There are bears in Hokkaido. Not just cuddly koala types either, but proper, big, scream-for-your-mommy grizzlies. It’s hard to imagine where the higuma hide themselves in a nation of 135 million people sardined onto usable land the size of two football fields. Perhaps a number are passing themselves off as hairy geishas—who knows?—but there are, it is claimed, thousands of them roaming free as the breeze on Japan’s northernmost island.
I know for sure there are bears in Japan, because I saw one. Vicariously, but that still counts, doesn’t it? It was the day Asger and I, together with my researcher, Emi, drove to visit the konbu farms that lie southwest of Sapporo, along a coast road that sticks in my memory for two reasons, the first being its majestic, volcanic splendor, with giant birds of prey wheeling in the deep blue sky above, the second, as I said, because I didn’t happen to look up into a forested hill above the motorway and see a large, dark, bear-shaped shadow moving through the undergrowth.
Emi did.
“I just saw a bear,” she said before looking back down at the map on her lap.
“What do you mean, you saw a bear?” I said, frantically craning my neck as I drove, the car veering toward the median strip.
“A bear. Up there.” She pointed to a fast-receding point behind us.
I repeated the question a few times, during which, to her credit, Emi remained patient.
“Emi just saw a bear, Asger!” I shouted above the strained din of the Daihatsu’s electric-toothbrush engine, but he was as under-awed as Emi. Of course she’d just seen a bear. What was the big deal? Hadn’t he just the other day watched a ninja make five red sponge balls appear in his hands from nowhere at the ninja-themed restaurant in Shinjuku?
We continued along the coast road beside Uchiura Bay, heading south to Hakodate, passing through shabby, desolate towns of low-rise, corrugated iron houses and shops. Great mounds of buoys littered the empty lots between buildings, while sixty or so feet out at sea the surface of the water was covered with hundreds more, like a giant, unfinished game of solitaire—the telltale signs of a konbu “field.”
I was still glancing around nervously, on the lookout for nine-foot, hairy carnivores, when we finally arrived in Minamikayabe-cho on the Pacific coast, an area famed throughout Japan for producing some of the finest konbu (sometimes spelled “kombu”) in the land. Over 15 percent of all Japan’s konbu—worth ¥10 billion ($89 million) a year—comes from this part of Hokkaido; they even supply the emperor.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of this great, green, leathery sea plant to the diet of the Japanese. They eat around fifty different types of seaweed, but konbu is king. It is the one constant ingredient in dashi. In traditional Buddhist cuisine, there even is a dashi that is made simply by letting a piece of konbu sit in cold water for a few hours—it is delicious, with a barely-there hint of the sea.
Konbu isn’t just used to make dashi—although given the myriad uses for dashi in soups, sauces, marinades, batters, and dips, that would be enough to warrant it podium position in Japanese cuisine. They also soak it in vinegar, dry it, and then shave it to make tororo konbu, which is often used in miso soup instead of nori; or cook it slowly with water, soy, mirin, and sugar, then sprinkle it with salt to make shio konbu (salt konbu), a popular snack. It is also used as a wrapping for saba-zushi (pressed mackerel sushi). And, as I learned from my chastening visit to Ajinomoto, konbu, of course, has the highest levels of glutamate of any natural substance and was the inspiration for the invention of MSG.
There is every reason to believe konbu is one of the most significant foodstuffs in terms of the Japanese’s famed good health and longevity. It has more minerals than anything else they eat, including potassium, iron, iodine, magnesium, and calcium, as well as vitamins B and C, and is thought to aid in the removal of toxins from the body. Seaweed also contains lignans, believed to prevent cancer. Plus, of course, it is fat- and calorie-free. As I would discover a couple of months later, the Okinawans eat more konbu per capita than any of their compatriots. And guess who lives not only the longest in Japan but in the world? The Okinawans (although there are considerably fewer bears on Okinawa, which I can’t help feel must be a factor).
It is difficult to get a sense of how konbu looks in the wild from the small, dried, black-green strips the Japanese buy prepackaged in their supermarkets. I really wanted to see where konbu grows and talk to the people who farm it. Hence the five-hour drive from Sapporo (Lissen stayed in town with Emil, who was threatening to hold his breath unless he got to go on the Ferris wheel again). But konbu farmers are a secretive and suspicious bunch, wary of outsiders, perhaps because they are rumored to earn upward of $100,000 a year for tending their small plots of ocean. It had taken weeks of e-mails and phone calls from Emi to set up a meeting, and even then I eventually had to send a copy of my passport to assure them I wasn’t involved in some kind of seaweed espionage.
“It’s been the worst year ever for konbu,” Takahiko Sasaki, head of the Minami Kayabe Fisheries Cooperative Association, explained to us when we finally arrived. “We usually produce around 3,500 tons a year, but this year it’s been less than half that. The problem is storms. The konbu is very exposed and is damaged easily by rough tides.”
We were standing in a warehouse beside the harbor watching a team of robust-looking middle-aged women tying together fifteen-pound bundles of whole, dried seaweed leaves, which looked not unlike tobacco, each bundle roughly the size of a bale of hay. They quite overwhelmed the tiny pickup truck sent to transport them.
Sasaki-san, wearing a polo shirt embroidered with a small cartoon of a bear playing golf, explained that the konbu is grown just beyond the harbor walls, a few yards out at sea. Konbu leaves, which are narrow and tonguelike, with frilly edges, can grow up to six yards long (over twenty yards has been known). They are a translucent, browny green and are harvested at either one or two years of age by men with bamboo poles with hooks on the end who use them to rake the leaves aboard boats. Drying has to be done within a day or the seaweed starts to turn white and the quality suffers. When it is finished, the seaweed is very dark green, stiff, and brittle, like sheets of dried spinach lasagna. Farmers traditionally begin to harvest natural konbu on July 20 and continue until late August, with folks flocking from all over the region to help pick the leaves. It is tough work, starting at two in the morning and working through to eight in the evening.
They still dry some of the konbu the natural way in these parts, first brushing it clean on a machine that looks like a giant shoe polisher, then hanging it out in the sun in large, wooden-framed open sheds. But most is dried by machine in small warehouses at around 160°F for twelve hours or so. Should you ever need to, you can tell the difference between sun-dried and machine-dried konbu, as the former is greeny brown, while machine-dried is darker, almost black. Real konbu connoisseurs can also tell where on Hokkaido a piece comes from. For instance, in the area around Minamikayabe-cho, cut a piece of konbu and it will be white inside, hence the area’s name—which translates to White Mouth Beach; elsewhere the konbu will be black inside—from Black Mouth Beach, near Hakodate. There are over ten species of konbu, and it comes in a variety of quality grades, depending on color, gloss, and thickness. The thicker, the better (an eighteen-pound bundle of prime konbu will contain eighty-four pieces; a bundle of lower-grade leaves will contain more), but of course, this being Japan, appearance is the most important factor in grading—the straight, uniformly shaped konbu is most prized of all. The ultimate piece of konbu would, then, be wild grown, naturally dried, thick as a passport, glossy, and symmetrical.
The variety of konbu can have a radical effect on the flavor of dashi, ranging from delicate and light to rich and dark, depending on the beach where the konbu grew and even the year—as with wine, climate has a large effect on the flavor of each year’s konbu. The very best rishiri konbu is laid down for two years in a temperature- and humidity-controlled process known as kura-gakoi, which deepens the glutamate flavor. It is much appreciated by so-called konbuliers, the konbu equivalent of a sommelier.
Drying makes the konbu leaves crinkle up at the edges so they look like ventagli pasta, so the higher grades of leaves are steam softened at 212°F to enable them to be rolled flat. This is done by hand using a machine rather like a mangle. We followed Sasaki-san in his truck farther west along the coast to watch this being done by a husband-and-wife team in a ramshackle shed on the beach. The husband gently fed each piece of konbu through the machine before passing it to his wife, who would trim it by hand with a pair of shears and fold each yard-long piece into thirds for packing. She’d been doing this job for thirty years, she told me.
They also harvest “wild” konbu in these parts, which, because it grows on the ocean floor, both tastes better and has more minerals than the farmed variety, which they cultivate close to the water’s surface. It is far harder to harvest, of course, which means it costs twice as much. It is also even more vulnerable to the weather.
“This year, there has been practically no natural konbu,” Sasaki-san told us. “Maybe fifty or sixty kilograms [110 to 132 pounds] in all. Usually we harvest a thousand. Low pressure in October meant that the seabed was damaged by rough water.”
The decimation of the konbu crop—most likely as a result of climate change—would really be something to worry about for the Japanese. Perhaps it will prompt them to rethink their carbon footprint and switch off all those electric toilets.
We wished Sasaki-san and his ladies well and thanked them for their time. Asger departed with yet another handful of sweets, Emi and I received a gift pack of konbu, I gave Sasaki-san a box of English tea, and we set off for home in our Daihatsu buzz-box.