Tohoku Honey

In the summer of 1689, the poet Matsuo Basho walked north from Edo into Tohoku on a journey he later recorded as Oku no Hosomichi – The Narrow Road to the Deep North. He was fifty-three days out of the capital when he reached the Mogami River in Yamagata, traveling by boat through the rapid current in the early summer rain. He wrote one haiku about it. It is now probably the most famous haiku about a river in the Japanese language: “Samidare wo / atsumete hayashi / Mogami-gawa” – gathering the rains of May, the Mogami River runs swift. The river itself has not changed much. The country on its banks has changed less than most of Japan.

Tohoku is six prefectures: Aomori, Iwate, Akita, Miyagi, Yamagata, Fukushima. It occupies the northeastern third of Honshu, running from the latitude of Hokkaido in the north to the mountains above Tokyo in the south. The Ou Mountains run north-south through the center, dividing a Japan Sea coast on the west from a Pacific coast on the east. Both coasts are cold, rugged, and undervisited. The interior is agricultural: rice, fruit orchards, sake breweries. Winters are serious. The summers are short and intense and produce some of the best food in Japan.

Sendai is the largest city, the gateway by shinkansen from Tokyo in 90 minutes. It is the city of Date Masamune, the one-eyed daimyo who built it in the early seventeenth century and was ambitious enough that the Tokugawa shogunate spent his entire career watching him carefully. The statue of Masamune on horseback stands on a hill above the city. The food association is gyutan – grilled beef tongue, sliced thin and cooked over charcoal, served with barley rice and oxtail soup. It arrived in Sendai after World War II when American occupation forces had access to beef and were not eating the parts that Japanese cooks found interesting. Sendai’s Tanabata festival in August – the largest Tanabata in Japan, the streets hung with enormous colorful paper streamers – runs immediately before Aomori’s Nebuta and Akita’s Kanto, making the first two weeks of August in Tohoku one long festival corridor.

Aomori, at the northern tip of Honshu, is where the Nebuta Festival happens: six nights in early August when teams parade enormous illuminated paper floats through the city streets, figures of warriors and gods up to nine meters wide and five meters tall, glowing from inside with light, accompanied by taiko drums and dancers who wear specific costumes and jump in a specific way to a specific chant. Two and a half million people attend each year. The floats take a full year to design and construct. The artisans who make them are named and celebrated. If August is not possible, the Nebuta House WA-RASSE museum on the Aomori waterfront keeps examples year-round.

Aomori is also apple country. The prefecture produces most of Japan’s apples on terraced orchards in the hills around Hirosaki – a castle town with one of the country’s most celebrated cherry blossom parks and a district of preserved samurai houses. The Shirakami-Sanchi mountains on Aomori’s western border are a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the last undisturbed virgin beech forest in East Asia, covering 130,000 hectares of mountains that have never been logged. Brown bears and Japanese serow live in the interior. The Oirase Gorge below the mountains is one of Japan’s most photographed autumn landscapes – a stream running through old- growth forest for fourteen kilometers.

Akita faces the Japan Sea on Tohoku’s western coast. The prefecture is known in Japan for its sake – the cold water and the high-quality rice grown in the river valleys produce some of the country’s most respected breweries – and for the Kanto Festival in early August: men balancing bamboo poles between four and twelve meters tall, hung with dozens of paper lanterns, on their foreheads, shoulders, and palms, while walking through the streets. The poles can weigh fifty kilograms. Balance is not a metaphor in Akita in August.

The Robinia pseudoacacia – the black locust tree introduced to Japan in 1873 for erosion control and now spreading freely across the mountainsides of eastern Japan – blooms in the hills above Akita in late May and early June. The bloom lasts approximately seven days. Wind cancels it. Rain dilutes it. A beekeeper who has positioned hives in the right place at the right time produces honey that is pale, clear, and mild in the specific way that the best domestic acacia honey is mild – not thin, but clean, with nothing competing. L’Abeille, Japan’s most exacting honey retailer, carries Akita acacia from a named beekeeper as a flagship domestic lot. It arrives in multiple jar sizes. It sells in the first weeks of the season.

Iwate Prefecture, south of Aomori on the Pacific coast, holds Hiraizumi – a UNESCO World Heritage Site of a different kind. In the twelfth century, the Fujiwara clan ruled the north from here and built what became known as the Northern Kyoto: a complex of temples and gardens whose ambition matched the capital’s and whose isolation protected it from the wars that repeatedly destroyed Kyoto’s equivalent structures. Chusonji’s golden hall – the Konjikido, completed in 1124 – is still standing, covered in gold leaf, housing the mummified remains of three generations of Fujiwara lords. Basho arrived here in 1689, three hundred years after the Fujiwara were destroyed, and wrote that the grass was all that remained of the warriors’ dreams. The grass is still there. The golden hall is still there. The contrast between the two carries the same weight it carried in 1689.

The mountain forests above Hiraizumi and across the Tohoku interior hold old-growth stands of tochinoki – the Japanese horse chestnut, Aesculus turbinata, endemic to Japan. It blooms briefly in late May, producing a honey that is rich and fragrant with a faint spicy edge unlike anything else from the domestic calendar. Old-growth tochinoki stands are declining as forests are managed and replanted with timber species. The honey exists in proportion to how much old forest remains.

Yamagata is where the cherries are. Approximately 70 percent of Japan’s cherry production comes from this prefecture, concentrated in the valleys around Higashine and Sagae east of the Ou Mountains. In June, cherry orchards line every road – next to convenience stores, behind petrol stations, between rice paddies. Farmers begin picking at four in the morning before the sun warms the fruit. The premium variety is Sato Nishiki: a large, glossy, red cherry developed in Yamagata in the early twentieth century and now the dominant variety nationally. A single box at Tokyo auction can reach prices that make international news. The ordinary ones are sold at roadside stands for a few hundred yen and eaten on the spot.

The same cherry trees produce honey in June. It is a honey that does not travel well – produced in small quantities by beekeepers who move hives into the orchards when the blossoms open, available locally and through specialty retailers who commission it directly. Miel-Mie’s Honey Hunter sources it from Mogami-cho in northern Yamagata, the river town where Basho began his boat journey. The honey is a record of the same landscape: the cherry orchards along the Mogami, the same May rains, the swift current downstream.

Fukushima, the southernmost prefecture, carries its contemporary history with a candor that is characteristically Tohoku. The nuclear disaster of 2011 – which followed the earthquake and tsunami that killed nearly twenty thousand people across the Pacific coast – is acknowledged directly by the people who live here, not minimized. The agricultural prefecture has rebuilt its food reputation on provenance and transparency. Aizu Wakamatsu in the western mountains is a separate world from the coast: a former castle town with intact samurai districts, lacquerware workshops, and the story of the Byakkotai – nineteen young samurai who died in 1868 during the last significant battle of the Boshin War. The graves are on a hillside above the city. Matsumoto Beekeeping, Japan’s first certified organic honey producer, operates from Aizu Wakamatsu – owned by a fifth- generation beekeeper who studied opera in Italy before returning to take over the family apiary.