Masahiro Hoshina, a Japanese farmer, starts worrying about typhoon season months before it begins, haunted by memories of the heavy rains and landslides that washed away wasabi farms during one 2019 storm.
“Recently the power of typhoons feels totally different from before due to global warming. It’s getting stronger,” said the 70-year-old farmer in Okutama, west of downtown Tokyo.
“Since it’s happened once, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen again.”
Photo: Reuters
Wasabi, the tangy Japanese horseradish that’s an essential part of sushi and dabbed onto slices of raw fish or into bowls of soba buckwheat noodle soup, is usually grown along streams in narrow valleys, leaving farms prone to disasters.
Typhoon Hagibis, which slammed into eastern Japan in 2019, slashed production in Okutama by nearly 70 percent the next year. The need for replanting and careful tending meant it’s taken nearly three years for sushi farms there to recover.
Experts say global warming is affecting production not only by increasing the number and severity of storms, but with rising temperatures that threaten growth of the plants, which need to be in water a consistent 10-15 degrees Celsius year-round.
Photo: Reuters
A lack of wasabi could also endanger traditional Japanese foods such as sushi and sashimi, where the tang of the wasabi is used as a contrast with raw fish.
Weather isn’t the only obstacle wasabi farmers face. A drop in rural populations due to aging means there are no successors. Because of the two factors, the output of wasabi grown in clear-flowing water, like at Hoshina’s farm, had fallen to half that of 2005, according to the Agriculture Ministry.
Norihito Onishi, head sales manager at a chain of soba buckwheat noodle restaurants called Sojibo, has seen his business directly affected by wasabi shortages and supply problems.
The restaurants were long known for allowing customers to grind their own wasabi roots to produce the spicy paste used as a condiment for soba. But they’ve had to mostly give this up.
“In the past, we served all the cold soba noodles with a piece of raw wasabi, but now we can no longer do that,” Onishi said.
Though wasabi root was plentiful when the restaurant first opened 30 years ago, Onishi said over the last 5 to 10 years there have been times when he couldn’t get any at all. The precious root is now made available only for certain types of dishes.
“If this unstable supply of wasabi persists, due to many factors including global warming, we will face a situation where we need to come up with other ways to overcome the problem so we don’t end up not serving raw wasabi at all,” said Onishi.
In recent weeks the Trump Administration has been demanding that Taiwan transfer half of its chip manufacturing to the US. In an interview with NewsNation, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that the US would need 50 percent of domestic chip production to protect Taiwan. He stated, discussing Taiwan’s chip production: “My argument to them was, well, if you have 95 percent, how am I gonna get it to protect you? You’re going to put it on a plane? You’re going to put it on a boat?” The stench of the Trump Administration’s mafia-style notions of “protection” was strong
Every now and then, it’s nice to just point somewhere on a map and head out with no plan. In Taiwan, where convenience reigns, food options are plentiful and people are generally friendly and helpful, this type of trip is that much easier to pull off. One day last November, a spur-of-the-moment day hike in the hills of Chiayi County turned into a surprisingly memorable experience that impressed on me once again how fortunate we all are to call this island home. The scenery I walked through that day — a mix of forest and farms reaching up into the clouds
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
RSS