At the local Safeway the other night, I was mentally transported back 13 years to one of Beppu's main coastal attractions, the defunct and anchored cruise liner in the bay. This ship had been converted into a tourist attraction, and while it had been gutted and refitted, thus dispossessing it of much of its original charm, it boasted a top-notch restaurant and a beer garden. What was it that led me to recall that place that in retrospect seems a pink elephant of a structure, an eyesore in the bay? Edamame.
Last Thursday night in the frozen case under the Safeway name, there it was, a bag of frozen edamame ready to boil and chill. They were even called edamame, retaining the Japanese name. This I might have expected to see in Los Angeles or Hawaii, but not in Phoenix, Arizona. In 13 years and three different countries, I had not once seen a bag of edamame since leaving Japan.
Of course all my associations with this tasty little snap-pea which one boils in the pod in heavily salted water and then cools before popping them open to eat, revolve around drinking and friends. The one occasion that is most vivid in my mind is meeting my friend Barbara, whom I had known in L.A. and who had come to teach with me in 1989, at the foot of the stairs at our teacher housing and heading off to the ship. We both had ten-speeds and as the university where we worked and lived was at the top of a large hill, we plummeted down the long stretch of Daigaku-dori to the coastline on the highway before heading south to the cruise ship.
It was a mid-summer's day, after the rainy season. The bay, still in the torpor of summer, lay flaccid and heavy as a passed out drunk. The damp made ringlets of my straight brown hair, and of Barbara's curly red mop an electric halo. We ordered up a big plate of French fires and another of edamame, chilled and salted, the perfect accompaniment to oversized mugs of beer. From further up the coast the foghorn from the ferry that came and left twice a day gave its plaintive evening bellow. And across the bay to the southeast, we could see the skyline of Oita City glittering white in the light like a little San Francisco.
Soon I'll go out to the kitchen and cook up those Safeway edamame. I'll eat them on my patio looking at my cactus garden and swimming pool. I wonder if they will taste the same.
Posted by Jeanne Belisle Lombardo
September 09, 2002
Comments
Well, you can count San Francisco as a city you can find these in, and not just at the Japanese markets either.
Lovely story (and lovely writing too!), reminds me of my first introduction to the soybean, in a beer hall in Shinjuku on my first trip here to Tokyo in '97, with my then girlfriend and now-wife. At the time I couldn't fathom eating beans with my beer in place of peanuts or pretzels. But they seemed (and remain) the perfect combination.
Comment by: Kurt. Posted September 9, 2002 09:30 PM.
One of the first places we went in Beppu was to the cruise ship Oriana. It was part of the agenda for the English Summer Seminar, since the seminar was held at a hotel on Beppu Bay within walking distance. Jeanne, you might have been there, too. We toured the ship assigned to groups of Japanese high school students which didn't encourage stopping off for beer. Nothing I saw enticed me to return, especially since there was an admission fee.
I did some research and discovered that the Oriana is no longer a pink elephant in Beppu Bay. This link has many gorgeous pictures of the Oriana's glory days. Had I known any of the history of the Oriana before I toured it, I might have been much more interested in it.
1986. August 1. Moored at Oita, near Beppu, a resort on the Japanese island of Kyushu. She was welded to a wharf and her funnels were painted pink.
1995. Sold to the Hangzhou Jiebai Group Co Ltd, a department store operator and towed to Chinwangtao (Qinhuangdao), China where she served as an accommodation center and hotel.
It would be all to easy to bemoan her subsequent fate, however, unlike her much admired running mate Canberra, she has survived in spite of the odds. Luridly lit with neon and variously touted as the "Titanic of Huangpu River", the sister ship of the Queen Elizabeth, a "British imperial cruiser " and "one of the four most famous luxury boats of the contemporary world," the old gal now graces an otherwise undistinguished waterfront at Shanghai.
When JQS and I visited Beppu again in 1996, the Oriana had already been moved to China. I didn't even notice. I guess I was too busy looking inland at the bizarre B-Con Plaza
.Comment by: M Sinclair Stevens. Posted September 10, 2002 09:08 AM.
Melissa, I knew you would remember the name. I wrote this at work so could not check my journals and it was driving me nuts. Like you, I was not big on the Oriana. (And by the way, I was at that seminar but skipped the field trip and went home and fed my stray cats.) Having lived in L.A. and toured the Queen Mary there, I found it simply sad that all the fixtures had been ripped out. Thanks for letting me know her subsequent history.
Kurt, I am not surprised San Francisco has edamame. I've been up there two or three times in the last 5 years and always go to Japan Town (is that how they refer to it there?) to buy something made of bamboo or lacquer. And to have some authentic tempura soba. Oh, and I remember the soybeans too. The topic of Tokyo bars strikes a whole other chord of memory.
Comment by: Jeanne Belisle Lombardo. Posted September 10, 2002 02:09 PM.
Share Your Thoughts
All my associations with this tasty little snap-pea which one boils in the pod in heavily salted water and then cools before popping them open to eat, revolve around drinking and friends.