Wow – long time no post…
After a grueling week I had a pretty relaxing weekend. On Saturday I had some beach time all to myself out at the little shrine that I like to visit in Okubo. It is one of my favorite spots in Japan, just because of the (relative) isolation.
Sunday I went out with Kuniko’s dad to do some wakame fishing. I’m not a huge seaweed fan, but it is one of those Japanese essential ingredients that shows up in everything. I’ve never dreamed of one day harvesting wakame myself, but Kuniko’s dad offered up the chance and I jumped on it.
I pulled on my faithful 2-size-too-small rubber boots and we drove together to where his friend’s boat was docked, right near Futami. The guy was waiting for us in a little boat about the size of a small pickup truck, and we jumped on and shipped out. The owner of the boat was a little shy but he answered my questions and smiled a lot. I had visions of going out on the sea, but he instead stayed inside a harbor area where there were lots of good clusters of wakame.
The fishing was remarkably easy. He slowed the boat to a crawl, and then threw a stainless steel claw over the side. The claw had a chain attached at one end, and then a rope with a float attached at the other. The float told him where the claw was relative to the boat, and after letting it drag just above the ground he pulled it up, full of wakame. He dumped it out onto the floor of the boat, and then threw the claw in again. Our job was to process the wakame and put it into bags to take home later.
The processing was easy – just cut off the roots the may have been pulled up along with it (sometimes with crabs, shells and fish still tangled up in there) and then cut the best pieces out for ourselves and dump the rest back in the water. There was lots of lime green algae that looked like green cellophane – that was considered low grade stuff so we threw a lot of that back. The captain of the boat just watched as we hacked away, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t do a perfect job, but he let us go at it without much advice.
It was a tiny boat, and half the time I was afraid of falling in. You had to lean way over to hack up the wakame, and just one wrong shift and you could end up in the water. There were no life vests, safety rails, or any other apparent precautions against this. Just relying on good old common sense.
Near the end of the trip Kuniko’s dad was feeling a little nauseous. Luckily we got back before he felt really bad. We threw four big bags of wakame into the back of the truck and he took me home. I took the smallest bag with me – we can’t exactly string out lots of wakame to dry where we live – and said goodbye and thank you to Kuniko’s dad. I think we both enjoyed the experience.
I stopped in at the flower shop before going upstairs and gave them about a quarter of the wakame, and then went up and spent a couple of hours cutting and cleaning the wakame – it took a long time to get it ready to go. Over the next few days we’ll try to figure out interesting ways to eat it.
