Wakasa Agate Carving

Impressive but hard to look at, right? Many, many,many, 
thanks to the Met's art gallery for the originals I used in this composite. 
And the inventor of MS Paint. (None of the above artifacts are Japanese, by the way.)

In the dynamic, image above, note the two kanji. These make up the word menō, the Japanese word for agate. For those who can't make heads or tails of them and/or don't want to be bothered heading to a translating site to get a copy, here they are in print: 瑪瑙. 

From sight, I'd say the first one means "king trying to catch his horse", and the second one means "king waiting to flip three burgers on the grill". As I am such a kanji expert, I feel fully justified putting this interpretation forward for further review. ;)

And now a transition paragraph into the subject proper:

In spite of the fact that it doesn't get anywhere near as much publicity as, say, Sri Lanka or Brazil's gem industries, Japan does, in fact, have a toe/foot in the gem world: agates.

Sort of a surprise, right? You never hear about Japan being a source of luxury grade rocks. But yeah, in Fukui Prefecture (or Fukui-ken, kanji like so:  福井県) they've been mining agate and crafting things from the stuff for like two-ish centuries. (The origins may or may not be somewhere in the first 50 years of the 1700s). It's even got official 'traditional craft' status, as of 1976 (or Shōwa 51, for the era inclined.) So you know it's worth reading about, right? ;)

For those who missed this map in my
last post I used in it (whichever 
one it was...) -- voila! Map.

The official name for the ages old tradition of agate carving, unless I've grossly missed the mark, is 若狭めのう細工 -- all that is pronounced "wakasa menō zaiku". (Yeah, the site where I found this phrase used hiragana for menō... I've read that kanji can seem a bit 'heavy', like academic, so my guess is they wanted to look a little more visually accessible. Either that or it's just the normal way to spell it.) It means Wakasa agate work/workmanship. Why not "Fukui-ken menō zaiku"? 

Well, I found that Wakasa is the name for a coastal type province that today is but a part of southern Fukui Prefecture. For a while, it was an international trade stop, and whose importance wasn't to be sneezed at. It  was a source of seafood for the imperial court -- it came to be referred to as miketsukuni (or a miketsukuni province, not entirely sure which), whose kanji, I think, are this: 御食国. The first kanji, I wanna say, is an honorific one, the second one's "food" and third one's "country". Nowadays, this ex-province is called (the) Wakasa region. Um, so, I guess since the industry started in the province, that's what they went with...

But this isn't exactly the end of the agate nomenclature confusion. (At least, I've been confused.) We've got some more specificity to get through. See, there're websites -- including Japan's official tourist site -- that make a point of emphasizing a certain city's connection to this great agate tradition above all others in the region. Can you guess which city? (A hint: politics.)

This city, which was located 'round abouts smack dab-ish in the middle of the Wakasa region, holds the name of the seemingly improbable name of Obama. (Didja get it?) Nothing to do with our previous head of state, the kanji are: 小浜, which mean "small" and "shore".  (You might also see the kanji for "city" added to the end. I've seen this with other cities. Dunno what the nuance/nuances is/are.) 

Now about the agate itself. One source described the deposit(s?) most common color as red. In the pictures I've seen so far, you get a lot of intense red-orange and orange coloration, plus a range of paler versions. And of course, because it's agate, these colors can come in layers of stripes, sometimes in rectangle-y shapes. A few pieces I saw had definitely got some translucency going on. Sort of like the picture below with all the circles that look like a pudgy bee, but not, as this one's Minoan. (Again many thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seriously, if you want awesome -- and public domain photos, at that -- check out their site.) But I also saw at least one giant chunk of agate in process that was more gray than anything else. But I know the secret behind this discrepancy! 

They get agates all nice and vivid by heat treating them (this is also traditional, by the way). Which, if you're looking for the purity of rocks that were just shined up a bit, might feel like a bit of a let down, but still, you gotta admit, they're pretty eye-catching afterwards. 

Anyways, to get 'em all shaped, one tool I saw used in more than one video is the sand and water slurry and a grinding wheel. Beyond that, the secrets of the agate masters carving techniques remains a mystery to me -- for now.

Here, look at this video, which, for all I know, explains things better than I do (It's a little muffled, you might have to turn the volume up):

 Then there's this one video where I saw this one guy use a grinding wheel to polish a magatama he was making, though he wasn't in Wakasa. (A magatama is a bead with all kinds of cultural context. Some are basically like one half a yin-yang symbol. Others are like a cross between that and a macaroni noodle.) See, I'll put it here:

Speaking of videos, there're also a few that show kids doing stuff to agates, one had them etching with razors, while another had them rubbing agates with sand paper. (Shaping them? Polishing them?). Both were at the Miketsukuni Wakasa Obama Food Culture Museum (kanji (and hiragana) thusly: 御食国若狭おばま食文化館. Not entirely sure how to pronounce all of it, and I'm not even gonna try.) It's right across from Obama castle (no presidents involved there either) -- and a tax collector's, and a courthouse for family cases. Hm... Is that terrible or brilliant planning?

References:

Agate -- it's not just a type-o! (See cuz, agate/a gate... Look, I knew what I meant!)

Kawagoe City: Obama City, Fukui Prefecture

Fukui Prefecture: 福井県観光地等の多言語表記ガイドライン（対訳表）

Wakasa Obama Tourism Association Site: Wakasa Agate

伝統工芸 青山スクエア: 若狭めのう細工

OBAMA City Website | English Page: Our town Obama

Kyoto National Museum: Past Exhibitions Illustrated Handscrolls and Wakasa Province September 13, 2016 - October 2, 2016

Japan Heritage: Wakasa Province: A Cultural Heritage Linking the Seat to the ancient Capital: Miketsukuni and Saba-kaido Road: Cultural heritages linking the Japan Sea to Nara and Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan

As my lazy Japanese skills don't allow me to read things that are more complicated than "Kenji is seven years old. He likes cake." I don't know how much information I'm leaving out. This really applies to a significant portion of these references, but here's two I thought I'd point out, to those learning the language. So, yeah. Cheers!


Number one:

若狭工房： 小浜の伝統工芸: 若狭塗－国指定伝統的工芸品（昭和５３年指定）－

And number two:
御食国若狭おばま食文化館: ご利用案内

Oh, and here's where I got the Shōwa date. (He's got era names and dates too, and the transliterations and the kanji. And it's an ac.jp site, which means it's academic and therefore official. Which makes this author happy.) 

Michael Geoffrey Watson マイケル・ジェフリー・ワトソン: Meiji -- Taisho -- Showa -- Heisei

Mizu Yōkan

Consarn it, I could've sworn I did a September post... alright, two posts for October, it is! (Which, incidentally, is squirrel awareness month. Strange but true. )

Behold, three kanji, progressing in complexity until you have to enlarge your screen to read the last one: 水羊羹.  You might see this mysterious word spelled in other, simpler ways, like 水ようかん. The transliteration is, with or without the space, mizu yōkan or mizu  yokan for the macron disinclined/challenged/lazy. Whichever way you spell it (or draw it, I'm not always sure which verb to use), the word only means one thing. Jello. More or less.


Ingredients

But it's not just any kind of jello -- it's vegan jello, with a very "East Asian" flavor of red bean paste (aka anko, which you can draw/spell 餡子).

The gelatin is the magical, sets-at-room-temperature agar-agar, or to use the Japanese name, kanten (whose kanji looks like this: 寒天 -- wait, that looks like "cold heaven"...well, there's something to look into.).

The other ingredient is water... and sugar, depending on the recipe. Looks like adding chestnuts is allowed, but they're not absolutely necessary, and I think that might actually be kuri yokan.

After poured into a pan with corners, chilled (yes, chilled, there is a reason, just keep reading) and set, it's cut into squares or rectangular cuboids/bars (at least that's what I've seen) and looks like this lovely drawing I whipped together in MS Paint:

I actually only managed to get the little dessert pitchfork's angles right on accident. Yeah, the sky's a little big, but oh well. Stare at it long enough and you can start to see the darker shade I used for the edges.


Classification and History


Mizu yōkan is actually a sub-variety of the dessert yōkan or 羊羹 -- its name means "water yōkan '. (It looks like there are two other versions, neri yōkan or 練り羊羹, which uses more anko, and mushi yōkan or 蒸し羊羹. The only specific thing I know about mushi yōkan is that it's steamed.)

It has a history of the "centuries old" variety (yōkan's ancestor was a meat sub from China first eaten in Japan by the country's Zen monk community), but I'll save the details for a general yōkan post, which this one was turning into, before I managed to put a stop to it, unlike this sentence.

There is of course, a seasonal guideline for eating mizu yōkan. You're supposed to eat it when it's summer outside. However, in a recipe video by Ochikeron (which I've put a little below this in the Recipes section), she adds a little to this: in Fukui prefecture, there's a tradition of eating it when the weather's cold.

For those among us (myself included)
who had no idea where it was.

Recipes

Below are some recipe videos that I looked at. The first, from Cooking with Dog, looks unusual and pretty because they used little half-spheres as molds. But the recipe said you need to keep it refrigerated, so's I thought to myself I gotta keep looking. (I wonder if refrigeration might be necessary for any mizu yōkan, but other videos don't mention it so... hmm.)

The second one is from Ochikeron, which is the recipe I wrote down to make sometime.

Here's one from Just One Cookbook. Its doesn't have voiced narration, if you prefer your tutorials with writing. Also, the knife the person uses looks like it was made with the mokume gane technique (which uses several metals to make resulting item look like wood -- kinda cool, right?)

Finally, here's a spectacularly artistic one by decocookie, which also doesn't use spoken narration. It uses edible glitter and fruit rinds to make "fireworks" on top.

For recipes, I went for videos. Among the different ones that popped up on the first page of the YouTube search results, there was a mizu yōkan video that uses bamboo as the mold, making mizu yōkan tubes! (And looking kind of like pralines, but I'm pretty sure you couldn't eat the "shell" and  the inside would taste nothing like the filling). I haven't looked at it, so you'll just have to go see them for yourself. ;)

Of course, if you want something  super "official", there's the recipe from the website for Yamaguchi Prefecture (clicky). It calls for topping the mizu yōkan with arare mochi (aka toasted mochi), which I only heard of after finding that recipe. (Hurray for research adventures!)

Cooking Tips
Amongst the various works discovered while rushing around on the 1st to get a post put together, there is one in particular that I wish to point out. The title? Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification. Yeah, science cooking! Other than a recipe for both mizu yōkan and anko, it had some tips (well, the anko recipe was a tip, actually...) Here are the tips it had:

First, you might be tempted to go outside the rules a bit and add your sugar first, but don't! Your kanten won't dissolve then, and you'll never get your red bean jello to set.

Another caveat (gasp!): make sure you have your mizu yōkan solidify in someplace very cool (aka the refrigerator or outside, if you're in Fukui Prefecture ;) ). If you don't you'll get anko on the bottom and kanten on the top. (That actually sounds kind of neat to me, though I don't know what would happen when you tried to serve it.)

A third tip, which I was going to mention myself, if no one else did (but probably everyone does) was this: kanten comes in more than one form. Get the powder form, because if you get, say, the stick form, you're gonna need to soak it first. I don't even know what you need to do if you get the thread form.

It's titled,
"Well, I Thought I'd At Least Try It -- You Want It?".

References:
Fellow dessert-ologists, I give you my sources!

"Cooking Innovations: Using Hydrocolloids for Thickening, Gelling, and Emulsification"; Amos Nussinovitch, Madoka Hirashima"; 2014

"Shunju: New Japanese Cuisine"; 2006

"1000 + Indigenous Tasty Cuisine of Twenty-three Asian Countries with Food for Thought (Purchase this Book and Help Feed Hungry Children!)"; Dr. Lawrence Wheeler, Dr Beatrice Batnag Donofrio; 2009

"和英日本の文化・観光・歴史辞典 A Japanese English Dictionary of Culture, Tourism and History of Japan"; 山口百々男, Steven Bates; 2010

"Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan"; Eric Rath; 2010

All gone!