Chapter Five

The Land That Brews Time — Fermentation and the Spiritual Culture of Japan

第五章 — 時を醸す土地・発酵と、日本の精神文化

Introduction — Fermentation, the Work of "Waiting"

Thus far we have traced Hekinan's fermentation as history, as industry, and as ecosystem. In this chapter, last of all, we wish to enter another deep layer this land's fermentation holds — its "spirit."

Fermentation is, in the end, the work of "waiting." Once the preparation is made, what a person can do is limited. The rest is entrusted to the working of the kōji mould; one only waits, as time changes the ingredient. The several years of mirin's maturing, the two summers and two winters of Hatchō miso, the three months of white soy sauce — each is a long time of "waiting," in which time itself, having left the human hand, does the brewing.

This posture of "honouring the act of waiting" is not Hekinan's alone. It is, as it were, the appearance in food of a larger spiritual culture that the country of Japan has nurtured over more than a thousand years — an aesthetic that runs through Zen, the way of tea, wabi and sabi, and the way of the warrior. In this chapter we wish to depict how that thousand-year spirituality resonates with this land's fermentation. As for the deep system of Japan's spiritual culture itself, we leave it to Hosomichi's companion essay, "The Japanese Spiritual Worldview," and here devote ourselves to tracing the current that flows into Hekinan's fermentation.

I. A Thousand-Year Source — Tea That Came with Zen

To understand the spiritual depth of Hekinan, it is well to go back to the neighbouring land of Nishio. For there lies the source, nearly a thousand years old, of this region's spiritual culture.

The origin of Nishio's matcha reaches back to 1271 (Bun'ei 8).¹ Shōichi Kokushi (Enni Ben'en), founder of Jisshō-ji, is said to have sown, within its precincts, the tea seeds he had brought back from Song China — and this is held to be the beginning.¹² Jisshō-ji was the first Rinzai — that is, Zen — temple in Mikawa.³

Here is a decisive fact. Tea came to this land together with Zen.

Shōichi Kokushi was a disciple of Eisai, founder of the Rinzai school, who wrote Japan's first book on tea, the Kissa Yōjōki (Notes on Drinking Tea for Health).⁴ Eisai and Shōichi Kokushi, in their life in Song China, came to feel that tea had the virtue of nurturing and prolonging life, and that, drunk, it sharpened the head and was indispensable to Zen practice — and so they spread the benefits of tea.⁴ For the Zen monk, tea was a "drink of nurture" that dispelled drowsiness, cleared the mind, and sustained practice.⁵

In other words, from the very first that tea was brought to the land of Mikawa, tea and Zen were inseparably bound. This is no event of the Meiji era, nor of Edo. It is a source of spiritual culture that put down roots in this land in the Kamakura period, some seven hundred and fifty years ago. If Hekinan's fermentation is two hundred years old, the tea and Zen of this land reach back more than three times as far.

II. The Shared Spirit of "Waiting"

The tea that came with Zen was in time deepened into the way of tea, and nurtured a singular Japanese aesthetic — wabi and sabi, "ma," the richness within simplicity. And this aesthetic connects, in a deep place, with the work of fermentation.

To say in one word what runs beneath them both: it is "waiting."

The forms of the way of tea are filled with "waiting" and with "setting the heart in order." The guest, invited to a tea gathering, first passes through the roji (the tea garden), shakes off the dust of the floating world, sets the heart in order, and only then enters the tea room. For a single bowl of tea, time is taken to prepare the place and the bearing is fully observed. To banish haste and concentrate on this one moment — this very posture is what the way of tea inherited from Zen.

Fermentation, too, stands upon the same "waiting." Having prepared the ingredients, the brewer entrusts the work to the kōji mould and to time. One cannot hurry it on. Two summers and two winters, several years — one only waits, quietly. What is there is an attitude of trusting time, restraining the human hand, and waiting for the working of nature to ripen.

As the tea person commits the heart to the time of a single bowl, the brewer commits the taste to the years. Different though the scale of the bearing is, the spirit at its root — "honouring the act of waiting" — flows out from one and the same current. The land called Hekinan has, while brewing miso and soy sauce and mirin, at the same time inherited this very spirit of "waiting" from a thousand years ago.

III. The Constant and the Changing — Another Wisdom of Change and Changelessness

There is a word that lights this spirit of Hekinan's fermentation from another angle: Matsuo Bashō's poetic principle, "the constant and the changing" (fueki-ryūkō).

"Fueki" is what does not change across the ages. "Ryūkō" is what changes at each moment.⁶ At first sight contrary, these two are, in Bashō, bound at root into one.⁶ Bashō's disciple Mukai Kyorai sets it down in his treatise, the Kyoraishō: "Knowing not the constant, the foundation can scarcely stand; knowing not the changing, the style is not made new."⁷ Without knowing what does not change, the foundation does not stand; without knowing what changes, no newness is born.⁷ Another disciple, Hattori Dohō, called its root "the sincerity of poetic elegance" (fūga no makoto).⁸

Nothing tells Hekinan's fermentation so truly as this word.

The brewery, for two hundred years, does not change its method. It guards the wooden vats, guards the kōji, guards the bearing of preparation — this is "the constant." Yet at the same time, the same brewery has brought forth a new bottle suited to the tables of abroad, and answered the demand of the age. As mirin changed its form from a wine to drink into a seasoning, as white soy sauce developed into white dashi — this is "the changing."

To lay the changing upon a foundation of the unchanging. Or rather, by going on changing, to keep the unchanging essence. What the breweries of Hekinan have done for two hundred years was nothing other than the practice, in food, of this "constant and changing" that Bashō found in poetry. Zen, tea, haikai — these wisdoms that run through the spiritual culture of Japan live, in this land, in the form of fermentation.

IV. A Modern Fruition — Mugaen, the Village of Philosophy

This current of spirit, flowing down from a thousand years ago, gave rise in the modern era to one emblematic place in this land: "Mugaen, the Philosophy-Experience Village," at the western edge of Hekinan.⁹

Its name derives from the local philosopher-thinker Itō Shōshin (1876–1963).⁹ On the site of the "Mugaen" training hall that Shōshin opened in 1934 (Shōwa 9), which his bereaved family donated to the City of Hekinan, it was rebuilt in 1992, with the philosopher Umehara Takeshi welcomed as honorary village head.¹⁰ Shōshin was a man who studied under Kiyozawa Manshi, advocated "selfless love" (muga-ai), and piled up a thought reaching beyond Buddhism even to Western philosophy.¹¹

In Mugaen, together with a meditation corridor, a standing-style tea seat and a tea room are set.⁹¹² That the tea which came with Zen a thousand years ago is still, in a modern village of philosophy, carried on in the form of a single bowl — this correspondence is beautiful. That the land which nurtured fermentation gave birth, in the modern era, to a "village for thinking," a "place for setting the heart in order," is proof that the current of spirit flowing through this land has not, even now, run dry.

Mugaen is no facility known to the world. But for that very reason, it is a quiet treasure that Hekinan alone holds. That a thousand-year spiritual culture came to fruition, in this land, even in a village of philosophy — that fact is here.

V. To Brew Time

Last, we wish to bind together what we have traced in this chapter.

Fermentation is the work of "waiting." And Hekinan was a land that has held, in layers, around that work of "waiting," a thousand-year spiritual culture — the tea that came with Zen, the aesthetic of wabi and sabi, the wisdom of the constant and the changing, and the modern village of philosophy.

These are not separate things. As fermentation commits the ingredient to time, as tea commits the heart to the time of a single bowl, each connects deeply at one point: "trusting time." Not to force out an answer in haste, but to wait for the time to ripen. This very posture is the invisible inheritance this land has nurtured over a thousand years.

To see Hekinan's fermentation merely as a producing-ground of seasonings is to have seen only half. This land has, while brewing taste, brewed also an attitude toward time itself — the spirit of "honouring the act of waiting." In a present whose speed of consumption ever increases, it may be a thing rather rare, and precious.

And the source of this spirit of "waiting" connects, beyond the one locality of Hekinan, to a deeper spiritual worldview that the country of Japan has nurtured over two thousand years. Its whole image — Zen, the way of the warrior, the way of tea, and Japan's singular aesthetic and view of life and death — will be traced in detail in Hosomichi's companion essay, "The Japanese Spiritual Worldview." This chapter has done no more than depict the way that great current wells up in the single spring of Hekinan's fermentation.

From the prologue to this chapter, we have traced the land of Hekinan — from geography, from the sea, from mirin, from white soy sauce, from the ecosystem, and from spiritual culture. In the epilogue that follows, carrying all of these, we return once more to the "present." What is this land, holding a two-hundred-year constancy, now seeking to offer the world as its changing? Seeing that through, we wish to close this chronicle.

Notes & Sources

This is the fifth chapter of the Chronicle of Hekinan (white paper). The facts stated rest on the sources cited. The origin of Nishio matcha and Jisshō-ji (1271, Shōichi Kokushi) rests on official materials of the City of Nishio and others. It should be noted that "the origin of Nishio tea" includes a legendary element concerning Shōichi Kokushi's bringing of the tea seeds, and that the full industrialisation of matcha is from the Meiji era onward (Kōju-in, Adachi Jundō). As a systematic account of Japan's spiritual culture itself exceeds the scope of this chapter, it is left to Hosomichi's companion essay "The Japanese Spiritual Worldview," and this chapter has confined itself to the point of contact with Hekinan's fermentation. No example of Bashō himself directly setting down "the constant and the changing" has been confirmed; it is a principle transmitted through his disciples' poetic treatises, the Kyoraishō and the Sanzōshi.

"The Matcha and Tea of Nishio," City of Nishio official website (on the origin of Nishio tea being held to be the founder Shōichi Kokushi sowing the first tea seeds within the precincts of Jisshō-ji, founded in 1271 [Bun'ei 8]). https://www.city.nishio.aichi.jp/sportskanko/kanko/1005620/1001475/1002604.html ↩ ↩²
"Nishio Tea," Wikipedia (on the origin of Nishio tea being held to be Shōichi Kokushi, founder of Jisshō-ji, bringing tea seeds back from Song and sowing them within the precincts in 1271 [Bun'ei 8]). https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/西尾茶 ↩
"[The Matcha of Nishio] Originating at Jisshō-ji of the Kamakura Period?," Sengoku Kirara-tai (on Jisshō-ji, founded in 1271, being the first Rinzai [Zen] temple in Mikawa; based on the exhibition catalogue "Tea in the Medieval Eastern Provinces," Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History). https://ameblo.jp/8omote/entry-12444227213.html ↩
"'Nishio Matcha,' a Regional Brand from Chūbu," CREC regional-brand material (on Shōichi Kokushi being a disciple of Eisai, founder of the Rinzai school and author of the Kissa Yōjōki, and a high priest who founded Tōfuku-ji in Kyoto; and on Eisai and Shōichi Kokushi spreading the life-nurturing virtue of tea and its use in Zen practice). http://www.criser.jp/document/crec/167chiiki2.pdf ↩ ↩²
"[The Matcha of Nishio] Originating at Jisshō-ji of the Kamakura Period?," Sengoku Kirara-tai (on Zen monks of the Kamakura-period Zen schools using tea in practice and form, and folding it into daily life as a medicine of nurture and a drink that quells drowsiness). https://ameblo.jp/8omote/entry-12444227213.html ↩
"Fueki-Ryūkō," Kotobank (Encyclopedia Nipponica, etc.) (on "fueki" as what is changeless across the ages, "ryūkō" as what changes at each moment, the two not opposed but one at root, Bashō calling it "the sincerity of poetic elegance"). https://kotobank.jp/word/不易流行-123091 ↩ ↩²
"Fueki-Ryūkō," Weblio Dictionary / Mukai Kyorai, Kyoraishō (1702–04) (on the source and meaning of the Kyoraishō's "knowing not the constant, the foundation can scarcely stand; knowing not the changing, the style is not made new"). https://www.weblio.jp/content/不易流行 ↩ ↩²
"What Is Fueki-Ryūkō?," Japan Haiku Society / Hattori Dohō, Sanzōshi (on "in the master's elegance there is the eternal-constant; there is the change of a moment; these two are exhausted, and their root is one; that one is the sincerity of poetic elegance," its root being "the sincerity of poetic elegance"). https://jphaiku.jp/how/huekiryuukou.html ↩
"The Philosophy-Experience Village 'Mugaen,'" Hekinan Tourism Navi (City of Hekinan official tourism site) (on Mugaen being a cultural facility born in memory of the local philosopher Itō Shōshin, and on its standing-style tea seat, meditation corridor and other facilities). https://www.hekinan-kanko.jp/highlight/detail/41/ ↩ ↩² ↩³
"Hekinan City Philosophy-Experience Village Mugaen," Wikipedia (on the site of the training hall opened by Itō Shōshin in 1934 being donated by his family to the City of Hekinan and opened in 1992, with Umehara Takeshi welcomed as honorary village head). https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/碧南市哲学たいけん村無我苑 ↩
"Itō Shōshin, a Philosopher-Thinker Who Lived in the Homeland," City of Hekinan official (on Shōshin studying under Kiyozawa Manshi and advocating "selfless love," and piling up research and thought reaching beyond Buddhism even to Western philosophy). https://www.city.hekinan.lg.jp/soshiki/kyouiku/bunkazai/1_3/itoshoushin/4927.html ↩
"Hekinan City Philosophy-Experience Village Mugaen," Aichi Prefecture Lifelong-Learning Information System (on its three buildings — meditation corridor, training hall, citizens' tea room — and the serving of matcha at the standing-style tea seat). https://www.manabi.pref.aichi.jp/search/searchdtl.aspx?stdycd=1120601&ht=1&knd=6 ↩