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Ochazuke | |
 Alex Herbach |
Everyone’s holiday presents have subtext. If they didn’t, nobody would stand around comparing them: Janie’s new Blackberry means she can talk to all her friends with her thumbs; Jacob’s sweet Blu-Ray player means he can see the pores in Morpheus’ face whenever he watches “The Matrix.” Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Festivus, everyone likes to talk about their presents almost as much as opening them.
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Janie: What did you get for Hanukkah, Alex? I take no small measure of satisfaction in these exchanges. Since I celebrate both holidays, can’t identify—in the traditional sense of the word—with either; I would have felt like a hypocrite. How can I sing carols and eat chestnuts under the mistletoe while thinking about my Jewish friends eating latkes and playing dreidl? For that matter, how can I play with a top while thinking about my Gentile friends eating delicious ham and sipping cider? So I find satisfaction in my family’s special traditions, our little idiosyncrasies that make us smile and others wince. I remember when I first realized my holiday celebrations were a little different. Sometime in middle school, the word “portmanteau” showed up on one of our spelling lists. Everyone was so excited—all these words they once knew only as terms now had a category; the way, I’m sure, Eskimos must feel when they learn the word “snow.” I just shrugged, then paused as I realized: the entire month of December is a portmanteau for my family. I’m a bonafide JewBu, celebrator of Chrismakkah, during which, in a particularly sacrilegious flourish, I eat ham with my latkes and sour cream—call them hamkes. And of course, there were those forkchops. My mother thought they were so cute. But it could be worse. I could have been celebrating Hanukkah with my grandparents. “My parents didn’t believe in Hanukkah gelt (gifts); that was an assimilation thing,” said my dad during a recent phone conversation. “Maybe I would get a quarter.” So getting sorry Hanukkah presents is traditional after all! That’s an unfair way to put it. I have gotten some incredible, very generous Hanukkah and Christmas presents in my lifetime. It’s just much more interesting when your gifts are more…interesting. And trust me, when my mom’s family gets together for Christmas Eve gift exchanges, “interesting” would barely be a euphemism. The Sakamoto clan is entirely Buddhist—save for my Mormon Aunt Kazue and her family—so Christmas is less emphatic than the traditional version. Everyone is assigned one relative out of a hat for whom you buy a gift. There is no “one present” rule however, and most get at least two gifts under the tree. But the real Sakamoto tradition, the reason we fly in from out of state every year with our cameras, are the gag gifts. Never modest, the only limit in buying a good gag gift is the imagination. My personal list includes a box of “cowboy hats,” also known as toilet seat covers, a decaying cake from the previous July 4, various Barbie dolls, and a protective suit made out of bubble wrap (earlier in the year, I backed my car into our garage door before opening it. No comment.) From penis-shaped pasta (they enlarge when you cook them!) to hand-blown bongs (my aunt thought it was a vase), nothing is off limits; especially when the recipient was my late Uncle Ted. Before we discuss his gifts, I should share a little about Tetsuya. Most Japanese American families have a man exactly like Tetsuya: strong, stoic, reserved, with a shouting voice—used when only absolutely necessary—that could melt titanium. They are usually born and educated in Japan, so when they speak, regardless of how long they have been in the States, it is in some gruff, mumbled nihonglish that only their wives can understand. My uncle was also very competitive, quietly proud in victory, screaming bakatare! at the top of his lungs in failure. This was perhaps a skill he picked up during World War II when he built kamikaze planes for the Japanese Army. There was a joke around the hangar about my uncle’s engineering abilities: he built the planes so poorly that they kept coming back. (Never forget that humor is universal.) After the war, his engineering skills did manage to land him a job at Boeing, where he helped develop, among other things, the cockpit of the 747. When you go to visit the captain during your next flight, just remember, you’re entering the house that Tetsuya built. But by 1970 my uncle, who suffered from retinitis pigmentosa, found his eyesight becoming progressively worse. By 1980, he was blind. He adjusted to it better than I ever could. He cooked and cleaned for himself every day; he even still tended to his garden. Instead of cursing at his Washington State Cougars—his alma mater—on the television, he called them idiots through his radio receiver. I never once saw him down on himself, not ever. But even so, that didn’t stop his nieces and nephews from trying to cheer him up every Christmas with gag gifts. His list of gifts reads like the contents of a fraternity’s storage closet: a fishing cap with a removable bikini top, a penis-shaped sake pourer, a cooking apron shaped like a corset with fake breasts, and of course, the tie-on butt cheeks (think butt chaps minus the chaps.) If you’ve never seen a blind man wearing fake butt cheeks pour sake from a penis, you’ve obviously never spent Christmas Eve with the Sakamotos. And if your celebration lacks all of those elements, then you may want to rethink your traditions. No discussion about Japanese holiday traditions can end without oshogatsu, the New Year’s feast. But like everything else in my family, our celebration is a little different. If one were to enter my aunt’s kitchen in the days leading up to New Year’s, the anxious, violent directions emanating from it would not come from a gruff, stoic Nisei, but from a tall, excitable Lithuanian Jew. That would be my father, who for over a decade has been cooking and overseeing the lengthy Oshogatsu menu. It wasn’t always like this. My Uncle Ted used to be the boss, but when he started going blind he realized that he would need to find a replacement—rather, train one. He found a more than willing apprentice in my father, who was already interested in Japanese cooking and, after showing my uncle he was serious about learning, was allowed be my uncle’s assistant. In a Japanese restaurant, apprentices must wash the floor for four years before getting their first vegetable knife, which they use for the next several years to cut vegetables, nothing else. There is even a special verb tense that is used. Something like “wash the dishes” sounds more like “I will give you the honor of washing the dishes” in a professional kitchen. It wasn’t quite like this for my dad, but it was close. “During those years I did some things to earn his confidence. [Ted] always made the dashi; so one year I said, ‘let me make some niban dashi (a twice-refined fish broth).’ I knew he knew what niban dashi was, but he never made it before. And he kind of smiled like, ‘I remember that.’” Over the course of 15 years, my uncle gradually let up the rein and handed his kitchen over to my father, who still does all the cooking—even the kuromame (see recipe below). I wouldn’t need to stand on a soap box to see the parallels between myself and my father cooking New Year’s dinner: one half of my culture and heritage embracing the other. Though I take immense pride in my heritage, it is not the culture for culture’s sake that impresses me about this story, but the sense of family. It took some time, but the transition was relatively seamless between my mother’s family’s traditions and my father’s. There was no sense of obligation, or interracial rancor. It was just the right thing to do. It was family. Sure, our traditions are a little off kilter. Where some choose neckties, we choose tie-on butt cheeks—tomata-tomahto. Sure, some would have certain descriptors for our family that might start with “D” and rhyme with shmisfunctional. But it’s family and, anthropologically speaking, it’s all the same. The holidays are about one thing. Not ham, mistletoe, dreidl, or even genital macaroni. It’s about family. It’s not for everyone, but it’s all I know. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Kuromame (Simmered Black Beans)
Rinse kuromame with water and drain. Boil 1 quart of water with sugar, soy sauce, salt, baking soda, and the wrapped rusty nails together for 5 minutes, remove from the heat and add the kuromame. Soak overnight. The next morning, bring kuromame to boil over medium-high heat. When it starts to simmer, carefully skim foam from surface. Add 1/2 cup cold water and carefully skim foam again as it starts to simmer again. Repeat once more with another 1/2 cup of cold water (skim foam again). Cover with a drop lid that rests directly on the kuromame. If you don’t have a drop lid, cut a piece of aluminum foil to fit the pan (1/2 inch smaller diameter than pan) and cut a small hole in the center, placing alumium foil disc directly on the kuromame. Cook on very, very low heat for 7-8 hours. Add a little hot water if necessary to keep beans wet, but liquid should cook down to the level of the beans and be very syrupy. Take off heat and let beans sit at room temperature for one day. Rinse and dry pine needles. Thread three beans on a pair of needles, two on one and one on the other (“ABA”). Place threaded beans on red lacquer plate and dust with edible gold flakes. “Mame” means “health” as well as “bean,” which is why we eat them on New Years and why we never stint in their preparation. To do so would be asking for trouble in the coming year.
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