemed quite expensive:  a root that was roughly 1½” in diameter and 6” long cost 1,500 yen or about $19.00.  I guess you can grate a lot of wasabi from that.  That night I went to a lovely fish restaurant and had sushi, where wasabi is nestled between the fish and the rice.  It was the most potent wasabi I have ever tasted!  As my eyes watered and sinuses cleared, I thought it must have been picked today from the farm.