| Samurai Movies (8) |
November 11, 2021
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| He wondered why the Tokugawa Shogunate had decided to use rice as a tax for farmers and a salary for samurai. He had never heard of any other countries that had used grain or other foods as a tax and a salary, except for the ancient ages. He had heard that rice is 1.7 times as nutritious as wheat, although he hadn't double-checked that statistics. Rice can be preserved for a long time. He had heard that in the Edo Period, the price of rice was rather higher than other crops, vegetables, etc. so farmers tended to make more rice than others. When searching on the internet, he found an interesting article that pointed out cooked rice's superiority over other grains: ・It's sticky, so easy to eat with chopsticks. In the case of other grains, eaters need to use utensils separately: a knife to cut, a fork to poke, a spoon to scoop, and hands to eat bread; but, in this country, foods have been developed to be eaten solely by chopsticks. ・It has moisture, so it's easy to eat by itself. (Bread needs something like butter to help the bread to go smoothly down one's throat.) ・Rice itself has taste, so an eater can eat only rice. (Bread or pasta can't be eaten by itself because they are tasteless and need some additional condiments, like jam or salt, or side dishes. He remembered that Hayao Miyazaki, an animation movie director, used to have a big 'hinomaru'  lunch box. 'Hinomaru' is the nickname for this country's flag. That lunch box (normally a square shaped box) consists of only rice and in the center an 'umeboshi', red pickled plum, so it looks like that flag. At lunch, he divided it from the center, and ate one half, and then left the other half for supper.) ・It can overlay or remove the taste of the food that you have just eaten, so you can eat other types of side dishes with it, as well as Chinese, Western foods, etc. together with rice. ・It can be eaten without problems when it becomes cold. It matches salty food, so with the help of umeboshi's sterilizing power, it can be preserved for a certain period of time as rice balls. He remembered that in the movie, 'A Samurai Family's Household Account Books', the father had a custom to eat lunch with one of his colleagues while playing 'go', a white and black stones game. The father's lunch box was very nice that the colleague felt inferior with his own one. But after the family had settled their debts, the father's lunch became just a rice ball, some pickles, and a half of a steamed sweet potato wrapped in a cloth. The colleague this time felt pity for this drastic change, but the father said, "Don't feel pity for me. I'm okay." He had heard that brown rice has an ideal balance of nutrition and minerals and vitamins. And, if you take miso soup with radish and/or green leafed vegetables, the vitamins that brown rice lacks will be supplemented. On the other hand, he had read that people started to eat 3 times a day around 1690s. Before then, people ate 2 times a day. A person's typical meal was 1 'jiru', 1 'sai', or 1 'jiru', 2 'sai'. 'Jiru' means soup, so one cup of soup (miso soup), and 'sai' means side dish, like pickled and/or boiled vegetables with seasonings, and some fish. At that time, meats weren't eaten because of religious reason, he studied so. Actually, in the movie, 'Twilight Seibei', there were some dinner scenes of a samurai family. One scene had the family eating only a rice bowl of rice-porridge ~ the ingredients looked sparse, pieces of pickled radish, and pieces of pickled green leafed vegetables, that's all. The other scene showed an image of better diner because a friend came over: a rice bowl of rice, some vegetables, some pickles, some seaweed, soup, and some sake. He had heard that this country's people's height was the shortest during the Edo period. He searched, and the result was this: ・Jomon Period (BC12,000~BC1000) : Man 158 cm, Woman 149cm ・Yayoi Period (BC1000~AD300) : Man 163 cm, Woman 152 cm ・Kamakura Period (1184~1333) : Man 159 cm, Woman 145 cm ・Edo Period (1603~1868) : Man 155 cm, Woman 143 cm ・In 1950 : Man 161 cm, Woman 150 cm ・In 2012 : Man 171 cm, Woman 158 cm The writer of the website said that in and after the Kamakura Period, people had stopped to eat animal meat for religious reasons, so the height of people shrank. He didn't think so. (To be continued ...) |
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No.454
*grain :穀物
*statistics :統計
*superiority :優越
*utensil :台所用品、家庭用品
*solely :単独で
*condiment :薬味
*overlay :上塗りする、覆う
*sterilize :殺菌する
*inferior :下位の、劣等感
*pity :気の毒
*supplement :補う
*porridge :おかゆ
*sparse :まばらな