Quick! What’s the first thing that springs to mind if I ask you what Japan and the Washington, DC area have in common? (Hint: it’s early Spring here.) Why, cherry trees in blossom, you’d answer, and you’d be right! So it’s especially appropriate to read and appreciate a book devoted to the seasonal foraged foods of Japan, so many of which are just as ephemeral as the fragile cherry blossoms now gracing both our landscapes.
But these foods (sansai is the term used in Japan) are not only short-lived in terms of seasonality, but the awareness and knowledge of their identification and preparation is slipping away, becoming lost in the rush of industrialization and globalization of the modern world. In the West, we see the loss of tradition and ancient materials all around us, but who thinks of it happening in the land of geishas, temples, and Living National Treasures?
This is an elegiac book, as well as a celebration. Each chapter is devoted to one aspect of wild food, and each notes how this food was revered or sustained people through hard times in the past, but is now only eaten by a fraction of the folks it once supported. Ms. Bird, who has lived and worked in Japan and speaks Japanese, sought out practitioners of the foraging art all over the country and offshore to boot – she even talked to women harvesting seaweed by diving deep without breathing gear.
The chapters cover early spring greens, horse chestnut trees, ferns, bamboo, and the aforementioned seaweed harvesting. Her description of the ancient horse chestnuts, formerly found everywhere and reliable suppliers of famine food for thousands, being sold and cut down for furniture broke my heart – perhaps because it echoed our own native chestnuts, once rulers of the great forests of the Eastern Seaboard, which vanished years ago. Now I have an Asian chestnut tree in my back yard. It gives me nuts every year, but I would gladly trade it for an American one.
As Ms. Bird notes, the Japanese horse chestnut is related to the European horse chestnut and our American buckeye, but not to the Asian or American true chestnuts. She guarantees that no one who tries to eat an unprocessed horse chestnut will mistake it for the other kind! And speaking of processing, it takes an astonishing amount of time and labor to render horse chestnuts edible, so much that I wonder how adventurous or desperate the pioneers of this process must have been. That said, they keep in storage for a decade or more.
The culture of seaweed harvesting, still extant but much reduced from the past, has fascinated poets since ancient times; possibly because until recently, women dived not only without breathing gear but also without clothes. Japan’s seaweed has terroir; wakame from the Naruto coast is said to be superior to any other because of the fast-moving currents in the strait. But even for seaweed, the experience is not what it used to be. The varieties consumed in the country have been reduced as commercial farming simplifies both ecology and diets.
The narrative part of Eating Wild Japan concludes with a chapter on the native Ainu people of Hokkaido, perhaps the segment of population most connected to their traditional ways of eating. Their religion and culture is wholly concerned with conserving the sources of their foraged food, as they consider these things so interrelated as to be inseparable. There is a revival of interest in this way of life now, but it comes with the risk of exploitation of the material aspects without consideration of the Ainu’s ancestral spiritual connection.
The book concludes with a guide to plants and a section of recipes, all traditional Japanese preparations incorporating sansai. It should not be difficult for those of us outside of Japan to substitute our own local foraged plants for those specified. And, if we do so with a little more reverence and thoughtfulness for what is still available to us than before, we can thank Winifred Bird and her thoughtful insights.
Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes, by Winifred Bird, illustrated by Paul Poynter, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA, 2021. https://www.stonebridge.com/
