Rice, Noodle, Fish (32 page)

Not everyone is playing the right way, though, according to Soga. He says that too many Japanese wineries blindly imitate California and France without considering the soil, the conditions, or the type of food that will be served with their wines. “We should be making wines to pair with Japanese food, and umami and dark, intense wines don't pair well.”

Instead, Soga has embraced natural wines, a lighter, more esoteric style better suited to Japanese terrain and Japanese palates. He experiments with up to a hundred different types of wild yeasts, prefers long periods of fermentation, and above all wants his wines to express the earth they come from. “I want you to be able to taste Hokkaido in every bottle,” he says.

As we sit talking and tasting in his bodega, taking in the damp funk of deep fermentation, it's easy to see what he means. Soga, like most of the serious terroir evangelists, thinks of wine as more art than science, a craft that
requires soul and touch and deep-seated dedication. His mind is filled with big ideas about wine, and he reaches constantly for metaphors and analogies to drive his points home. In the first hour we meet, he likens wine to burgers, pickles, seaweed, miso, onion rings, bowls of ramen. “If you use the best seaweed in your
tonkotsu
broth, you'll never taste it because
tonkotsu
is so intense. But with
shio
ramen, you taste every ingredient. I like my wine like
shio
ramen.”

He wants to be sure I understand that Domaine Takahiko is not a company and he is not a businessman. I take the bait and ask him how many people he employs. Soga brings his two hands together to make a large zero.

“If I was going to do it, I wanted to be a part of every step of the process.” He tends to the wines, picks the grapes, smashes, inoculates, ferments, ages, and bottles them. He even designs the labels for everything he produces. It's hard to imagine Soga gets a lot of shut-eye, but this level of dedication is not without its rewards: everything he makes sells out months before it's ready to drink, making him the island's cult winemaker of choice.

“If you're a
shokunin
, Hokkaido is a good place to be.”

Saito Narumitsu would probably agree. He dedicates his life to making small batches of high-quality cheeses, which he sells out of a small wooden stand on the side of a two-lane highway between Niseko and Otaru. He learned the craft during a five-year apprenticeship at Kyodo Gakusha, one of Hokkaido's most famous cheese producers, which operates as an incubator for the island's rapidly expanding cheese culture.

In 2007 he opened Tokari Ranch, a business he runs with his wife, whom he met studying cheese at Kyodo, and his brother, who raises the cows.

Like many of Hokkaido's young entrepreneurs, Saito isn't from the island; he moved from Niigata a dozen years ago, when life stalled on Honshu and he saw an opportunity to try something new.
“In Honshu, a hundred years is nothing. But here we have a much shorter history, so instead of tradition, we have room to develop our own culture.”

There is one Hokkaido tradition, though, that he does follow. “This was Ainu land a thousand years ago, and we wanted to respect that.” He honors the Ainu roots in the names of his creations. Retara, which means “white” in Ainu, is a soft, fresh cheese similar to a ricotta or a fromage blanc. Another—a firm, nutty cheese with a grassy finish—has a name that means “waking of the springtime.”

My Ainu is rusty, so I can't help but refer to each cheese by its apparent European inspiration—Gruyère, Camembert, scamorza—much to Saito's (understandable) consternation.

“Sure, there are strong French, Italian, and American influences, but the ingredients are from Hokkaido and we are from Hokkaido, so this is Hokkaido cheese. It's not world-class, not yet, but our cheese is getting better every year. With time, we will get there.”

Which makes his choice of names for his farm all the more fitting: Takara is Ainu for “growing your dream.”

If Hokkaido's cheese and wine industries are still fermenting, its bread culture is fully baked.

Aigues Vives sits on a cliff perched above Otaru with generous views of the Sea of Japan. The owner, Tanno Takoyashi, converted part of his home into a country bakery, with a set of stone steps that leads you through the trees and to the front door.

Tanno invites me back to see his oven, a wood-burning beauty brought over from France. It's 10:00 a.m., time for the second round of baking of the day. After feeding the fire with chunks of maple, he loads the bread and pastries according to cooking time: first the fat country rounds, then long, skinny loaves dense with nuts and dried fruit, and finally a dozen purple crescent moons: raspberry croissants pocked with chunks of white chocolate.

He and his wife traveled to France fifteen years ago and fell in love with
the bread culture. For six months he watched the best bakers he could find, living off carbohydrates and the scent of a dream slowly proofing. He took notes; he took pictures. Later he returned and began to re-create the work he'd witnessed in the West. “I made a lot of bread. A lot of bad bread.”

In certain corners of the Japanese food world, chefs and farmers and even politicians see guys like Tanno as the enemy. In their eyes he is aiding and abetting an unsettling shift in the Japanese diet—the continuing move from a rice- to a wheat-based diet. In 2011, for the first time ever, Japanese families spent more money on bread than they did on rice. This overtake has been a long time coming, put into motion by the U.S. and Japanese governments in the wake of World War II, but it has suddenly set off alarms in certain corners of the food world—chefs, producers, and politicians who see it as not just a domestic dietary issue but an affront to the national identity as a whole.

Tanno, for his part, doesn't see what the fuss is about; you wouldn't either if you put in the time and the heart this guy puts into his breads. “Why should we have to choose between rice and bread when we can have both?”

He isn't referring to the soft, spongy industrial stuff most Japanese eat. He is referring to the heroic loaves and pastries that he pulls from his oven every morning, bread that wears a thick, crisp crust, a soft, faintly sour crumb, and a dedication to an ideal that borders on obsession.

It's not just the French oven and the French technique. The flour (at least part of it) and the starter are French. The cars parked on the gravel outside are French. As I walk from the oven in the back to the counter, I pass the kitchen and can't help but take a long look: Le Creuset enameled pans, a cast-iron stove, jars filled with preserves—it looks like a museum piece from the future, showcasing the French country kitchen of the twentieth century.

“We didn't just want a bakery. We wanted to create an environment, that's why we came here. For so many years people never thought about Hokkaido as a place for food. But that's changing.”

Tanno Takoyashi lines up loaves to feed into his wood-fired oven at Aigues Vives.

(Matt Goulding)

It's baffling enough to find one place like this in the middle of nowhere, but the Takoyashis aren't the only ones wood-firing their own ovens in the neighborhood.

At Boulangerie Jin, you'll find another country house with maple wood in the front, a blazing oven in the back, and a shiny Peugeot on the side. Inside, husband and wife team up to make crisp-edged baguettes and one of the finest croissants I've eaten anywhere. Over the years, offers have come in to sell their products all over Niseko with heavy markups for the carb-craving snowboarders, but they don't want more money, they don't want some stranger selling their creations, and they don't want more exposure. (When the wife sees me take out a notebook, she immediately shuts down.)

Sokesyu Bread, just a few hundred yards down the road from Takara Ranch, is pretty much as crazy as the other two. French house, French oven, French car. But Yusuke Konno, tall and skinny, with round glasses and a bandanna wrapped tight around his head, makes his bread with 100 percent Hokkaido flour. “Of course.”

He makes superb versions of all the French classics—pain de campagne; baguettes; golden, flaky croissants—but he has a few funky new projects in the works, too. “We can experiment because Hokkaido culture isn't as deep as Tokyo's or Kyoto's.” He's been talking about making the switch to dense, German-style brown breads. “Now maybe I'll need an Audi.”

Let's consider the evidence: three separate, unrelated bakeries, all of whose owners drive French-made automobiles, have hand-built European wood-fired ovens, and dress like Provençal marmalade makers. All of this in one of the least-densely populated areas in all of Japan? The odds must be infinitesimal.

But these aren't just bakeries; these are affirmations of a much larger idea. Every detail matters. The source of
your heat, the type of flour, the age of your starter—of course these form the fundamental base for the flavor of our daily bread. But somewhere, in the deep recesses of taste and perception, it matters that he drives a Peugeot. It matters that she wears a French country wife's blouse. It matters that the kitchen doesn't just
look
French.

It matters that they're all the way up here, in Hokkaido, where the air is green and the skies are wide and everything feels just a little more possible.

It matters.

米 麺 魚

Even if you travel to Hokkaido to get lost in the wilderness, it feels good to come back to a city of Sapporo's caliber—familiar for its sprawling entertainment district, covered shopping arcades, and preponderance of noodle shops and
sushi-yas
, but with a collection of wide avenues, green spaces, and Western architecture like nothing you've ever seen in urban Japan.

Few cities eat better than Sapporo. The morning markets teem with
donburi
dreams. Sophisticated yakitori and tempura and haute cuisine restaurants serving only Hokkaido ingredients dot the downtown area. At Ramen Yokocho, a dark, narrow alley that claims to be the birthplace of miso ramen, a dozen tiny bars serve up steaming bowls of the rich noodle soup.

But I don't want ramen or raw fish or cabernet and Camembert. At midnight on my last night on the island, I am on the hunt for Genghis Khan, or, as he's known in these parts, Jingisukan—an unlikely fixture of Sapporo's dining scene. The name refers to a style of mutton grilled over convex metal domes thought to resemble the helmets worn by Mongol armies. Supposedly Hokkaidoans, once flush with sheep used for clothing the Japanese military, based the cooking on the belief that Mongol armies cooked lamb on their shields and helmets. Today dozens of Jingisukan joints cover Hokkaido's capital.

Jingisukan, Hokkaido's unlikely mutton conqueror

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)

Daruma Honten is a fifteen-person bar down a tiny alley in Susukino, Sapporo's pulsing pleasure district, the largest you will find north of Tokyo. Diners sit at a countertop while stoic women in bandannas fill their helmet grills with burning charcoal, then baste the iron surface with cubes of melting mutton fat. Thin slices of meat marinated in soy and ginger tent the smoking black domes, with onions positioned on the rim to absorb the tide of drippings that flows down their surface. The ladies leave me with the tongs but eye me with suspicion as I let the lamb build up a char deep enough to make a Mongol warrior proud.

The man next to me, a Wagyu farmer from upper Tohoku, comes to Hokkaido every few months to wrangle up more cattle—“The best in Japan,” he says. While he's in town, he likes to drink Nikka whisky and eat sheep. “Sometimes I wonder why I don't live here.”

While the mutton sizzles, I drink icy mugs of Sapporo, Japan's oldest beer, created by a German-trained Hokkaidoan at the dawn of the Meiji era. The Beach Boys play over the speakers, just audible over the protein chorus. When the meat is ready, I pluck it directly from the helmet, pinched between chopsticks with a soft petal of onion or two, and dip it into soy sauce spiked with garlic and chili.