If you’ve ever spent time in Japan, you’ve probably eaten wakame. This dark green, smooth seaweed, a type of kelp, has long been a staple in miso soup and salads. But do you know how it is grown? I visited a wakame farmer in Naruto, one of the most important wakame-producing areas in the country, to find out.
Wakame is becoming well-known internationally as a healthy food rich in minerals and vitamins
My host, Shibahara-san, has always worked as a wakame farmer, like the majority of people in his small village. His company consists of just five people, but he is part of a cooperative of around twenty companies, giving him the rights to farm an area of sea.
Shibahara-san heading out to his boat
Wakame production is seasonal. Next year’s crop is currently being grown on string frames in a salt water tank. It is already five months since the spores were sprinkled onto the frames, but the seaweed is still too small to see with the naked eye.
It’s hard to believe that there will be wakame a metre long growing on these frames in a few months’ time!
Next month, the frames will be attached to ropes at one-metre intervals, and these ropes will be stretched in a criss-cross pattern before being lowered into the sea between anchors and floats for the seaweed to grow until spring.
The ropes are now being prepared
Wakame farmers’ boats and the floats that mark the site of their farms
After being harvested in February and March, the wakame is boiled for a short time in order to transform it from its natural brown into a more appetising green colour.
This boiler is shared by the members of Shibahara-san’s cooperative
It is soaked to remove the salt - first in salt water, so as not to break the cell walls and turn the plants mushy, then in fresh water. Next, it is spun in a large centrifuge, before being hung on racks to dry.
The centrifuge (on the right), along with other equipment
Wakame has two parts, the leaves and the lighter green stems. The leaves are what we usually eat as “wakame”, although the stems are also used in cooking.
The leaves are separated from the stems by hand
The seaweed is usually sold chopped, which is more convenient for cooking, but long "ito wakame" (thread wakame) is popular as a souvenir among visitors to Naruto. Salt is often added to preserve the wakame, which is stored in refrigerators and then prepared for sale bit by bit throughout the year. Before being packaged, it has to be checked for tiny shrimp or other impurities.
The chopping machine
It takes about an hour to check one crateful of wakame
That’s basically the process, but I’m sure I’ve forgotten a stage or two. I never knew it was so complicated! From now on, I will have a far greater appreciation for the wakame in my miso soup ...
Shibahara-san takes pride in his wakame
Shibahara-san also showed me some of the other local industries.
The low rectangles are oyster farms, while the platforms are for recreational fishing
The wakame farmers set traps for octopus. This one is doing its best to escape - they move amazingly fast!
Shallots grow well in the sandy soil
After visiting the wakame farm, I was curious to see the nearby Naruto Strait, which creates ideal conditions for the industry. The tides push a huge volume of water through this narrow strait where the Seto Inland Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. Where the fast-moving currents hit the shallower areas at the sides of the strait, whirlpools are formed. I took an exciting boat ride to get up close to them.
The colour, height, and surface texture of the water all change suddenly right under the bridge
Before heading home, there was time to stop at one more, very different Naruto sight. The Otsuka Museum of Art is packed with masterpieces of Western art, reproduced exactly on ceramic boards. It’s quite an eerie sensation to step inside from the quintessentially Japanese world of wakame farming and find yourself in the Sistine Chapel!
Am I in Italy or Japan?...
Tomorrow, I’ll be catching the ferry across to Wakayama and heading to an onsen!
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