Word: rice
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...Like most Japanese, I grew up around sake. The clear rice liquor?a fermented product somewhat similar to wine?infuses many important holidays and traditions here, not to mention poetry and cuisine. My father, an American who has lived in Japan for four decades, drinks it hot every night with dinner. My hometown, Kobe, produces nearly a third of the industry's yield. My mother's side of the family is even in the sake business. Still, until recently I never cared much for the stuff. Its strong smell, fiery aftertaste and old-fashioned image seemed about as alluring...
...Suigei's kura is chilly and dark and reeks sweetly of fermenting rice. The first step in the sakemaking process is the milling and polishing of rice. The more it is polished, the higher the grade of sake. For Suigei's top-grade daiginjo, each grain of famed Yamada nishiki rice is polished until just 30% remains. The rice is then washed and soaked in giant tanks, and poured into vats for steaming...
...cross a plank into the next building, where the steamed rice is fermented. Doi proudly shows me a Tupperware container holding what looks like green tea ground to powder. It's mold, a key ingredient that is mixed into the steamed rice, which is then spread onto platforms in a sauna-like, cedar-paneled chamber, where the heat and humidity help the mold spores grow. To this mixture Doi will add yeast and water to trigger fermentation...
...Down wooden stairs, Doi hops nimbly onto a narrow catwalk 4.5 meters above the floor, which connects 30 enormous steel tanks. Each holds a rice mash in varying stages of fermentation and cooling. "In my father's day," Doi says, "they didn't even use thermometers. He just stuck his hand in to determine the temperature." In the final stages of the month-long process, the mash is placed in bags and pressed in what looks like a giant accordion. The liquid that is squeezed out is pasteurized, filtered and aged for half a year in barrels before being bottled...
...skillfully untangles the accusations and counteraccusations of Tasaday proponents and skeptics, but when he narrates his own fact-finding travels in the Philippines, he can be risibly naive. He tells the reader everything he wrote down in his notebook, interesting or not: "We drove for half an hour, past rice paddies, water buffalo and palm trees." Invented Eden has many such sentences. Worse, Hemley is a complainer, which is no more fun in a book than on the trail: the roads are muddy, his saddle hurts, the locals rip him off, his asthma acts...