Japan's Sweet Potato Culture

About this book

It is the crop that gets sweeter after it is dug up. The Japanese sweet potato crossed two oceans, fed Okinawa, took its name from the Satsuma domain whose ash soils it loved, and was carried to Edo by a scholar who wanted a harvest standing between the capital and famine. This book is the guide to the whole culture that grew from that journey: the plant, the varieties, the fields, the roasting stones, the drying sheds and the still.

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 long journey from the Americas through China and the Ryukyus; the varieties and breeding, from honeyed Beni Haruka and island Anno to the white shochu workhorse Kogane Sengan; the regions, from Kagoshima's ash plateaus to Naruto's sand fields and the Kanto loam; yakiimo in all its forms — stone pot, clay pot, winter truck and convenience-store counter; hoshiimo and the arts of curing and keeping; sweets and shochu; the farmhouse table through the year; and the history, language and traveller's kit, from Aoki Konyo to reading a variety label.

No district or maker is ranked and no shop's prices, hours or harvest figures are asserted — those change; the varieties, the soils 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 430 — 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.