A Journey to Mikawa

A bottle of mirin and a jar of dry-fermented beans do not look like they belong on the same shelf. Drive an hour and a half southeast of Nagoya, along the shore of Mikawa Bay, and it turns out they were always neighbors.

This is old Tokugawa country — the shogun who unified Japan was born here — and it is also a landscape built for fermentation: rice paddies, soybean fields, and salt water within a short cart ride of each other for four hundred years. Loop through it in a single day and you pass through three different kinds of patience: a mirin aged for two years behind a 300-year-old black wall, a bean cured in salt and sun in a fishing town, and a miso pressed under three tons of stone through two winters. Come with us.

1. Hekinan — the mirin that reached London before most Japanese food did

On the coast of Mikawa Bay, in what is now Hekinan City, a shipping merchant named Ishikawa Hachiroemon Nobuatsu decided the local climate suited something better than cargo. In 1772, he began brewing mirin — the sweet, low-alcohol rice wine that Japanese cooking quietly runs on — and carried it himself, on his own boats, up to the Shinkawa docks of Edo. Eel and soba cooks in the capital liked what he sent well enough to start calling it simply "Mikawa mirin." The name stuck to the brand itself: Kokonoe.

The kura still standing on the property is older than the company that fills it: built in 1706, moved plank by plank to its current site in 1787, and still finished in the same black-lacquered board siding after roughly 300 years.

A signboard still hanging inside is easy to walk past, but it holds a detail worth pausing on: this mirin — sold abroad under the export label "Best Mirin, Kokonoe-Sakura," brewed by H. Ishikawa, Ohama, Mikawa, Japan — won a Grand Prize at the 1909 Seattle exposition and a Gold Medal at the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition in London, held at Shepherd's Bush; the diploma for it still survives. A small brewery on Mikawa Bay was already reaching Western tables more than a hundred years before "Japanese food" became a phrase anyone in America used casually. Long before sushi crossed the Pacific, this rice wine already had.

The brewery opens to the public just once a year, at its kura-opening. Our guide was a young brewer who does the pressing herself, and she explained it the way you explain something you love: the aged moromi is ladled into cotton sake bags and stacked, and for the first stretch the mirin is pressed out by nothing but the bags' own weight. Only later are weights added, and the amber liquid comes slowly, over days, in the method they call the Sase press. No one hurries it.

We never saw her do this work. We didn't need to. When she reached up to show us the stacked bags, the proof was on her arms — muscle in places arms don't usually carry it. The press works by weight, and so does she. Sweetness this deep is not squeezed out of anything; it is lifted into being, batch by batch, by someone who plainly loves what she makes.

The scale stays with you, too. A single steaming begins with 2,400 kilograms of glutinous rice — more than the average person in Japan eats in three decades, all of it destined for one round of mirin. And nothing is let go of at the end: the sweet lees left in the pressing bags become the beds for Moriguchi-zuke and Nara-zuke pickles, and a small restaurant beside the brewery cooks with the ferments.

Look down as you cross the grounds and you find narrow trolley rails still set into the earth. Mirin once left here in large ceramic jars — mirin-game and itto-game, thrown in nearby Tokoname — rolled from the great kura down to the harbor in front, bound for Edo.

We tasted several mirins that day, chilled, in small glasses. Real hon-mirin drinks like a fine, quietly sweet rice wine — because that is what it is: rice, koji, and time. Most bottles labeled "mirin" abroad are mirin-style seasonings, built to imitate the sweetness without the years. Wherever you shop, look for the word hon — "true" — and an ingredient list short enough to say aloud.

Mirin, like sake, carries enough alcohol that United States import rules keep it off this shelf for now — the same reason you won't find sake here either. But the story, unlike the bottle, travels anywhere. We left thinking mostly about patience: two years between a rice paddy and a finished bottle, and 250 years between one merchant's hunch about the local air and a signboard boasting of London.

2. Toyohashi — the last hamanatto house in town

Hamanatto tastes like miso and soy sauce concentrated into a single bean — deep and savory, its umami and all five basic tastes pressed into something small enough to hold between two fingers. It belongs to a much older family of foods than its modest jar suggests — fermented whole soybeans, a style thought to have reached Japan well over a thousand years ago, likely carried back by Buddhist monks returning from China, kin to Chinese douchi and to the temple natto still made at Kyoto's Daitoku-ji. Local memory in Toyohashi also links the taste to Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was born nearby and is said to have kept a jar close at hand — a piece of local lore, not a health claim; we like it simply because it is true to the place.

What is certain is more recent and more concrete: Kunimatsu Honten was founded in 1884, and today it is the only house left in Toyohashi still making hamanatto by hand — local grown soybeans, salt, and koji, fermented and aged for roughly half a year, sun-dried, then finished with a seasoning of soy sauce and ginger. No shortcuts, no additives, and a small family business carrying all of it forward. Even in Japan, hamanatto has stayed mostly a local specialty.

It is, more precisely, a family in which the women carry the craft — we heard its story from the eldest daughter. Marriages here have folded food into food: one bride came from a family that makes salt on the Seto Inland Sea, and that same salt still goes into the beans today. None of this is a marketing decision. It is simply a household that has never stopped taking food seriously.

Whole over a bowl of ochazuke, or crumbled and minced into a sauce, hamanatto moves easily between food and seasoning — closer to Japan's anchovy than anything else on the shelf, adding a depth and umami that is hard to place until you know it is there.

From our Pantry

• Hamanatto from Toyohashi — dry-fermented soybeans from the last house of its kind in Toyohashi.

Taste it at home

Mince it fine and let it melt into a tomato sauce the way an anchovy would, or try our Hamanatto Bolognese — Japan's "Anchovy" of Umami. A pinch also disappears nicely into a bowl of plain rice. For something on the sweeter side, bake it into our Hamanatto and Mixed Nut Biscotti.

3. Okazaki — miso pressed under three tons of stone

We have told the full story of Hatcho miso before — how the name comes from a single street, eight chō (about 870 metres) west of Okazaki Castle, and how Maruya's soybean-only miso ages for at least two summers and two winters under a hand-stacked cone of river stones. Here we will keep to what a single afternoon on-site added to that story.

Maruya names its own method in specific terms: barrel-packed at the lowest moisture the miso can still be made with; the stones stacked into a cone by hand, roughly three tons of river stone balanced on judgment alone; and more than two years of natural fermentation, unhurried through two summers and two winters. Nothing goes into the vat but soybeans, salt, and water — after that, no human hand pushes the process along, only the seasons. Standing inside either of the two kura the brewery still calls East and North, the stone cones on top of the vats are less like a photograph and more like weather: they fill the whole roofline, mound after mound, in half-light.

The barrels themselves are built to outlast the people who fill them — on average, about a century of service. Maruya still keeps roughly 200 of them, the oldest dating to 1864. But even a hundred years runs out eventually: in 2010, the brewery commissioned its first new barrel in 78 years. Their own reasoning was simple — a tradition can't survive on one company's effort alone. It takes the many craftspeople who support it, and one way to keep their trade alive is to keep giving the barrel-makers something to build.

Outside on the street, a row of large cedar barrels rests beside the piles of stones — as much a part of the scenery here as the buildings themselves.

From our Pantry

• Maruya Hatcho Miso Mikawa, GI-Certified — dark, dense, and stone-aged, the miso that gave the street its name.
• Maruya Organic Hatcho Miso — the same two-year process, from organic soybeans.

The full story of Hatcho miso — the eight chō, the stones, the two winters — lives on the Miso Across Japan page.

Bring Mikawa home

Mikawa does not fit neatly into one flavor. It is a rice wine too strong for this shelf, a bean cured into something closer to a seasoning than a food, and a miso dense enough to season a stew rather than a soup. What ties them together is not a taste but a habit: build something slowly, in one place, for a very long time, and let the place end up inside it.

Try hamanatto minced over a bowl of plain rice one night, and a spoonful of Hatcho miso stirred into a stew the next. Both are dark, both are savory, both come from the same soybean turned two different ways — one dry, one wet, both from a stretch of coast you could drive across in an afternoon.

Come with us. One road, three kura, and a very long patience.

Continue the journey

• Miso Across Japan — one ferment, five regional landscapes, including the full story of Maruya's Hatcho miso.
• A Journey to West Tokyo — another single-day loop, this one through the sake breweries and craftspeople west of the capital.
• A Journey to Shizuoka — tea country on the slopes of Mt. Fuji.