Essay: Culture in a Bowl by Jeffrey Batac

Culture in a bowl

by Jeffrey D. Batac

In Japan, one of the things that struck me as odd was how short their rice grains were. As I tore open a bag of uruchimai at a cooking session in Minami Aizu in Fukushima, I had to take a double look at the rice before me, wondering whether or not I had the right bag. The rice grains came in half the size of the regular dinorado, each grain resembling a miniature clear quartz crystal. Until then, I was content feasting on steamed rice served in dainty bowls during meals, completely oblivious of its provenance or the manner by which it was prepared.

Like Filipinos, the Japanese count rice as one of their dietary staples. It's difficult to imagine grabbing a bite with no rice nearby, except maybe if you're having a giant bowl of ramen for dinner. Later on, however, I found out that going on a ramen binge is not exactly a good excuse to ditch rice either. At Toku, a ramen shop inside Harumi Triton Square in Tokyo's Chuo district, a steaming bowl of ramen oozing with the fatty goodness of beef broth comes with a free bowl of rice topped with pickles and aonori flakes. As things go in this coutry, rice is all but an inevitability.

If anything, the ubiquity of rice in Japan lends a sense of familiar comfort for a rice eater like me who hails from a rice-eating country 3,000 kilometers south of Narita. But the cultural affinity with rice is probably the only stark similarity between the two nations; everything else is just strange, alien, and far removed from the reality I know.

It begins with how rice is cultivated and grown. Stepping off the bus for a rice planting exercise at Ina-no-sato in the hilly region of Minami Aizu, we were given the chance to witness and try out the highly mechanized agricultural operations at work.

To a certain extent, seeing Japanese farmers drive around with their efficient and time-saving rice-planting machines was anticlimactic. This becomes particularly poignant when placed in the context of how this same country has pioneered the production and use of bullet trains and high-tech toilets long before the rest of the world decided to play catch-up. To them, manual rice planting is an outdated exercise best reserved for busloads of curious tourists, similar to how some museums stage ancient art, such as hand-loom weaving or anything else that nobody does anymore, as a reminder of how much things have changed.

Much of Japan's success as an industrialized state is attributable to how it has managed to modernize its agricultural sector. The rural countryside is not left at the mercy of an imperial capital or any of its imperial-minded bureaucrats. In these parts, being a farmer is a deliberate choice, not a foregone conclusion.

With a mountainous topography, achieving self-sufficiency doesn't certainly come without its own set of challenges. Tiny plots of arable land, irrigation problems in the highlands, and the limitations posed by the changing seasons warrant efficiency, ingenuity, creativity, and probably some semblance of aggression. The Japanese aren't known for being belligerent, but when it comes to their farming methods, they can be.

The unassuming nature of rice is an excellent representation of Japanese ways and culture. This is apparent in what seems like their natural proclivity toward minimalism. This minimalist philosophy couldn't get more obvious than in the manner by which Japanese folks go about their daily lives. From the delicious simplicity of the usual ichiju-sansai all the way to the visual harmony provided by the sharp and clean lines of their architecture, everything comes across as an exercise in restraint.

At the Akutsu household in Fukushima, where I had the privilege of staying in for a couple of days as part of a homestay program, I had a rare glimpse into the quotidian affairs of a typical Japanese family. Obasan, the eldest in the family, basically takes control of all the domestic chores while her son and his wife are out at work. With gray hair and an arched back, obasan's old age is belied by the fluidity with which she manages the day's tasks, almost effortlessly, as she flits about from one spot to another, with a palpable sense of certainty that can only be had by a lifetime of experience.

Hardworking, methodical, reliable, steeped in tradition, and hardly self-aware, obasan reminds me of the institutional face of Japan. Like almost any other Japanese I've met on this trip, she doesn't seem to afford herself the luxury of relaxing.

Her son, my temporary otosan, is as much a workhorse as his mother is. On beautiful spring days like this, he goes to the mountains very early in the morning to harvest seasonal mountain vegetables, which are then sold by his lovely mild-mannered wife, my temporary okasan. On winters, he earns a keep driving a payloader and cooking takoyaki balls. The time I was at their home, I only saw both of them at night.

It was obasan who served me company most of the time. One sunny afternoon I joined her as she sat in front of the television, her eyes fixed to the screen while her hands folded linens. We were watching a live Noh production. "Tokyo," she said, pointing at the stage, before laughing out loud at what I surmised must have been a funny sequence. For want of appropriate vocabulary, I simply nodded, my dismal Nihonggo a grave anomaly in this particular instance.

At a cooking session in Minami Aizu, obasan had to grab the pot of rice grains I was washing at the time. Using my right hand, I was stirring the uncooked grains soaked in cold mountain water, just like the way I do whenever I cook rice at home in the Philippines. Mouthing off words in Japanese, she proceeded to pick up the grains from the pot and rubbed them vigorously between her palms. "This is how you do it," she seemed to say.

For all their rigidity with their customs and traditions -- from their tea ceremony to the perfunctory bowing of their heads -- there is a hint of crazy in the Japanese psyche that is not immediately apparent until you turn on the television. With wildly colorful sets and even stranger antics, Japanese talk shows can be alternately surreal and funny. One episode featured guests being forced to eat pasta bathed in Tabasco sauce. Another show featured guests aping the gestures of 10 soap actors in rapid succession, inflections and all. Don't even get me started on anime shows.

The Salvador Dali phase of Japanese imagination stops the moment the TV is turned off. In its place are real, live people of the standards and practices variety. In this world, timetables are strictly adhered to, trains arrive on schedule, vendo machines are an inescapable fact, and emergency exits during earthquakes are pointed out first before settling in for business. It is a world where you are expected to finish the sticky, short-grained Japanese rice served to you in dainty bowls during meals.

For someone like me whose sense of taste has been cultivated in large part by a lifetime of eating dinorado and sinandomeng along with all their attendant histories and contexts, Japanese rice shall always come across as foreign. But it's the kind of foreign I don't mind having every now and then.

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