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Sakuranbo Cherries
I have a friend who loves mountains. I do, too. So, sometimes I contact him and ask when we can go hiking. Since he knows almost every mountain in Northeastern Japan, I leave it up to him where we will go.
The other day we had a plan for a hike, but since it was raining we ended up going for a long drive instead. Of course, we headed directly for the mountains, which this time meant Yamagata Prefecture.
As we were zooming along, admiring the scenery, my friend pointed out row after row of trees laden with cherries. Most of them were covered in shiny new plastic. “The trees must be protected from rain”, my friend explained. “As soon as they get wet, this delicate fruit will crack and be ruined. So the farmers must be very careful.”
These were all Sakuranbo Cherries, big magnificent balls of sweetness. They are in season for a very short time, about a month at most. At ¥1,000 (about $10 USA) for a teeny box of about twenty, they are far beyond my humble means. So, I had never tasted one. And somehow that preciousness added to their impressiveness.
Suddenly we saw some farmers balancing on ladders, small woven baskets on their hips, picking cherries one by one. “Let’s stop”, suggested my friend. So we did.
“Hello. Here is a foreigner who has never seen cherries on a tree. May we have a look and take some photos?”
“Sure”, came the kind reply. And then the woman picker said, “Chotto matte! Chotto matte!” (“Just a minute. Just a minute”) and ran off to fetch an older lady with a sunbonnet.
“Hello. Hello. Welcome!” she greeted us. “Here. Try some cherries”, and she picked a few and handed them to us. My friend bowed his thanks and eagerly popped one into his mouth. “Mmmm. Sooooo good!” he said in delight. I tried one, too, and was amazed by the delicate sweetness of these perfectly shaped jewels.
The woman explained that when the trees bloomed, the farmers had to hand pick most of the flowers off the tree. That way the cherries would be lush and large. “Fewer flowers mean bigger, plumper fruit”, she explained. “But also fewer cherries, of course.”
Farmers have to rent bees these days since the colonies are dwindling. “And those guys charge us a fortune, but don’t give us any of the honey!” she lamented with a sigh.
She told us it would take one person half a day to pick one tree. Of course, they keep only the best. The others they toss on the ground. “They split so easily”, she said. “So we have to be very careful.”
But at the end of the long day of picking the work is not finished. Far from it. “At night we sort all the cherries. We sort by size, of course, and also by color. A machine might be able to know the size, but never the color. So, we have to do all that by hand. It is extremely tedious. It is definitely the hardest part of this job.”
The entire family is involved in this major yearly project. And members who have left for work elsewhere come back at picking time if they can. Also neighbors and part-time workers help out. Later when their own fruit trees are ready for picking, the family will go over to lend them a hand, too. This tradition of mutual assistance has been going on literally for centuries.
In fact, the woman we talked to told us her family had had this business for well over seven generations. “More, more”, she said, waving her hand behind her to indicate an entire line of ancestors before her. And she hoped, despite the shrinking number of farmers all over Japan, that it would continue for a long time to come.
The trees we were standing under were about fifteen or twenty years old, but trees can produce good fruit for about fifty years or so. Since Sakuranbo Cherries are in season for such a short time, the farmers have to earn the bulk of their yearly income in about a month. That is why they work round the clock and why the fruit seems more expensive than gold.
But Japanese farmers are clever. They grow other kinds of fruit, too: grapes, apples, peaches. But the day my friend and I were there, Sakuranbo Cherries were their entire universe of attention. Everyone’s sole focus was on that delicate, delicious, and most fragile queen of fruits.
Misturu Kakimoto of the Japanese Vegetarian Society writes: “A survey that I conducted of 80 Westerners, including Americans, Englishmen and Canadians, revealed that approximately half of them believed that vegetarianism originated in India. Some respondents assumed that vegetarianism had its origin in China or Japan. It seems to me that the reason Westerners associate vegetarianism with China or Japan is Buddhism. It is no wonder, and in fact we could say that Japan used to be a country where vegetarianism prevailed.”
Gishi-wajin-denn, a history book on Japan written in China around the third century BC, says, “Thre are no cattle, no horses, no tigers, no leopards, no goats and no magpies in that land. The climate is mild and people over there eat fresh vegetables both in summer and in winter.” It also says that “people catch fish and shellfish in the water.” Apparently, the Japanese ate fresh vegetables as well as rice and other cereals as staple foods. They also took some fish and shellfish, but hardly any meat.
Shinto, the prevailing religion at the time, is essentially pantheistic, based upon the worship of the forces of nature. According to writer Steven Rosen, in the early days of Shinto, no animal food was offered in sacrifice because of the injunction against shedding blood in the sacred area of the shrine.
Several hundred years later, Buddhism came to Japan and the prohibition of hunting and fishing permeated the Japanese people. In 7th century Japan, the Empress Jito encouraged “hojo,” or the releasing of captive animals, and established wildlife preserves, where animals could not be hunted.
There are many similarities between the Hindu literature and the Buddhist religions of the Far East. For example, the word Cha’an of the Cha’an school of Chinese Buddhism is Chinese for the Sanskrit word “dhyana”, which means meditation, as does the word “Zen” in Japanese. In 676 AD, then Japanese emperor Tenmu proclaimed an ordinance prohibiting the eating of fish and shellfish as well as animal flesh and fowl. Subsequently, in the year 737 of the Nara period, the emperor Seimu approved the eating of fish and shellfish.
During the twelve hundred years from the Nara period to the Meiji restoration in the second half of the 19th century, Japanese people enjoyed vegetarian style meals. They usually ate rice as staple food and beans and vegetables. It was only on special occasions or celebrations that fish was served. Under these circumstances the Japanese people developed a vegetarian cuisine, Shojin Ryori (ryori means cooking or cuisine), which was native to Japan.
The word “shojin” is a Japanese translation of “vyria” in Sanskrit, meaning “to have the goodness and keep away evils.” Buddhist priests of the Tendai-shu and Shingon-shu sects, whose founders studied in China in the ninth century before they founded their respective sects, have handed down vegetarian cooking practices from Chinese temples strictly in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha.
In the 13th century, Dogen, the founder of the Soto sect of Zen, formally established Shojin Ryori or Japanese vegetarian cuisine. Dogen studied and learned the Zen teachings abroad in China, during the Sung Dynasty. He fixed rules aiming to establish the pure vegetarian life as a means of training the mind.
One of the other influences Zen exerted on the Japanese people manifested itself in Sado, the Japanese tea ceremony. It is believed that Esai, founder of the Rinazi-shu sect, introduced tea to Japan and it is the custom for Zen followers to drink tea. The customs preserved in the teaching of Zen lead to a systematic rule called Sado…a Cha-shitsu or tea ceremony room is so constructed as to resemble the Shojin, where the chief priest is at a Buddhist temple.
Food served at a tea ceremony is called Kaiseki in Japanese, which literally means a stone in the breast. Monks practicing asceticism used to press heated stones to their bosom to suppress hunger. Then the word Kaiseki itself came to mean a light meal served at Shojin, and Kaiseki meals had great influence on the Japanese.
The “Temple of the Butchered Cow” can be found in Shimoda, Japan. It was erected shortly after Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1850s. It was erected in honor of the first cow slaughtered in Japan, marking the first violation of the Buddhist tenet against the eating of meat.
An example of a Buddhist vegetarian in the modern age: Kenji Miyazawa, a Japanese writer and poet of the early 20th century, who wrote a novel entitled Vegetarian-Taisai, in which he depicted a fictitious vegetarian congress…His works played an important role in the advocacy of modern vegetarianism. Today, no animal flesh is ever eaten in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and such Buddhist denominations as the Cao Dai sect (which originated in South Vietnam), now boasts some two million followers, all of whom are vegetarian.
The Buddhist teachings are not the only source contributing to the growth of vegetarianism in Japan. in the late 19th century, Dr. Gensai Ishizuka published an academic book in which he advocated vegetarian cooking with an emphasis on brown rice and vegetables. His method is called Seisyoku (Macrobiotics) and is based upon ancient Chinese philosophy such as the principles of Yin and Yang and Taoism. Now some people support his method of preventative medicine. Japanese macrobiotics suggest taking brown rice as half of the whole intake, with vegetables, beans, seaweeds, and a small amount of fish.
In his 1923 book, The Natural Diet of Man, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg writes: “According to Mori, the Japanese peasant of the interior is almost an exclusive vegetarian. He eats fish once or twice a month and meat once or twice a year.” Dr. Kellogg writes that in 1899, the Emperor of Japan appointed a commission to determine whether it was necessary to add meat to the nation’s diet to improve the people’s strength and stature. The commission concluded that as far as meat was concerned, “the Japanese had always managed to do without it, and that their powers of endurance and their athletic prowess exceeded that of any of the Caucasian races. Japan’s diet stands on a foundation of rice.”
According to Dr. Kellogg: “the rice diet of the Japanese is supplemented by the free use of peanuts, soy beans and greens, which… constitute a wholly sufficient bill of fare. Throughout the Island Empire, rice is largely used, together with buckwheat, barley, wheat and millet. Turnips and radishes, yams and sweet potatoes are frequently used, also cucumbers, pumpkins and squashes. The soy bean is held in high esteem and used largely in the form of miso, a puree prepared from the bean and fermented; also tofu, a sort of cheese; and cho-yu, which is prepared by mixing the pulverized beans with wheat flour, salt, and water and fermenting from one and a half to five years.
“The Chinese peasant lives on essentially the same diet, as do also the Siamese, the Koreans, and most other Oriental peoples. Three-fourths of the world’s population eats so little meat that it cannot be regarded as anything more than an incidental factor in their bill of fare. The countless millions of China,” writes Dr. Kellogg, “are for the most part flesh-abstainers. In fact at least two-thirds of the inhabitants of the world make so little use of flesh that it can hardly be considered an essential part of their dietary…”
Misturu Kakimoto concludes: “Japanese people started eating meat some 150 years ago and now suffer the crippling diseases caused by the excess intake of fat in flesh and the possible hazards from the use of agricultural chemicals and additives. This is persuading them to seek natural and safe food and to adopt once again the traditional Japanese cuisine.”
posted by vasumurti on 6/17/2009 5:28 pm