Yesterday, relying heavily on my big yellow kanji dictionary, I was able to deduce that wheat was indeed absent from the bottle of organic tamari sent to me by one of Sir's concerned Tokyo colleagues. I played around with the condiment for some time, inventing a tasty marinade and creating some original art in the process. I was quite satisfied by my efforts and retired contentedly for the evening.
This morning in my Inbox I found a message from Said Colleague, who had helpfully translated most of the label for me during the night (or during the day - I find it is extremely difficult to get my head around a thirteen-hour time difference). It turns out the label is packed with informational goodies of which I was previously ignorant, including not just the ingredients (organic soybeans and table salt among them), but also the use-by date and the manufacturer-recommended holding strategy. With so many of the difficult characters accounted for, I was able to see for myself that the bottle contained 360 milliliters of salty soy spirit.
What joy! This knowledge will be invaluable during my next Mitsuwa pilgrimage, when I will be able to read labels with the confidence of an old hand.
I also have more news to share about soba, which was proving an etymological challenge yesterday. My dictionary is written in tiny lettering on very fine paper, but having retrieved my reading glasses from their super-secret hiding place (super-secret because I can never remember where it is), I was able to solve the mystery. The suffix ba is the grain character that is pronounced mugi in the Japanese words for wheat and barley. The prefix is so (pronounced kyou in other contexts) which means buckwheat. So the characters literally mean buckwheat grain. I find this revealing, because it means that the ancient Japanese (unlike The Nutritionist) understood that buckwheat is its own particular thing in and of itself, rather than a gluten-filled cereal to be described in relation to wheat or barley (small grain or great grain, respectively). Isn't that interesting?
Here is a funny fact that you can can use as an ice-breaker at gala holiday events in the coming months. Because soba is a homonym for the word meaning 'next to' or 'nearby', buckwheat noodles are the traditional Japanese house-warming gift for welcoming new neighbours. It's a pun - get it? You can imagine, I'm sure, the impact my erudition has on lively party conversations.
Of course, this is all mere academic fluffery since soba are only about 80% gluten-free buckwheat flour, with the remaining binding provided by wheat flour. One hundred percent g/f varieties do exist, however, which I will be searching out at Mitsuwa, armed as I now am with all the labelling information I require.
I foresee a trip in November.
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