Sushi Traditions

One day several women from the Miyama agricultural cooperative remembered that farther up the valley, at the end of the road, a group of farm wives was making nare zushi. As we piled into a car to drive up, Yasuko tried to fill me in, “It’s too hard to explain nare zushi in English. It’s an old tradition. You have to see it.”

On our way, we stopped in to watch mochi being made at a traditional mochi bakery, then wound past a hamlet with steep thatched-roof houses and patches of ripening millet and up a narrow tree-lined road. At last we stopped outside a low modern building, the community center for this end of the valley. Inside, several women were fanning huge wooden tubs of cooked rice. A beautiful fine-boned old woman, who was clearly in charge of operations, greeted us and then went on with her work.