Throughout the world, a mention of the name "Obama" brings to mind one thing, or person that is, and reactions will vary based on your postal code. For the Japanese, Obama can only mean saba. We started the day more or less at the source, the seafront fish market. The morning auction was in full swing, with a young barker calling out prices, the buyers making little gestures with their fingers like in a Chinese drinking game. They were very subtle in this, half -hiding their hands as they did. (I'm told that with the fugu auction, both parties place their hands in a bag, ensuring the utmost secrecy.) Things ground to a halt occasionally when there was a discrepancy, but I suppose today's loser is tomorrow's winner. Generally speaking the action was fast, and the group moved steadily down the rows of styrofoam boxes piled high.
Today, one type of fish was being sold in mass quantities, and I'm told that it wasn't sold too often. Being autumn, I presumed it will be ground up to fertilize the now bare rice paddies, rather than wind up on a plate somewhere. Once the fish had been bought it was moved off to the side, before being loaded up on small pickups and carted off. The remaining buyers continued to move as one, except for one character who drifted around confidently, a sly smirk ever on his face. I secretly thought of him as The Godfather. He was all pro.
We visited his shop not long afterward, down at the end of the nearby Fish Center, and I recognized a number of men I'd just seen buying at the market. People moved through, buying fish to take home, or settling into one of the small eateries to sample seafood as fresh as it gets. We'd limited our own visit as we would enjoy our breakfast at nearby Sushi Tomi, a small shop with a friendly and engaging itamae. Many sushi chefs can be dour, but Shimakawa-san never failed to return our banter, even as he shaped the fish in quick movements with his hands. It was a wonderful performance, each piece of fish a treasure. I tend not to like ikura, but here it delighted as the roe literally popped between the teeth. I could easily have stayed here the rest of the morning.
But we had appointments to keep. The first was with a farmer who led us along the terraced rice fields of Tanada, which stepped up gradually from the sea below. It was an impressive enough place today, and I could imagine its beauty when in the full green of pre-harvest. The hundred plots were collectively farmed, and in May the fields were lit by 2000 candles to emulate the lights of the squid boats out to sea. A stele near the water's edge marked the site of a medieval garden called Okino Ishi, where people once gazed upon the rock formations towering from the water. Renowned Heian-period poet Lady Sanuki composed her famous waka about one of them, collected in the Hyakunin Isshu:
My sleeves are like
the rock in the offing that
can’t be seen even at low tide,
unknown to anyone, but
there’s not a moment they are dry.
-trans. Joshua S. Mostow.
As we continued along the coast, I thought about how Japanese sentimentality inspires a large part of their poetic canon. And this coastline brought the same out in me, for I lived on it for a dozen years, a hundred kilometers or so to the west. There was familiarity then in the fishing villages we passed through, in the weathered wooden houses huddled together along little lanes. In one we ran into a friend of our driver, who was generous in offering us a taste of naresushi, or pickled mackerel. This is the original sushi, dating to the 7th Century, and far removed from the tidy little hand-pressed delights that make up Jiro's dreams. Fermented over a few months in wooden buckets, naresushi looks like bark, has the texture of jerky, and with a flavor that doesn't fully hit the palate until a few seconds after swallowing.
While one may revel in the thought of trying a delicacy 1300 years old, that timeline is nothing when compared with our next destination. The world's first Varve museum was in a long, squat A-frame structure stretching between the Sanjusangenzan mountain range and the Mikata Five Lakes. One of these lakes, Suigetsu is unusual in that it has no marine life. As such, the sediment on the bottom lies undisturbed, which has allowed scientists to take a 45-meter cylindrical sample of the lake bed. This is the varve, a sample composed of alternating light and dark layers, each pair representing a single year. To walk past the 45-meter long striped wall was to walk 70,000 years back in time. The stripes revealed changes in climate and environment, the ice ages and volcanic eruptions. Most startling of all was just how small a portion of the varve dealt with human time.
After a pleasant seafood lunch at a lakeside inn, we continued by car to the Rainbow Line that cut over the hilltops between the five lakes and the sea. From a viewpoint up top, a chairlift whisked us up to the interconnected terraces above. We were ever on the go today, so I envied the people here in varying states of recline, in hammocks, loungers, swings, all enjoying a day whose weather was as perfect as autumn gets. There were a number of cafes, a rose garden, and of course the view of the lakes, the sea, and the shoreline, all given definition by an array of mountains. On a day like today, one could spend an entire afternoon doing little but admiring the changes in the light.
But what awaited became the pinnacle of the day. We hired a large boat to cruise the perimeter of Lake Suigetsu, past the villages, the charming hot springs inn, and the narrow channel that led underground through the hills to the sea. On board was a modest sample of Mikata Umeshu, the region's renowned plum wine that can be found even in chic restaurants in Manhattan. We'd earlier visited their brewery, but could now finally sample their finest, including a few that were only available at special events such as this. I'm used to plum wine being smooth, but the grades as high as 19% and 38% gave quite a kick.
So it was that we sipped as the shoreline drifted by, much of it lined with trees of the same plum as that in our glasses. And as the day came toward an end, and the light began to shimmer off the water, our boat delivered us once again to shore. Heading south then toward Kyoto, in the footsteps of so many others over the centuries, already anticipating another visit in order to further explore these distant shores not at all far from home.
On the turntable: Jimi Hendrix, "The Cry of Love"
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