Japes with the Japanese: An Irishman’s Diary about sake and Swift

I embarked on a voyage into darkest south county Dublin the other night, on a potentially dangerous mission. It involved first a bike trip to St Stephen’s Green, then a tram journey to the edge of the known Luas line (well, Carrickmines). After that came a long trek on foot through the mansions of Foxrock where the exotic smell of old money hung in the night air.

Finally, just beyond the brooding hedges of Samuel Beckett’s childhood home, I reached my destination, the Japanese ambassador’s residence where the riskiest part of my mission began.

It was, in short, a sake-tasting reception, involving a range of Japan’s finest rice wines, in apparently unlimited supply. There was food too, of course, including steamed Irish mussels. But the mussels were steamed in sake, naturally.

There was no getting way from it, if you were a columnist who takes his research seriously.

So while sipping all the brands on offer and comparing the interplay of each with the mussels, the smoked salmon, chicken yakitori, etc, I also reminded myself of some cautionary drinking tales.

The most relevant was one involving Shane McGowan and The Pogues.   That band had many fraught experiences in their heyday but it was a 1991 tour of Japan, and an event described only as "the sake incident", that caused their break-up.

My other restraining influence was umami. Pronounced "you-mammy", it has a particular resonance in Irish ears, which itself discourages misbehaviour. And although the maternal implication is linguistic accident, it's not inapt, since umami refers to the deliciousness of food and now officially considered a "fifth taste", alongside the traditional four of sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

Like the Orient itself, umami was long a mystery to Europe. The great French chef, Auguste Escoffier, created it regularly in the late 1800s without knowing where it came from. It wasn't until 1908 that a chemistry professor at Tokyo University tracked it to particular sources.

Breast milk

Many people’s first encounter with it is via breast milk, apparently. But your most recent experience is more likely to have been via Parmesan cheese, in combination with pasta sauce.

In Japanese cuisine, umami is said to be the thing that stops people overindulging since after a certain point, the lingering taste is enough. Good sake has it too, they say. And based on how well I behaved the other tonight, it must work.

I mentioned Gulliver's Travels here earlier in the week, as an avowed influence on the TV series Star Trek, which also concerns an epic journey into imaginary worlds. But among the many fictitious places Gulliver visits, as I had forgotten until the embassy's Mr Yamada reminded me, there is one real country, Japan.

It features at the end of the book, briefly, and it’s unusual for other reasons too.

One is that it presents a benign image of the country, at a time – the 1720s – when it was viewed with suspicion. This is doubly unusual because, through Gulliver, Swift introduces readers to another Japanese concept, fumi-e, which should have offended an Anglican like him.

Fumi-e was a test whereby the religious authorities of Japan, where Christianity was then banned, required suspected believers to prove innocence by trampling on a holy image. But typically, Swift does not hold this against the Japanese, who he does not expect to be Christians. His real targets are the dastardly Dutch, then trading with Japan (where the British were excluded). To this end, after having Gulliver pose as a "Hollander", he then has him conscientiously trying to avoid the test.

This, in fact, was among the details Swift got wrong.

Fumi-e was not applied to foreigners, it was for suspected native converts. Hence the 1966 novel Silence, the masterpiece of Shusaku Endo, himself Catholic, which concerns the tests's use against Japan's 17th-century Christians.

But Swift’s joke is that, unlike Gulliver, the real Dutch will do whatever it takes to make profits. Thus his hero immediately attracts suspicion from the hosts as the first alleged Hollander they have seen exercising religious scruples.

The satire is of its time, an era of fierce Anglo-Dutch rivalry. This also explains the long list of derogatory terms that survive in English involving the D-word.  They include “Dutch treat”, “Dutch gold”, and “Dutch nightingales” (ie frogs). They also include that thing you get if you disobey umami and overdo it with the rice wine, “Dutch courage”.