Usagi no Moshio Seaweed Salt
On a rugged wind-swept peninsula in the Sea of Japan in northern Shimane prefecture known as the Land of the Gods, septuagenarian Isamu Abe is making mild-tasting, nutritious, and very dry, fine grain seaweed salts that are as excellent for baking and making desserts as they are as table salts.
Sagiura is a picture-perfect fishing village located on the western tip of the rocky and deeply forested chunk of land that is also the location of the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, one of Japan’s oldest and most important Shinto shrines. Sagiura is a small village comprised of several rows of charming old wooden homes that encircle an equally small and picturesque bay that leads through a narrow opening in the Sea of Japan. The village flourished during the Edo period (1603-1868) when it was a trading port for ships that brought foods like sea salt and soy sauce produced in the Seto Inland Sea region to towns on the west coast of Japan all the way up to Hokkaido. It was also an important stop for pilgrims coming to the nearby town of Izumo to visit the village’s Inasehagi Shrine, an over 1,000-year-old auxiliary shrine of the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine.
Sagiura is, in fact, the name of a district that consists of two fishing villages, with the other one being the village of Udo located just around a bend to the south. They joined together a number of years ago in response to the area’s declining population. Fifty years ago, there were 1,700 people living in the two villages. Today there are only 80 households and 120 homes are empty. This accounts for Sagiura’s appealing peacefulness. Its tidiness is, in part, due to the fact that each year one or two of the empty houses are demolished, with the lumber being recycled by Isamu Abe, who uses it to fire his salt pans and make a mild-tasting, highly nutritious, and sustainable (somewhat unusually so because it relies on the abandoned homes caused by Japan’s decreasing rural population) moshio seaweed salt.
This, however, is not a sad story. Far from it. Now seventy-six years old, Isamu is an active, dapper man with the playful spirit of someone much younger. He eagerly returned to his hometown twenty-one years ago after retiring early in order to live a slower life. He had left Sagiura when he was young to study mechanical engineering at a university and then become a salaryman at a chemical company in Osaka, where we worked as an engineer and manager. Upon returning to Saigura he used his retirement bonus as well as his skills to start Usagi no Moshio in 2002—the year that salt making was fully deregulated in Japan. The village gave him an old tool shed next to the local elementary school, which is located on a hill behind the town, to use as his salt workshop. The school was becoming increasingly underutilized as a result of the village’s declining population.
Isamu commissioned someone to build two salt pans in which to boil and concentrate the seawater, and he laid the cement blocks for their small furnaces himself. He also devised a wooden closet for the final drying of the salt. It consists of a stack of racks inside and on the outside a small room heater that blows hot air into the base of the closet and a home dehumidifier positioned at the top end to pull out the rising moisture.
Isamu makes two kinds of salt—a pure white sea salt and a moshio seaweed salt, which is by far the most popular of his salts. Moshio seaweed salts are an ancient form of salt making in Japan. They reflect Japan’s cook’s desire to get more from their key seasonings in terms of flavor and health benefits. The seaweed that Isamu uses is arame (Eisenia bicyclis). A reddish-brown type of seaweed with narrow oval fronds growing on a stiff stalk, arame is a member of the edible konbu family of sea vegetables and is rich in calcium, iron, iodine, potassium, magnesium, and vitamin A. It has a slightly sweet flavor and also traces of savory umami deliciousness. Arame is endemic to the temperate waters around central Japan and some of the best comes from Shimane prefecture where Sagiura is located. Because of its special properties it has been an offering at Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine for millennium, together with the traditional Shinto offering of sea salt. Because it is easily dried and reconstituted, arame is commonly used in Japanese cooking as a superfood in side dishes, soups, and salads.
Isamu harvests arame from the shoreline in front of the village in July and August when it is at the peak of its flavor and dries it naturally on the beach along the harbor for use throughout the year. He makes salt two to three times a month. Each batch is about thirty-two kilograms and the process takes a week from start to finish. He starts by collecting seawater about one kilometer from shore, going out by boat with a local fisherman and filling five large tanks with water from five meters deep in the ocean in an area that is twenty meters deep in order to tap into the sea’s famously pure, mineral-rich water. Isamu says that the brilliant whiteness of the regular sea salt he makes is a testimony to the purity of the seawater he uses.
Isamu boils the seawater for two days to concentrate it and crystalize the salt. During the first day he boils the seawater for eight hours. At the same time, he boils the arame for three hours to reconstitute it and extract its juice, which he filters and mixes with the concentrated seawater on the second day when he boils the combined water for another eight hours. All the while he constantly rakes the seawater with the help of two local fishermen to create fine, even-sized crystals. When the salt is crystalized on the third day, it is spun on the dry cycle of a small washing machine and then laid on the racks in the drying closet where it is left for twenty-four hours. The rest of the process includes sieving the salt through a fine mesh to create even finer grains.
The result is a moshio salt with a light caramel color, mild rounded flavor, and lots of additional minerals and other nutrients. Its dryness means it is good as a table salt, and Usagi no Moshio comes conveniently packaged in shaker bottles. The salt’s very fine grains easily blend into foods, making it good for both cooking and baking. Lastly, its mildness has made it attractive for use in all kinds of desserts. Fifty percent of Usagi no Moshio’s sales are to professional cooks who use it to make such foods as the local specialty zenzai, a thick sweet soup which originated at Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine centuries years ago that is made solely of boiled adzuki red beans, sugar, and salt and served with a pounded mochi rice dumpling. (Zenzai is eaten throughout Japan during the winter and is called oshiruko in the eastern part of the country.)
Sagiura is located at the northern end of Shimane prefecture, a long, relatively narrow band of land in southwestern Japan that incorporates stretches of beautiful sand beaches and high mountains filled with winding valleys and small villages. It is one of the most unspoiled regions in the country, partly due to the fact that it ranks as the least populated. By humans that is. It is, however, the abode of the entire pantheon of Shinto kami gods, at least temporarily for ten days during the tenth month of the lunar year. The event is called Kamiarizuki, the time when the kami god Okuninushi, who is enshrined at Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, calls all of the country’s deities to the shrine for an annual council. In the wake of the gods’ arrival (and undoubtedly also due to the weather typical for the west coast of Japan in autumn), the area becomes a spectacular scene as fast waves sweep the shoreline and high winds blow through its forests. One of the best places to experience this power of nature is at Inasa no Hama beach near the shrine (shown in the title block above), which is the spot that the gods arrive at on the first day of Kamiarizuki.
The name of Isamu’s salt—Usagi no Moshio—reflects the traditions, folklore, and spiritual power of the region. It is a play on the names of the two villages that were combined—Udo and Sagiura—contracted to Usagi. In Japanese usagi means rabbit, and rabbits have long been associated with Shinto, particularly in the Izumo region where statues of rabbits are placed around shrines for good luck and to act as spiritual guardians. In addition, in Japanese folklore, rabbits are the animals who live on the moon, where they make pounded mochi rice dumplings like the ones found in Izumo’s zenzai soup. A specialty moshio salt that Isamu makes is Usagi no Moshio Full Moon Salt, for which he uses seawater collected only on full moon days. It is believed that the sea is richer in minerals during full moon days and also charged with the energy of the full moon, and sea salt made with “full moon” seawater is assumed to have a greater ability to cleanse and enrich foods as well as protect and empower those who consume it.
Rabbits are considered a lucky symbol of advancement, popular as a talisman among students. Since Isamu started making salt at the elementary school, the school and its gymnasium have become a community center with Isamu’s salt-making a featured demonstration for visitors. Community events and festivals are also held there. The two buildings are charming structures from another age, and a museum on the second floor of the school contains artifacts from the village’s many abandoned homes and is a quiet reflection on the village’s way of life and its journey through time. With Isamu making life-nourishing sea salts in the school he attended when he was a boy in the heartland of Shinto with its belief in the constantly renewing cycle of life, Sagiura’s future seems secure.
Story & Photos: Tom Schiller
Usagi no Moshio 鵜鷺の藻塩 / Usagi Community Center 鵜鷺 コミュニティセンタ
1044-1 Sagi-ura, Taisha-cho, Izumo City, 699-0761, Shimane
Tel: +81 (0853) 53 5635
Web:www.city.izumo.shimane.jp/www/contents/1375402079050/index.html
Isamu Abe is happy to provide demonstrations to visitors when he is making salt, which is two to three times a month. Call the Usagi Community Center to learn when that is.
Where To Buy
Usagi no Moshio seaweed salt is available in shops across Shimane prefecture. You can also buy it in Tokyo at:
Shimanekan — Shimane prefecture's "antenna shop" in Toyo is located across from Mitsukoshi's main department store in Nihonbashi. It offers a wide variety of local foodstuffs and crafts, while its restaurant "Mondo" serves regional cuisine and sake. Open 10:30—19:00 daily, including Sunday.
Fukushima Building 1F, 1−5−3 Nihonbashimuromachi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 103-0022
Getting There
Because of the importance of the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine, there are many options for travel to Izumo and onward to Sagiura. These include:
Daily flights from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to Izumo Airport. About a 90-minute flight.
Japan Rail Tokaido / Sanyo Shinkansen trains from Tokyo to Okayama City (a 3-hour and 20-minute ride) with a change to a Japan Rail Yakumo Limited Express train to Izumo (a 3 hour ride).
The Sunrise Izumo overnight sleeper train jointly operated by JR Central and JR West. The train has showers, toilets, and vending machines and also private cabins and special seats called “nobinobi zaseki” or “stretch-out seats” that can be booked at no extra cost.
Highway buses from Tokyo to Izumo operated by Ichibata Bus and Willer Bus. The ride is about 12 hours.
From the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine it is a 20-minute bus ride to Sagiura. Take the "Usagi Line" bus bound for Hinomisaki and get off at the Sagiura bus stop. From there it is about a 10-minute walk to the community center.
Another option is to rent a bicycle in Izumo and tour the Hinomisaki Coast that circles behind the Izumo Taisha Grand Shrine. The scenery is spectacular, there are number of small villages, hot spring resorts, and historical sites, and the roads are surprisingly empty of traffic despite all of the pilgrims making their way to Izumo.
