At home in Japan, part 3: Homegrown in Wakayama

Shrines and altars aside, I got a sense that the Yoshimatsus were intricately connected to their land.  Yoshimatsu-san, even though he was a retired school teacher and principal, identified himself as a farmer.  At first I thought that maybe he was referring to the vegetables that he grew in practically every available square inch of his yard: edamame, kabocha, myoga (they called it Japanese ginger, but it’s something more complex and delicious), and kuri (thin cucumbers).

Yoshimatsu owns roadside rice fields like this one.

But I soon found out that although he had only recently purchased rice fields, his family has owned orange groves for generations; the plots he now tends were promised to him when he was a boy. 

As I drove through the landscape of Wakayama, past rice field after rice field and orange groves planted on hills so steep that farmers must ride a kind of rudimentary monorail just to tend their fields, I kept thinking of how I’d heard that the Japanese government protects its farmers from competition from agricultural products from abroad (particularly the U.S.).   But one of our American guides said that for the most part, that wasn’t true.  The government certainly didn’t have to protect these orange farmers, whose fruit had a sweetness and delicacy I’d never tasted.   The Japanese are mostly uninterested in oranges that have to be picked while green and shipped across the Pacific.  Apparently, the Japanese have very high standards for fruit.  (This may partly explain the $269 melon I saw in a Tokyo department store.) The peaches and grapes are huge, and everything is flavorful because it ripens on the plant and then is quickly shipped around a relatively small nation. 

Yoshimatsu pruning his orange trees.

This makes sense; the Japanese have always been all about delicious local food.  I’m guessing the word locavore, only recently current in English, might baffle the average Japanese.  They’d probably think, “Duh! What other kind of food would you want to eat?”  Wherever you go, they tell you what’s local and what’s fresh.  They’re so into freshness that when you’re dining in a restaurant with other people and your food comes first, it’s almost rude of you not to start eating immediately:  you have to eat it while it’s fresh.  They’re so conscious of the localness of food that when they go traveling, the train stations are packed with local specialties that you’re supposed to take as a gift to the people you’re visiting, as culinary souvenirs known as omeyagi. 

A bowl of myoga stood ready for our nagashi somen.

Local food was certainly in evidence when we had a barbecue and ate nagashi somen, cold noodles that flow around a kind of watery race course. That evening all four generations were present, eating vegetables from the garden right behind us.  And these were the same people who all work together in the fall to bring in their small rice harvest.

Our Kyoto guide later told me that the demands of rice-growing have helped determine the cooperative nature of Japanese society:  it’s very labor intensive and not something one can do alone.  You have to rely on others, perhaps your extended family.  And it helps if they’re close by, several generations living side by side in an ie household.