Japan's Wasabi Culture

About this book

Almost everything the world calls wasabi is not wasabi. This book is the guide to the real thing: a rhizome that spends two years drinking a cold mountain stream, loses its perfume within minutes of grating, and built a whole culture of terraced stone beds, spring fields, sharkskin graters and sushi counters around that single impatient fact.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — What It Is, Roots & Place, Taste & Texture, and How to Enjoy & Where to Find It. The plant and its waters; the fields and regions, from the terraced beds of Izu and Shizuoka to the broad spring fields of Azumino; the varieties and breeding, from connoisseur's Mazuma to the honest workhorse lines; the grower's craft of building, tending and harvesting the beds; grating, keeping and the rhizome at table; wasabi at the table in foods and dishes; horseradish, powder, tubes and the wider world — the imitation faced head-on; and the culture, language and traveller's kit, from namida slang to reading a market label.

No grower or district is ranked and no shop's prices, hours or harvest figures are asserted — those change; the water, the varieties and the customs endure. No health effects are claimed anywhere, and old beliefs are labelled as beliefs. A glossary and theme indexes close the book. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of its own — in fact more than 450 — with no sentence repeated anywhere in the book.

日本で作られた本です: Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. / Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. / Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.