shinmai– tag –

Autumn on the Plate: Matsutake, Sanma, and the Arithmetic of Abundance Japan is the only country that names a season after appetite. But the foods that define shokuyoku no aki now arrive with numbers attached — and most of those numbers are counting downward. This is what abundance looks like once it has to be measu...

The Grain at the Center: How Rice Made Japan Before it was a food, rice was a reason to organize a landscape, a calendar, a religion, and a state. To understand Japan, you have to start in the flooded field. Fly over rural Japan in early summer and the country reveals its oldest logic from the air. Between the mount...