Vince Patchwork was born and raised in the Western suburbs of Melbourne, which is about as far from farm life as you can get. His mother would happily tell anyone that the first time he saw grass, he burst into tears and, from the age of four, whenever he visited a farm, not only was he terrified of the cows, the pigs, the sheep and horse, but they were equally terrified of him.
As a teenager, he had once decided to start a garden and had dug up a sizable square of the back lawn. He had planted zucchinis, carrots, tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkins, but absolutely nothing came up. Even radishes, which are so easy to grow and need absolutely no maintenance, wouldn't grow for Vince.
All the same, something of the very rural nature of Australia had seeped up through the Footscray pavements and infected Vince. Once he arrived in Japan, he developed an intense interest in Japanese agriculture and its differences from Australian agriculture.
Indeed, this was one of the reasons Vince had decided to move to Yokohama in the first place. Nozomi had told him that it was very country. Connie, who had been born in the saddle, scoffed at the very notion. Although Nozomi herself lived in a great thicket of bamboo with elegantly layered fields climbing up from the house, she was less than five minutes from the No. 41 bus route, just around the corner from the nearest factory and even closer to a number of apartment blocks.
This, however, was Vince's sort of country. It had more concrete than grass, a 24 hour supermarket and bottle shop which Carl Lewis could have run to in less than 30 seconds, a sushi shop and no less than four hair dressers that Vince could have hit with a stone. If he needed to be reminded he was in the country, all he had to do was ring a taxi. He went through every listing in the telephone book and was told each time that they didn't serve country residences. There was in fact a taxi service and parking depot over the road and even they wouldn't send a taxi to such an isolated area.
Even where they had farms, they were of a manageable size and looked more like market gardens. In fact, they grew crops that Vince could easily identify with - spinach and eggplants and Chinese cabbage.
Nothing exemplified the Japanese countryside so much as bamboo, but when Osamu had told him that bamboo was nothing but a pest and that it got into the drains and everything, Vince had almost doubled over with laughter. Osamu might have been offended, but had merely assumed that he had made a grammatical error in English.
On his fifteenth birthday, Vince Patchwork hadn't received any presents from his parents. He had been handed an envelope which contained a demand that he uproot and remove all the bamboo from the back garden and an ultimatum that he do it before 12th. August, a date some three months to the day later. In return, he would receive payment by the hour and learn the joys of earning honest money by the sweat of his brow.
His father assured him that the hourly rate of 20 cents was more than he himself had earned in a week at the same age. Vince knew better than to lecture his father about inflation, but even Luke Slattock, who worked for the butcher as a delivery boy, earned three times his own meagre stipend while Matt Harvey got two dollars an hour for working in his father's quarry.
Nevertheless, Vince set to work eradicating the bamboo. He had thought that it would be something like pulling weeds, at the most like up-rooting rose bushes or Norfolk pines. But no, this was bamboo with the most intricate root network of any plant. It is so intense that it holds the earth together and it is little wonder that in Japan, people seek refuge in bamboo groves during earthquakes. Indeed, Vince was soon to discover why his father wanted the bamboo removed. It was all through the drainage system and the septic tank. Vince had often wondered why their toilet had high tides and low tides like the sea. He had just always assumed that it had something to do with the phases of the moon.
Twenty years later, Vince still had the callouses from his three month struggle with the bamboo, tackling a job that no professional would have touched. There were also emotional scars, because he had ultimately lost the fight with the bamboo patch. It usually didn't show, but Vince never laughed at anyone's English grammar lest they laugh at his Japanese grammar. He did, however, find it hilarious that bamboo should be as much of a pest in a country where it was a native and a national symbol of strength and endurance. In so many ways, Japan was more of a bamboo culture than a rice culture. It was used in so many traditional product- tatami mats, children's toys like tops and stilts, New Year's decorations, garden fences, ladles. Goodness, they had even once hung their washing on bamboo poles. Trucks still prowled the streets with loud speakers chanting in prolonged syllables: "Take no saotake." The recorded message went on to say that these bamboo poles were the same price as 20 years ago. Vince made a mental note never to invest in bamboo stocks. Somewhere in the middle of 1992, bamboo must have gone up in price as the message changed. It now thanked all their customers for their continued support. This seemed even more unbelievable than the first message as in his entire time in Saedocho, he had never seen one person buy so much as a stick of bamboo. In fact, he had felt so sorry for the poor bamboo man that he had tried to hail him down one day to barter over the purchase of a pole. Not only did the truck not stop, it almost ran Vince over. He was further disillusioned to discover that the bamboo poles were not made out of bamboo anyway, but were plastic imitations.
Vince actually wondered if bamboo was so widely used as a material in Japan because it was such a pest. He wasn't in the least surprised to discover that it was actually a food as well. Obviously, you couldn't munch into one of the thick trunks or even eat the leaves, but, at certain times of the year, new bamboo trunks began to shoot up, often growing as much as a metre and a half in one day. If you managed to get the bamboo shoot or takenoko just as it was breaking the surface of the earth, it was a tender delicacy. Digging these shoots was not only a good way to get a feed, but also a way of thinning the bamboo.
In Ikebe-cho, the bamboo shoots started at the beginning of April and were available for an entire month. In Kyushu, they came up in March, while in Northern Honshu, May was the month. Takenoko only come from the thick-trunked Moso breed of bamboo and the Hokkaido climate is too harsh for this genus. Vince was surprised to discover that Mosotake was not native to Japan, but had come from China, originally via Okinawa, about 200 years ago when Okinawa had been annexed.
Osamu was a takenoko expert. He had been digging them since the age of six. The most important skill, he informed Vince, was the reading of the true line of the root. It took ten years, Osamu explained, to look at a bamboo shoot and see the true line of the root. However, as Vince was obviously very intelligent, he might be able to learn to do it in seven years. It admittedly did look rather easy, but when it came time for Vince himself to cast a critical eye on the line of the takenoko, he discovered that his best instincts were all between 70 and 270 degrees out.
To dig the takenoko, Isamu used a 130 centimetres long iron pole called a nomi. It looked like a crow bar, but had a splayed and sharpened end about 7 centimetres wide. It is a jabbing instrument which is operated with an under arm action. Osamu frowned at Vince's first long arcing strokes.
"You have no accuracy," he explained, "with long blows. You must use short strong strokes. Use your legs and body as well as the strength in your arms. The nomi shouldn't curve upwards." Vince soon understood that the general idea was to dig under the bamboo shoot and sever the root from below without touching the soft flesh of the takenoko itself. Isamu could dig a takenoko in 30 seconds, but it took Vince something more like ten minutes. And even then, he had sent the nomi straight into the heart of the bamboo shoot flesh five times before he dug one correctly. In this time, Osamu had gathered thirty bamboo shoots and was husking them with a long knife.
One by one, he cut away the outside leaves of the bamboo shoot to reveal a milky white flesh. Takenoko, he explained to Vince, are best cooked immediately after they are dug.
"But you can buy them in the shops, all year round," Vince remarked.
Osamu smiled thinly, "Those are the preboiled and vacuum sealed takenoko. They're okay, but they don't have the subtle flavour of the fresh ones. Some people are so fanatical about having them fresh that they don't dig them out of the ground at all. They dig around the root and light a fire. Then, they eat them straight out of the ground." Vince couldn't persuade Osamu-san to even try cooking the takenoko in the ground. The shoots were taken upstairs and chopped into chunky slices. During the dissection of the takenoko, Vince was able to read the whole future history of the bamboo trunk. All its future segments and joints were already in place. After chopping, the bamboo shoots were boiled for about twenty minutes with rice husks. These were to absorb any bad tastes in the takenoko, Osamu explained. The shoots vary in quality. If they are white, they are the best. Yellow takenoko is old and green takenoko is inedible. Osamu preferred the bottom of the shoot which is crunchier. His teeth were good after all and it was the elderly or people with poor teeth that preferred the softer top of the shoot. The takenoko was mixed in with gluggy rice and aburage (deep-fried tofu). It was also sprinkled with sansho, a herb that is most popular in its dried powder form with unagi (fresh water eel). It is also used with takenoko because it is ready for picking at the same time of the year. Osamu picked up the tiny freshly picked leaves and clapped them between his hands twice to release the flavour.
Osamu also prepared, for the first time, some takenoko sashimi. This is not fish and not raw as the name would suggest. He explained that raw takenoko was poisonous and Vince was later to discover that the poison was, in fact, a type of cyanide which was quickly cooked out. Instead, takenoko was cooked for just under a minute and then served. It was crunchier than the other, but tasted much the same, Vince thought.
For his last trick, Osamu took some bamboo shoot husks and first scorched them over an open gas flame. They were then folded into a triangle and pickled plum was placed inside. They looked like flat onigiri rice cakes and you sucked the flesh of the umeboshi plum out of one of the three corners. He explained that when he was a child it was a special treat in April to suck on these and that he could make one last for over an hour. When times were tough and there was a shortage of umeboshi, they put the shiso leaves which were used in the pickling process of the umeboshi. Sashimi, raw fish, is usually served with shiso.
As for the taste of the takenoko themselves, Vince had to agree that they were a delicacy of the highest order, a seasonal food that could only be appreciated in the month of April. If Vince had ever seriously thought of taking Osamu up on his offer of a seven year takenoko apprenticeship, he quickly decided against it when he saw Osamu's refrigerated store room with humungous takenoko, three times the size that he had been digging, earlier that day.