It was the perfect expression of how deeply the Japanese have transformed rice and how wedded they are to its simple pleasures. The sake is rice. The onigiri is rice and the miso that coats it is most likely rice too.
“With rice, the whole taste is complete,” said Isawa as he re-filled our glasses without mercy. “This is the Japanese way.”
The next morning, Isawa took us to meet a 58-year-old rice farmer named Tadao Shinagawa. “My family has grown rice for centuries,” he told us a bit sheepishly, as if a few centuries weren’t really enough to impress here.
“I am Japanese so I eat rice since I am a child,” he said, the deep lines in his face cracking into a wide smile. “It’s the most important thing in our life. Sake too. It’s in our DNA.”
As if to prove it, Shinagawa said the type of rice he grows is called hitomebore, literal translation: “love at first sight.” Traditionally, hitomebore is a sushi rice, but Isawa has found a way to make sake with it.
Shinagawa explained there are three types of rice in Japan: cooking rice, sake rice and sticky rice used to make mochi—a gelatinous dough used in sweets, crackers, cookies and a special white confection served on New Years. The New Year’s mochi, it turns out, is pretty important.
“In Japan, it is said the gods come back on the first of January,” he said, “and not just the gods, our ancestors too. We have to ask them to protect us, to give us a good harvest.”
Of course, the best way to please grumpy ancestors is with, you guessed it, rice—with an offering of sake, followed by cooked rice, vegetables and finally white mochi, stacked three at a time in pyramids of gooey sweetness.
Shinagawa recalled how he used to make mochi the old fashioned way, smashing the rice dough into submission with a giant wooden hammer.
“When we used to smash the mochi,” he said, “we would think about all the things we fought about and hope for a better year.”
“Now,” he said with a gummy grin, “we just use a mochi maker.”
Two weeks later, my wife and I celebrated our own new year back in New York. We filled two champagne glasses half with sake, half with ginger ale and a twist of lemon rind—an Isawa creation. And we toasted to our crab friend who had lost his mind (well, his brain) so we could learn the true meaning of umami.
Neil Katz is the executive editor of CBSNews.com and now a fervent lover of crab brains.
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