Tending to roots through traditional foodways
Published in Taproot Magazine Issue 43: Roots 2021
A few years ago I left Canada to visit Japan, where my grandmother lives. I was born in Japan, and so trips back are often filled with childhood nostalgia and memories. Having lived away for so long, they are also mixed with feelings of unfamiliarity, like I couldn’t ever fit in again in the same way. This time, what started off as a short stay to see family gradually transformed into something else, and today I am still here. I live in the countryside, in a village named Rakusen, “a place of ease for mountain hermits.”
During my time here, nestled between the mountains and the ocean, I have begun to create a homestead with an abundance of beautiful foods. Always striving for a little more food security and self-sufficiency wherever possible, this naturally led me down a path of deepening my knowledge of food preservation. The desire to put up food using little or no electricity and fossil fuels led me to seek out traditional food techniques—where the old secrets lie. But, somewhere along the way, this path began to teach me things beyond food preservation methods. As I worked with food in this way, I began to sink deeper into the soil. It was as if I was feeling around with my hands for traces of my roots that had begun to slip away—that I could no longer see, but knew were still buried all around me. Working with old food ways began to show me how to walk with my ancestors and the land I was on.
Despite Japan’s being known for its old traditions, unfortunately the Japanese kitchen today is becoming rapidly filled with modern conveniences. However, if you wander around the rural villages, where most inhabitants are elder farmers, examples of old food knowledge can still be found.
There is a word for “farmer” in Japanese called hyakusho, which translates literally to “a hundred names.” It refers to the multitude of skills that farmers acquire through their work, like jacks-of-all-trades. In some ways, I think they are some of the last knowledge-keepers around. Many of the old food techniques that they use have one thing in common: they tap into the power of the elements to alchemize and preserve food. Air and sun can dry, salt can transform and protect, water can suspend, fire can heat, smoke can cure, oil can create a barrier, wood can hold, earth can insulate and ferment; these are the elemental tools for food preservation.
The hyakusho’s ways have shown me that traditional food work is deeply rooted in the land. But my grandmother has shown me that these food techniques are also interwoven with the people and their culture. If you look closely, these methods can tell us stories of people who lived before our time. They can offer us clues to the environments they called home, the seasons they prepared for, the plant relationships they maintained, the tools they worked with, the foods they cherished—all these things shaped the meals that kept them full.
Traditional food ways are like portals that can connect us to our ancestors. Even if our roots were severed due to circumstances such as migration, colonization, adoption, or unjust histories, I believe there are glimpses of the past that can be still felt through old food ways. Even the simple act of tending to dinner over a fire, or the motions of using a mortar and pestle can rouse some dormant tidbits of wisdom. Sometimes these ancestors may have been displaced and relocated to new lands, but they almost always carried their food ways along.
At times I have felt unsure of which lands to search for my roots in, let alone call home. My grandmother’s parents came to Japan from Korea around the 1930s, during Japan’s colonial rule of Korea when some Koreans fled from poverty and oppression caused by the occupation and migrated to Japan. Still today in Japan we are called Zainichi Koreans: “foreign Koreans living in Japan.”
Hoshigaki 干し柿
In late fall, astringent persimmons are peeled, dipped in boiling water and hung outside from windows. Through the magic of the brisk winter air, the persimmons dry slowly without attracting critters, and with gentle massaging a powdery coating of sugar is coaxed to the surface. The once inedible persimmons transform into a toothachingly sweet treat called hoshigaki. The discarded peels of the persimmons are sometimes dried and kept for later use (more on that in a minute).
Takuan たくあん
In late winter, bunches of shriveled up daikon radishes can be spotted hanging limp from odd places. Strung from the rafters of homes or thrown over tree branches, they are first dried out in this manner, then they are buried in a bed of rice bran and salt called nuka doko. Other ingredients can be added to the nuka doko depending on the fermenter’s taste： kelp for umami, chili pepper for heat, citrus peel for fragrance, gardenia fruit for a natural yellow dye and even dried persimmon peels from earlier for sweetness. After a few weeks of microbial alchemy, the daikon radishes are dug out from the fermentation vessel, rinsed off in water, and they will have transformed into delicious pickles called takuan.
Most traditional food techniques require that you hone your ability to tend, a finely tuned sense of how to take care of something. It’s a skill that is cultivated through trial and error. This type of nurturing is something that many grandmothers carry with them—an intuition sharp as a knife from a lifetime of experiences in tending: from babies to hearth fires, vegetable patches, breads rising, chills and fevers, and so much more. Today, we seem to be quick to give up these skill-honing opportunities in exchange for countertop appliances and easy web searches that take out the guesswork and tell us exactly what to do. But what’s lost is the obscure art of knowing: sensing when the weather is right, feeling when a season is on the cusp, reading the temperature by the touch of your hand, or simply knowing when something is just so. These things can’t be learned through screens. They need to be felt with our bodies. This kind of knowing is a key component of many old food techniques.
Umeboshi 梅干し
In early summer, the still-green plums of the ume trees are picked to make umeboshi (salt pickled plums), simultaneously signaling the start of monsoon season. During the rains, the umes are submerged in a salty brine. Only when there is a hint of good weather ahead are the plums brought out and placed in the sun to bask for three days. This can be tricky when the weather is still wavering, but it is crucial to keep off any mold that may have slipped into the bath and began to creep onto the plums. It’s a fine line between a successful batch of umeboshi and an incubator of mold galore during the humid monsoon days. For this reason, to be able to make umeboshi with a low salt content is a sure sign of an experienced umeboshi maker. Usually when thoughts of moldy umeboshi no longer worry the mind, it means that the hot days of summer have begun.
Rice 米
As fall approaches, the rice paddies turn golden. Pretty soon they are busy with harvest tractors. Most of that harvest will go to large grain-dehydrating machines, where they will quickly lose 20 percent of their moisture content. But some farmers still do everything by hand: harvesting with scythes and drying the plants naturally outdoors. The cut rice plants are bundled and hung from wooden poles, where the grains bathe in sunlight, get rustled by the breeze (and sometimes blown by typhoon winds), and even withstand the rains. This slow method of drying with the elements allows the grains to develop a fine skin of undamaged starch. This results in distinctively more delicious rice, and there is also something said for the poetic scenery of the hanging rice plants—surely it adds to the flavor. This method isn’t passive, however; after the sweat of the harvest it requires a certain type of care, including a feel for the right timing and a trust that the weather will not take it all down in one bad storm. Often perceived by many of us as something to shield our harvest from, the elements—once they are understood and attended—can be a vital tool for extending food into the next seasons.
Kepari ケッパリ
When I was younger and would come visit my hanme (grandmother), I would try to take Korean perilla seeds back to Canada with me. This was because when I was far from Hanme I had dreams of eating her kkaennip jangajji (Korean perilla leaves pickled in soy sauce), known as kepari in Zainichi slang. We jokingly call it gohan-dorobo, meaning “rice thief”—it’s so good that, once you start, you can’t stop; you end up refilling your bowl with more rice just so you can keep eating kepari. Now that I live closer to her, I grow Korean perilla every summer, so I can bring her the leaves or have her come pick them with me. It’s become an activity that brings us both joy.
One summer my aunt showed up to my Hanme’s house, and she had with her stacks of perilla leaves that she had grown herself. All the Zainichi aunties of the neighborhood showed up, excited to trade something for a share of those perilla leaves, as if the leaves were secret trading cards and only Zainichi people knew of their worth. And no, they will all tell you, they are not the same as shiso, the Japanese perilla.
Kimchi キムチ
Of course my grandmother likes to make kimchi. But, because she too is a child of the diaspora, her recipe is not necessarily an old family secret passed down many generations. It’s actually more created from her own food experiments inspired by memories of her mother’s cooking. Most recently however, she has discovered the world of youtube videos and has begun to incorporate modern techniques shared by the virtual aunties. Isn’t that what most recipes really are –our life experiences swirling together in a dish.
Anytime I go over to Hanme’s house for a visit, our conversations almost always circle back to the same place: how to make kimchi. My aunt will come by and add her two cents. Hanme’s Zainichi friend will zip over on her scooter to add some notes to the kimchi think-tank. Of course, we all already know how to make kimchi: this is something else. It’s like an agreement, or maybe a special handshake, in a secret Zainichi club. We are agreeing that I know, that you know, that we all know how to make good kimchi. It’s a modern-day version of passing on knowledge through oral teachings—this time with a little local gossip on the side. Naming the best ingredients to use, the right amount of shrimp paste, which shop sells the best chile powder—they are all belted out like words of affirmation that reminds us of who we are and where we come from.
Warabi 蕨
Every spring in the mountains, I pick warabi (bracken ferns) for Hanme, also called gosari in Korean. She soaks them in wood ash, then dries them in the sun. It’s one of the ingredients that she uses for the food offerings in the ancestral reverence ceremonies she does three times a year. It’s important for her to have enough warabi. I can’t always make it to the festivities, but I won’t ever miss foraging the ferns for her; it has become a ritual of my own. I walk around, squinting to find the green stalks, looking for the little unfurled heads that peek out from the matted dead vegetation of winters past. “You don’t want the ones that are too tall—they’re too fibrous,” Hanme warns. I run my hand along the stalks of the ferns, feeling for where each one naturally bends with ease: that’s the spot you want to snap. Every fern I pick is a ritual of remembering: Snap. Remembering my haibe (grandfather). Snap. Remembering my ancestors. Snap. Remembering our ceremonies.
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The food ways I have learned from the farmers of Japan have taught me to listen to this land and feel its pulse. The elements all have their own rhythm and dance. In the right combination and with a bit of time, they can transform foods—not only for keeping, but also for enhanced nutrition and flavor. My grandmother’s food ways have taught me how to remember my ancestors and their land. I hear their echoes today through flavors that taste like home on my tongue, foods that my bones crave, and plants I keep close by my side. These are a testament to my ancestors’ resilience, and I am the continuation of their lineage.
Japan and Korea—they are the soil that my roots now weave through, impossible to untangle one from the other, both part of who I am today. They nourish me in their own ways, and I wish to keep nourishing them back the best I can. That, to me, feels the most like home. And, somewhere on the other side of the ocean, other parts of my family tree span Europe and cross to Turtle Island. Those settler roots also hold stories and lessons of their own, waiting to be unearthed.
