Not Quite Japanese : The Cuisine of These Islands Is Bold, Earthy and in Some Ways Closer to China than Japan

Picking my way over the bumpy dirt road behind the Sakae market, the melancholy strains of a shamisen, barely audible above the hubbub of voices, greet me as I duck under the curtain and slide open the door of the bar/restaurant Urizun.

The regulars at the bar scoot over to make room for me on my first night back in Naha. Our host and friend, Tsuchiya Saneyuki, welcomes me back and introduces me to a few people I haven’t met before. He places in front of me a small, heavy cup of dark brown earthenware from a local kiln, its unglazed surface glossed here and there with melted ash.

The clear, strong, brisk flavor of the colorless liquid within has none of the sweetness of sake . It perfectly complements the briny, slightly bitter taste of ajike no wata, the innards of a large bivalve, simply dressed with vinegar. Distilled from fragrant Thai rice, awamori is closer to the shochu distilled liquor of Japan’s Kyushu island. These bold flavors embody the essence of Okinawa.

That there is indeed an Okinawan cuisine, different from that of Japan, is plain to anyone who has spent any time in those wind-swept islands of blazing colors and clear light. Pork in all its permutations and the conspicuous absence of fish from the formal meal; an emphasis on fresh vegetables, often enriched with pork; accents of garlic and the peppery spice piipaachi, and the copious use of konbu seaweed arouse the palate with flavors alien to the narrow range of Japanese food. Like the cuisines of southern China, salt rather than soy sauce brings out the essence.

Before Japan forcibly annexed it in 1879, Okinawa was an independent kingdom, known to the Japanese as Ryukyu. If anything, the influence of the south Chinese province of Fujian, where Okinawan government emissaries landed in the heyday of Ryukyu trade, dominates that of Japan. The tea served with local sweets is usually jasmine, brought to Okinawa from Fujian after annexation. In 1972, Okinawa once again became a prefecture of Japan, as it was from the late 19th Century until the final stage of World War II.

The Ryukyus also possess a distinctive culture strong enough to have survived submission to China and subjugation by Japan, the annual devastation of typhoons, and the near-total destruction of their material culture by both American and Japanese armed forces during World War II (in which one-third of the civilian population died) followed by almost three decades of American military occupation. The latter left an unfortunate heritage of a persistent penchant for Spam and Coca-Cola.

But food is one aspect of the local culture that survived the past century more nearly intact than many of the arts, since it is created anew many times a day with simple techniques and readily available, inexpensive ingredients. Okinawan cuisine, reflecting at the same time the people who make and enjoy it and the land that produces it, seems an indestructible part of Okinawan identity.

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The sprawling public market in the middle of downtown Naha is not only the belly but the heart of the city. The main entrance, at the conjunction of the main drag, Kokusai-dori, and Heiwa-dori, leads down a gentle slope into an arcaded warren of lanes lined with stalls, almost all of them manned by women. Many of these are the same women--some now in their seventies and eighties--who brought their own produce here in the years following the war, to sell and to buy on the black market to feed their families. The market has grown up around them.

Shopping in the early morning is not an Okinawan custom, and it isn’t until late morning that the market really bustles with women shopping and selling.

Piles of glowing green vegetables, some familiar, some strange, seem to burst from the narrow stalls-- hechima (in Okinawan, naberaa, the same as the familiar luffah), a green gourd heavy with water; goya, a bitter gourd covered with warts; green papayas; smooth round winter melons, and a wealth of leafy greens--including nigana, a bitter green resembling dandelion greens, and fuchiba, known in mainland Japan as yomogi (in English as mugwort), where it’s mainly used to flavor sweets.

Others have clearly defined medicinal functions, like the glossy deep purple leaves of handama , with a deliciously nutty flavor, good for cleaning out your system. Concealed beneath their scruffy skins, the violet-tinged potato (called ta-umu , “wet-field potato,” in Okinawa) and the crimson-skinned murasaki-umu have been credited with saving the people of these islands from starvation. Imported from China at the beginning of the 17th Century, they supplanted millet and other grains as the staple food of the common people. Only the aristocracy and samurai classes ate rice. It wasn’t until after World War II that most people in Okinawa began to eat rice regularly.

The cool, dark shops within the covered arcade specialize in dried goods and offer many grades and varieties of konbu (kelp). The Okinawan appetite for konbu goes back at least as far as the 18th Century, when ships from Hokkaido sold the leathery dried seaweed in exchange for Ryukyuan sugar. Other seaweeds, the soft, thread-like aasaa and slippery strands of mozuku, are also favorites, rich in minerals and apparently playing a role in reducing cholesterol--important in this pork-rich cuisine. Glistening black water-snakes (dried) lie in coils or hang from the eaves of the market building. White ginger flowers in front of a nearby florist perfume the alleys. Stalls of spices, herbs, roots and packaged teas highlight the strong association here, as in China, between food and medicine.

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Tsuchiya meets me in the fish market. The fishes’ sleek, glistening bodies are as dazzling as the coral reefs where they swam until a few hours ago. Spotted scarlet miibai (a kind of white fish); another miibai , brown with leopard spots; gray irabucha (also a white-fleshed fish), turquoise about the gills, and yellow-black-and-white-striped flatfish rest on snowy beds of ice. Something nameless, opal and turquoise with big teeth, grins at us. Yellow and green crabs, their claws bound with blue vinyl ribbon, bubble helplessly on crushed ice; in a large tank, six different types of prawns move lazily; lobsters decorated with unimaginable rainbows wriggle amethyst antennae.

In spite of this brilliant array of the sea’s wealth, fish is not considered part of a formal Okinawan meal except in the highly processed and refined form of kamaboko (usually translated “fish paste” or “fish cake”). I ask my guide how this could be.

“People who went to sea were considered lazy,” he begins in Japanese. They were supposed to be tilling the fields. “The common people must have eaten fish, but they probably did it in secret . . . “ Local officials discouraged the islanders from fishing for their own subsistence, preferring to keep them working to produce goods that would enrich the government.

The meat market blazes with bare light bulbs suspended over piles and piles of fresh pink pork, presided over by spirited and sexy women with Amazonian arms. Okinawans use every last bit of the pig--from unctuous chunks of fresh bacon, generously layered with fat, cartilaginous ears, snout and face, feet, rich innards and blood. A liberal use of lard enriches and marries the flavors of many vegetables.

Upstairs on the second floor of the meat market, the Oyako Shokudo (parent-child luncheonette) is famous for its nakami-jiru , a rich soup made from chitterlings (pig’s intestines), served only on Saturdays. By noon the place is buzzing. Every day mother and daughter prepare only one or two set lunches, real home cooking. Today it’s soki-jiru , a rich broth made from meaty pork ribs, lightly flavored with miso bean paste, crowned with a mound of greens and served with a bowl of rice. Tomorrow’s lunch? “I won’t know until I see tomorrow’s vegetables,” says the silver-toothed lady behind the counter.

Dessert following an Okinawan meal is likely to be confined to fresh fruit, but throughout the day sweets are offered whenever tea is served. The sweets made in the sleek Japanese-style shop, Jahana, called kippan and togazuke, are firmly based in the court tradition. The complementary flavors of kippan --a dense, bittersweet nugget made from the white part of the peel of mandarin oranges, glazed with sugar--and togazuke-- candied winter melon with an indefinable, delicate flavor, cooked in sugar until meltingly tender, hardening on the outside to a fragile crystalline shell--are the perfect foil for green Japanese tea or the more delicate types of Chinese tea. Four generations ago, Jahana’s ancestors were Chinese immigrants in the Kume district of the city. Before the war there were three other such confectioneries. Now only Jahana remains.

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Urizun is one of those very rare places that combines wonderful food, sincere and unmistakable warmth and local color. Craftspeople and artists, real estate agents, teachers, musicians, businessmen, photographers, doctors, naturalists and other representatives of the diverse Okinawan society gather nightly to share the easy familiarity of the place and his or her preferred style of awamori. The finest is kosu, “aged liquor,” stored in earthy brown ceramic vats for up to 30 years, served in thimble-size cups.

The menu, a marriage of the cuisine developed at the royal Ryukyu court and the food of the common people (clear distinctions are lost in the haze of history), maintains a fine balance between the richness of pork, garlic and potatoes, and the lightness of seaweed, fish, tofu and vegetables. The light touch is that of Tsuchiya Keiko, who comes in every day from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. to do the hardest part of the preparation, oversee the arrival of groceries and generally keep things in order (in addition to keeping house and taking care of the children). As I help her stir the mashed potatoes in the narrow kitchen one morning, she asks me, “Can’t you make my husband come in and give me a hand with the cooking? Not every day--but once in a while?”

A meal at Urizun might include some or all of the following traditional dishes. Tofuyo is an intensely flavored little cube of tofu that has been fermented for at least six months with rice; salty and slightly sharp like aged cheese, its flavor becomes smoother and richer with time, complementing that of awamori perfectly. Sunui, a gelatinous seaweed known as mozuku in mainland Japan, is dressed with vinegar and here enlivened (on request in deference to tame palates) by a dab of grated garlic. Mimigaa sashimi is thin slices of pigs’ ears, blanched and dressed with vinegar and soy sauce, their crunchy texture as important (if not more so) than the delicate and elusive flavor.

More substantial dishes include kuubu irichii, stir-fried, finely julienned konbu (kelp) seaweed, flavored with bits of pork and fishcake ( kamaboko ); duruwakashii, unctuous mashed potatoes made from ta-umu sauteed in a bit of oil with their green stems, bits of pork, kamaboko and shiitake mushrooms; and raaftei, fresh bacon, alternating layers of succulent meat and rich fat, cut into large chunks and braised with miso (fermented bean paste) and vegetables until meltingly tender.

My last night in Naha, a classic Okinawan specialty is on the menu: ika sumijiru , a wonderfully fragrant and intense soup of squid and its ink. The steaming opaque black liquid (based on a hearty pork stock), with snowy pieces of squid, daikon and the slightly bitter green leaves of nigana afloat in a red lacquer bowl are a shock to the eye, but with a reassuring velvety consistency and deliciously complex flavor. Okinawan food should be enjoyed in its natural habitat, made with local ingredients, served on robust Okinawan pottery or elegant lacquer, to the sounds of the joyous and mournful sanshin (ancestor of Japan’s stringed shamisen ). In a word, the food that embodies Okinawa’s culture should be relished in all the complexities of Okinawa itself.

GUIDEBOOK

Naha Nosh

Getting there: From LAX, fly nonstop to Narita airport near Tokyo on Singapore, All Nippon, Northwest, Japan Airlines, United, Korean and Varig; round-trip, advance-purchase fares start at about $910. Transfer to Haneda airport in Tokyo and fly nonstop on Japan Airlines, Japan Air Systems and All Nippon to Naha, Okinawa; about $560 round trip.

Where to eat: Jahana, Matsuo 1-5-14, Naha, Okinawa; telephone locally 867-3687.

Oyako Shokudo (parent-child luncheonette), Kosetsu Ichiba, Heiwa-dori, Naha, Okinawa (no telephone available).

Urizun, Asato 388-5, Naha, Okinawa; tel. 885-2178; large parties should call for reservations; Japanese only spoken.