Japanese cuisine made it on to Unesco’s list of “intangible cultural heritage” in 2013, but it hardly needed that honour to be appreciated across the globe. Through the food of Japan, the west discovered a new frontier of taste: light and healthy, respect for texture and flavour, refined presentation. Little wonder, then, that today some of the most accomplished and multi-talented chefs are Japanese.
What tends to get overlooked in any discussion of Japanese cuisine, however, are its two basic elements: rice and sake. For Japanese palates, each is essential to the success of a meal. Sake has a strong reputation and even a certain prestige abroad. But rice? Isn’t it just, well, rice?
Not for the Japanese. The only rice people eat there is made in Japan, for two reasons. Foreign producers are locked out of the market by prohibitive taxes – taxes that protect domestic producers allied with the country’s conservative base. And domestic rice has a specific taste; the best, as far as the Japanese are concerned, is koshihikari rice, a shiny, short-grained variety. Once only grown in the coastal Niigata prefecture of Honshu, it’s now cultivated on other islands and has even been copied by the Chinese.
For centuries, rice has shaped the Japanese landscape and symbolised nature’s bounty and farmers’ hard work. In the eighth century, in the Man’yoshu poetry anthology, the plant was lauded for its “radiant ears”. For years, eating white rice was a privilege of the rich; the lower classes mixed it with “poor” grains like millet and barley. To the Japanese, rice isn’t just an accompaniment to a meal; it’s its central element, so much so that, cooked, it is synonymous with the meal itself. In Japanese, gohan means both a bowl of rice and the entire meal.
Sake, for its part, is considered uniquely Japanese, just like the rice it’s made from. But Japan’s signature beverage is a bit misunderstood abroad. In Japanese, sake is a generic term for all alcoholic beverages. The rice wine we call sake actually has a different name in Japan: nihonshu.
These days, however, rice and sake, those two quintessential emblems of Japan, have hit a rough patch on native soil. Under globalisation, homegrown tastes have to compete either with standardised ones or ones that try to mimic the real thing. The agricultural lobby, too, has seen its power dwindle, and international free-trade deals under negotiation could make things worse. Rice and sake also fell victim to the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima in March 2011; the region was a big producer of both. And although the rice fields there have now been largely decontaminated of radioactive fallout, producers of sake continue to suffer; the purity of the water needed to make it has been compromised.
Slowly but surely, rice and sake are losing ground in Japan. Bread consumption has risen to compete with rice, while beer and wine are outpacing sake. Only by concentrating on the singularity of its terroir can sake – and by extension the best varieties of rice – salvage its future, believes French geographer Nicolas Baumert, author of Sake: A Japanese Exception. Japan has a plethora of cookbooks and wine guides that tend to be as elitist as the advertising that shapes the trends that consumers follow, but today it’s still old-fashioned word-of-mouth that makes or breaks a product’s reputation, especially among amateurs of sake.
If “rice is the metaphor of Japanese identity, sake is its accomplishment” writes Baumert, an associate professor at Nagoya University. But while sake is without question “the most accomplished” of all rice wines, the Japanese didn’t invent it, he points out; it exists elsewhere in Asia, notably in China and South Korea. Still, so successfully has Japan appropriated the drink, it’s now considered an authentic Japanese product. “Other rice wines seem mere distant cousins,” the author notes.
Sake is anchored in the collective imagination of the Japanese. Traditionally associated with festivities and rituals, it was a libation that offered a break from people’s daily routine. A blend of rice and water, sake was made through fermentation and so was a metaphor for life; it also had a major religious role, especially in Shinto, Japan’s indigenous faith. According to historian Hidetoshi Miyachi, sake was long a drink of the aristocracy before military conscription during the Meiji period (1868-1912) transformed it into a popular beverage nationwide. Western dining habits, which allow wine to be drunk at table, changed consumption patterns yet again; sake started to be served in Japan with meals.
Rice and sake have been at the heart of Japanese cooking and winemaking for centuries. And the importance they held at feasts is no more evident than in The Merits of Sake and Rice Compared, a scroll painted at the end of the 15th or start of the 16th century that was widely reproduced up until the 19th. A copy made in the 17th century and preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is the subject of a wonderful new book published by Éditions Diane de Selliers.
Rich in illustrations and intellectually rigorous in its commentary, the scroll is a parody of disputation, a literary genre of medieval Japan that employed controversy to impart an edifying message.
There are three protagonists in the story: a nobleman who’s an amateur of sake, a monk who craves rice, and a warrior who favours moderation in all things. The three men debate the fundamental question: “Should one get drunk or stay sober?”
The amusing discussion echoes the verbal wit of Rabelais, notes Claire-Akiko Brisset, a Japan expert who supervised the translation of this “poetic work on the art of cooking”, as co-editors Estelle Leggeri-Bauer and Véronique Béranger call it. Diving deep into the sources of Japanese culinary art, the scroll has “an exceptional documentary value”, says their colleague, ethnologist Jane Cobbi.
It provides the keys to understand dining habits and cooking techniques that are still with us today: the cutting up of fish and fowl, the preparation and presentation of meals, and detailed descriptions of utensils such as mortars, wooden pestles and sieves. “What this beautiful document allows us to see is how a formal meal was arranged according to clearly defined norms,” writes Cobbi. It also signals “the appearance of an ‘art of good living’ that began with products chosen according to season and place”, she says. Whereas before the 15th century the culinary arts seem to have been only a secondary theme in Japanese literature and iconography, the scroll marks “the birth of gastronomie” in the archipelago.
It also illustrates the pros and cons of drinking. Japan was always a tolerant place for drunks. The tipsy wage-earner taking the last train home is a recurring image in modern Japan. Even several centuries ago, drunkenness was not seen in a bad light – on the contrary. “Ghosts and light drinkers don’t exist,” went the adage. “A banquet was considered a success when the guests started losing all control ... and even those who didn’t like to drink pretended they were drunk in order to please their host,” historian Isao Kumakura writes in an afterword to the book.
Proper drinking also had its rituals, such as the passing around of goblets as a seal of friendship. In those days, there was little drinking during meals, Kumakura notes. But after the meal was over, it was a veritable free-for-all of binge-drinking, buffoonery and bad behaviour.
This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde