Japan's Chestnut Culture

About this book

Every other fruit guide treats the chestnut as a paragraph. This book treats it as what Japan knows it to be: a whole culture of groves, skins and patience — a fruit guarded by a spiked bur, a hard shell called the demon skin, and a bitter inner skin that built an entire peeling culture.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — What It Is, Roots & Place, Taste & Texture, and How to Enjoy & Where to Find It. The named varieties, from national standard Tsukuba and first-of-season Tanzawa to the giant Ganne and peel-by-hand Porotan; the great districts — Ibaraki and Kasama, Tamba, Obuse, Nakatsugawa; the craft of the grove year, from the float test to machine and cottage peeling; the hot chestnut in all its forms — yaki-guri, amaguri, kuri-meshi, shibukawa-ni; the sweet counter, from pure kuri-kinton to Japan's own mont blanc; the whole tree at work in shochu, honey, tannin, timber and charcoal; the chestnut in proverb, haiku, festivals and the schoolboy haircut named after its bur; and a full practical kit for visiting, buying, storing and peeling.

No grower or district is ranked and no shop's prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; varieties, districts and customs endure. No health effects are claimed, and old beliefs are labelled as beliefs. A glossary and theme indexes close the book. Every entry runs to more than 200 words of its own — in fact more than 400 — with no sentence repeated anywhere in the book.

日本で作られた本です: Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. / Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. / Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.