A staple ingredient in Japanese cuisine, bamboo is commonly used in spring dishes and made into cutlery and tableware. Peter Weld travels to Kyoto and discovers how the plant is harvested and used.
Bamboo grows all around the world, in more than 1,000 varieties, from Russia’s Sakhalin island to southern Argentina. Fast-growing and tough, it has been used for millennia by people everywhere, both as a building material and for a wide range of tools and implements, but probably nobody has developed as many uses for it - and as deep an affection for it - as the Japanese have. And nowhere is the devotion to Japanese bamboo stronger than in Kyoto.
The city of Kyoto was the home of the emperor for over 1,000 years, from the late 8th century to the mid-19th, and a visitor to the city’s innumerable historical sites still sees plenty of bamboo. In Zen gardens it drips water into stone basins. It forms the ribs of the paper umbrellas and fans carried through the streets by kimono-clad women. At tea ceremonies it’s used for whisks and scoops. It’s woven into intricate baskets.
The city of Kyoto was the home of the emperor for over 1,000 years, from the late 8th century to the mid-19th, and a visitor to the city’s innumerable historical sites still sees plenty of bamboo. In Zen gardens it drips water into stone basins. It forms the ribs of the paper umbrellas and fans carried through the streets by kimono-clad women. At tea ceremonies it’s used for whisks and scoops. It’s woven into intricate baskets.
A WOVEN CRAFT
Fortunately, there are still places where bamboo can be appreciated in peace. One of them is Rakusai Bamboo Park, south of Sagano, straddling the border between Kyoto and the adjacent city of Mukō. The visitor centre here has samples of bamboo that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, including flat and square bamboo (made by placing moulds above the shoots as they first emerge from the ground; as they grow taller, they take the shapes of these moulds). There’s tortoiseshell bamboo, sesame bamboo, tiger bamboo, and more.
But it’s not just a museum of cut, preserved samples; outside the visitor centre, you can see most of these varieties growing on the park’s grounds. Underground there are barriers to keep the root systems of the different species from intermingling, so you can walk down quiet stone paths with one kind of bamboo growing on your left and an entirely different kind on your right. Not widely known among foreign visitors, the park is nonetheless famous enough among locals that on weekends you can almost count on seeing couples there in their ceremonial finery - kimono for the women with hakama for the men - posing for wedding photos amidst the bamboo. It’s a lovely sight, and the couples are usually very happy if a tourist asks to photograph them as well.
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Rakusai Bamboo Park sits on a long ridge, and as in Sagano, it has a few narrow roads, suitable for both driving - but carefully! - and strolling. Peek behind the fences which line these roads and you’ll see that the groves are immaculately tended. To get high quality bamboo, you can’t just drive out into the countryside, find a grove, and start cutting; you need to maintain your grove with the utmost care, keeping the trunks separated by a reasonable distance and weeding out other plant species that might crop up. There’s a lot of physical labour involved - much more than you would imagine when you look at a delicate bamboo tea scoop or a pair of chopsticks.
BEAUTIFUL VESSELS
Tea scoops and chopsticks are just two of the products created by the artisans of Takano Chikkō (www.takano-bamboo.jp/english), a company in the city adjoining Mukō to the south, Nagaokakyō. Takano Chikkō is located in an industrial area, sandwiched between an elevated expressway and the Shinkansen tracks. From the outside you wouldn’t be able to guess what kind of company it is - that is, until you spot one of its workers doing aburatori, the procedure that removes an outer layer of oil from the raw bamboo, and another sawing four-metre segments into more manageable lengths.
Inside there’s an intriguing mix of old and new: high-tech machines with digital control panels in one room, cutting slices so thin that the company’s employees have their business cards printed on bamboo, not paper. In another room a worker applies lacquer to spoons using the same tools and techniques that have been around for centuries.
Several of the company’s 26 employees are graduates of Kyoto College of Traditional Arts, and they work with the keen focus and incredible attention to detail that is the hallmark of Japanese craftsmen. Tōko Ebina is one of them. In a small, climate-controlled room, she holds a piece of sesame bamboo in her left hand, centimetres from her face, and uses lacquer to paint an intricate design onto it with her right hand. Before the lacquer can dry, she quickly sprinkles powdered gold onto it to create a relief, an art form known as maki-e which dates back a thousand years to the Heian Era.
Takano Chikkō’s products cover a vast spectrum, from bookmarks to train stations. (In 2004, the company was responsible for redesigning the interior of Keifuku Arashiyama Station in western Kyoto, a project that required roughly 3,000 pieces of bamboo.) Simpler items can be purchased at various locations around the city, including the visitor centre at Rakusai Bamboo Park, but to see some of their finest products, head for Takamura (www.takano-bamboo.kyoto/takamura), a shop in Kyoto’s upscale Gion district. Even if you don’t practice tea ceremony or flower-arranging, you’re likely to be sorely tempted by the beautiful cups, tea containers, and vases for sale there.
SAVOUR THE ART FORM
A short drive west of Takano Chikkō’s headquarters, right next to the historic Shintō shrine known as Nagaoka Tenmangū, stands Kinsuitei, a restaurant founded in 1881. It’s an elegant establishment whose customers include celebrities and statesmen, and the cuisine that it serves is refined all year round, but from the end of March to the end of May, it specialises in takenoko, or bamboo shoots.
Hisashi Ikeda, the restaurant’s senior managing director, demonstrates how to hunt takenoko: donning gloves and picking up a special, wooden-handled, long-bladed tool, a horiguwa, he heads out through Kinsuitei’s Japanese-style gardens to a nearby bamboo grove and starts carefully scanning the ground. He’s looking for the fine cracks in the dirt which indicate that a bamboo shoot is pushing up from below.
Soon he’s brushing away the topmost layer of dirt to reveal the tip of a medium-sized shoot. (The biggest ones can weigh as much as four kilograms.) There’s no time to lose; in another day or two, it will already have sprouted above ground, still edible but not good enough for as classy a restaurant as Kinsuitei. With a skill born of years of practice, he inserts the tip of the horiguwa in just the right spot and then starts walking in circles around the shoot, very slowly and gently prying it out of the ground.
Ikeda has takenoko in his genes, for Kinsuitei’s founder was his great-great grandfather, Rinkichi, and he has always known that some day he would become the fifth-generation president of the family business. (The current president, Takashi Ikeda, is his father.) From the grove he leads his visitors back to the restaurant’s kitchen to watch as the evening’s dinner is prepared. The shoot he has just dug up can’t be served yet; bamboo shoots contain egumi, which has to be boiled out of them for about two hours. “It’s not a poison, as some people think,” says Ikeda, “but it certainly doesn’t taste good.” His visitors watch as one of the chefs expertly prepares different shoots. On a busy day, the restaurant goes through some 150 large shoots and perhaps 300 smaller ones, all dug up in Nagaokakyō and Kyoto.
“Large takenoko are better suited to some dishes and smaller ones to others,” he explains. “For example, sashimi is best made with smaller shoots, but big ones are better for jikitake, which is our signature dish.” Soon his visitors are seated in one of the restaurant’s 20 little tatami-floored, thatch-roofed gazebos, each one perched on pilings at the edge of a carp-filled pond. They watch appreciatively as a set meal called Takenoko Zukushi is served. It arrives course after course - sushi, grilled bamboo, steamed bamboo, tempura, soup, and more - and takenoko plays either a starring role or a supporting role in nearly every one of them. Because this is Japan, the appearance of each dish is considered almost as important as its taste, and neither disappoints; it’s like being served a dozen little works of delectable art. It’s a great end to a fascinating day, a glimpse at a side of Kyoto that few foreign visitors take the time to see - a peek behind the bamboo curtain.