What I Ate

A list, with what I have since found out about each item, and honest marks where I still cannot say.

The foods I can actually name from those two years: a great many pickled things, fish, sushi, soba, yakiniku — plus okonomiyaki and everything that came off the irori.

The pickles

The largest category, and the one I understood least at the time. So many vegetables that, at the time, I had no idea what they were.

That has its own full treatment on the Pickled side of the site, because the finding is a big one: Japan does not sort pickles by acid. It sorts them by what they are buried in — salt, soy, vinegar, rice bran, miso, rice malt, sake lees — and only one of those seven is vinegar. The Ministry of Agriculture counts over 600 regional varieties.

So my confusion was not ignorance. It was an accurate perception that the food in front of me was organised on a principle I had no category for.

The full version is here. It includes why umeboshi is not a plum, and why I still cannot tell you which kind of takuan I was eating.

Fish

Everywhere, and in more states than I had known were possible: raw, grilled, simmered, dried, salted, smoked, pickled, and fermented.

Two things I did not appreciate then:

• A fishing town eats differently from a city. Stopping at the docks was the whole method, and it meant I was eating what had come in that morning, prepared the way that town prepared it — not a menu.
• Preserving was not a separate activity. The fish hanging in the smoke above the hearth were not a special project. They were just what happens in a house with a fire and no chimney.

Sushi

I ate a lot of it, and almost all of what I ate was not what an American means by the word.

Nigiri and maki exist, obviously. But the sushi of that region includes pressed forms — Iwakuni’s own tonosama-zushi, built in layers in a wooden mould and cut into squares — which look nothing like the rolls in an American restaurant and predate them as a technique, because pressing is a preserving method.

⭐ The through-line I did not see at the time: sushi is a preservation technology. The vinegared rice is the point, not the vehicle. Everything else on this page is about keeping food, and sushi belongs on the same list.

Soba

Buckwheat noodles, hot and cold, and the cold ones in summer were a revelation to somebody raised on the idea that noodles are a hot food.

And a local connection I only found later: Iwakuni renkon soba is a thing, made with the town’s own nine-holed lotus root. I have no idea whether I ate it. I probably did, and did not know.

Yakiniku

Grilled meat, cooked by you, at the table, over a fire in the middle of it.

This was the most immediately legible food in Japan for an American — meat, fire, table — and it is probably why I remember the name of it when so many other things are blanks. It needed no translation.

Though the structure is different from a cookout in ways worth noting: small pieces, very fast, one or two at a time, eaten as they come off rather than plated up at the end. It is a pace, not a menu.

The tofu

Lots of tofu. Some spicy, some not. And I have never been able to identify the chili in the spicy ones. My best guess is yuzu kosho, and a guess is all it is.

What I did not eat

Worth saying, because a list like this can imply more completeness than is true.

I was a young Marine with a car, eating in small coastal towns in the south, in alley shops in a mid-sized Yamaguchi city, and in the homes of people who took me in. I was not eating at restaurants of any standing, and I was not eating in Kyoto or Osaka. Almost everything on this page is home cooking, dock food and neighbourhood shops.

That is a narrow slice of Japanese food. It is also, I think, the better slice to have had.

The pattern, looking back

Nearly everything I have listed here is a preserving technology wearing a different hat.

The pickles. The dried and smoked fish. The pressed sushi. The salt-cured umeboshi. Even the irori itself, which is a smokehouse that also cooks dinner.

I did not notice that at twenty-something. I noticed it writing this section, forty years later, having spent most of the time in between fermenting things in crocks and putting things in vinegar without ever consciously connecting it back.

I think this is where I learned it. Not as a technique — as a way of thinking about food, in houses where nothing was wasted and the smoke had a job.