LUNCH IS ALL pickles at Kintame, a Kyoto shop that’s made tsukemono (“pickled things”) since 1879. Vegetables in tiny, tidy heaps appear on a radish-shaped plate, arranged like stops on a clock: white turnip cut thin as vellum, still juicy from a bath of rice vinegar and kelp; eggplant stained rose by purple shiso, mint-bright with smacks of cinnamon bark and cooling licorice; a knot of wild mustard greens, darkly tender and tingly, like a breath at the back of the neck.
Elsewhere these would be mere ornaments to a meal, stray bites to rouse the palate or brace it for the next course. Showcased here, as points of focus, they recalibrate your thinking. You become conscious of how these flavors — sourness, tang, funk and umami — run like a baseline through Japanese cuisine. Such are the yields of fermentation, here coming from the rice vinegar in the pickles, but present throughout the Japanese pantry in shoyu, miso, mirin and sake, all made by inoculating rice or soy beans with spores of koji (Aspergillus oryzae). Any soup or stew relies on dashi, a stock of kombu and katsuobushi — bonito that has been simmered, smoked, sun dried, repeatedly coated with mold and sun dried again until, almost purged of moisture, it clacks like wood when struck, then gets shaved into delicate curls that bring a briny earthiness, surf and turf in one.
Fermentation was one of our earliest tools of survival, a way to preserve food from rot and eke out supplies in winter; some anthropologists have theorized that a lust for beer, a fermented beverage, drove Neolithic humans to start planting barley and build settlements around 10,000 years ago, which would make fermentation the foundation of civilization as we know it. Today “everyone uses the refrigerator,” says Hiraku Ogura, 41, who runs Hakko Department, a Tokyo grocery store and cafe that specializes in ferments. Still we crave this flavor of arrested time, of something left to languish in the dark, perhaps because the taste of fermentation goes back to our first understanding of what taste is.
FERMENTATION ISN’T UNIQUE to Japan, but arguably no other nation has so fully committed to it. An archipelago nearly 2,500 miles north of the Equator, Japan lacks the climate to grow the kind of rich, vivid spices abundant in South and Southeast Asia, and its isolation, by geography and by choice, kept it on the margins of the spice trade. For flavor it had to look within, to the harvest of its fields and the surrounding sea. Fermentation turns a restricted set of ingredients into a bounty. Ogura, an anthropologist by training, has traveled across the country documenting the microbiomes and climatic conditions that shape local ferments. His ancestors on the island of Kyushu, for example, were whale hunters who thought of their prey not as their victim or mere food but as a kind of god. Out of reverence for the animal, they created a pickle from its bones and cartilage to ensure no part was wasted.
The past two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in fermentation across the developed world, in restaurants and home kitchens, as part of a countercultural resistance to the industrialization of food. (There are health benefits too — ferments can boost the population of good bacteria in the gut, reducing inflammation and easing digestion — but at the same time, Japan, where such foods are a staple, has one of the highest incidences of stomach cancer, although no correlation with diet has been proven.) Fermentation is anti-hurry, a process that demands patience and trust in things not entirely in your control. According to Kevin Jeung, 34, a chef at the fermentation lab at Noma in Copenhagen who’s made pilgrimages to Kyoto to learn Japanese techniques, you have to believe you can wrest life from decay and take “something inedible and make it not only edible but delicious” — like fish and squid guts, chopped and salted into shiokara, a thick swath of brine condensed to its primordial self, what you imagine the sea might taste like where it’s too deep for light to reach.
One reason the tradition may have persisted for so long in Japan is the cultural sense of connection to the invisible. In her 2021 ethnography, “Water, Wood & Wild Things,” the American writer Hannah Kirshner, who lives in the mountains of rural Ishikawa Prefecture, describes a brief apprenticeship at a sakagura (sake brewery), where workers must change their shoes three times before entering the koji-making room and are forbidden from eating natto, made from whole soybeans, or shiokara, lest traces of these fermented foods introduce competing microbes. “If there is a god in water, a god in rice, a god in sake, then a sakagura is like a shrine,” Kirshner writes, drawing a line between the animism of Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion, and its secular echoes in daily life. “Our work is worship.” And so they quietly tend to the unseen, wait — and let it multiply.
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