Hiroshima Okonomiyaki

Since I’ve been in Japan, I find that the more I learn about the country in terms of its language, traditions, and histories, the richer my experience becomes (A good place to start for anybody already in Japan is A Traveller’s History of Japan). Japan’s history is quite impressive if not solely for the fact that ever since people came to these islands, they’ve pretty much always been Japanese. What’s more interesting is when this history reveals itself embedded with the lifestyles and the people that I see everyday. Of importance to many Japanese in Japan is Hiroshima and its regional cuisine, okonomiyaki.

A student was in my office the other day for help in preparation for an interview to get into university – many good schools have interviews in both English and Japanese as part of their acceptance requirements. She also asked me if I learned much about Japan in Canadian schools. I told her that in the basic social studies courses that we take up to grade 11, all of our history focuses mostly on Canada. In Grade 12, we have the option of taking a world history class, but this focuses mostly on the west, and the only real mention of Japan is that the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the country. It wouldn’t be until university where I learned more about Imperial Japan before the war, and a bit more about the country’s broader history.

Anyway, the student I was speaking to was very glad to hear that we learn anything about Japan at all – especially about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She said that she has heard that there are many young people of this generation, many of whom live in these two cities, who are not aware of these significant events in their country’s history.

It’s been almost 65 years since the war, but I find it hard to believe this part of the country's history could be lost in the memories of the population – especially when there are people still alive who actually have first hand memories of the bombings.

It was last night at an overnight teacher party where I spoke with a teacher who is from Hiroshima. He is a proud Hiroshimite, or Hiroshimian -- or maybe these types of terms don’t apply to Japanese names, and he is often very privy to the differences between the cultures in Northern and Southern Japan. I told him that I went to Hiroshima over the winter vacation and that I had gone to Miya Jima and the Peace Memorial Museum. He sort of brushed these off as being obvious and was more interested in whether we tried any of Hiroshima’s okonomiyaki restaurants, which is a cuisine that Hiroshima is known for.

Okonomiyaki is a Japanese style pancake that usually is made with some combination of yakitori noodles, cabbage, fried egg, seafood, sliced meat, tuna flakes and okonomiyaki sauce – I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

I told him with brimming confidence that in fact, we had gone to the famous Okonomimura, which is a building in downtown Hiroshima that houses about 20 or so restaurants – all of them specializing in okonomiyaki. The building itself is an experience. After getting off the elevator at each floor, there are several small shops that all look the same – they have a large stainless steel grill down the middle of the restaurant where on one side, the chefs prepare the food and on the other, customers are served and eat strait off of the grill. Each place also has its owners all competing for customers and aggressively trying to seat people in their restaurant. Janice, her dad, and I had a great time.

My teacher however, was not so enthusiastic. He was a bit upset that I had not told him I was going to Hiroshima because he would have recommended that we not go to okonomimura, which is fairly well known among people who live in Hiroshima as a place for low quality, and inauthentic okonomiyaki. The way to tell okonomiyaki that is prepared well from the stuff that is prepared not so well is that you do not need to use chopsticks to eat it. When it is prepared well, you are provided with a metal spatula-type instrument; if the chef has prepared the dish properly, one should be able to cut the pancake and eat it with the spatula without it falling apart. I had to admit that after cutting my pancake in Hiroshima, I had to use chopsticks to pick at the sloppy mess in front of me.

He also went on to tell me that okonomiyaki is an important food in Hiroshima because during the war, and especially after the bombing of Hiroshima, staple foods such as rice, were very scarce. Instead, people had to find other ways to sustain themselves and okonomiyaki ended up being a nutritious alternative to more traditional Japanese foods. It was his grandfather who was around to actually see one of the B-29 bombers fly overhead of the city and the subsequent mushroom cloud of August 6, 1945. The man lived for several years – until his grandson was about 18 or 19, but he also carried around a medical card that granted him free access to medical treatment anywhere in Japan due to the radiation he was exposed to in Hiroshima. Although many thousands of people died instantly in the blast of the atomic bomb, just as many people died in the weeks after from radiation exposure. I find it a bit eerie that on August 7th, the day after the bomb, many people mourn the deaths of people suffering from this radiation, while I simultaneously celebrate the day of my birth.

My teacher has yet to find any good okonomiyaki in Iwaki, but he said that a childhood friend of his has a restaurant in Fukushima city. Whenever he craves okonomiyaki, this is where he goes to have it served properly. Someday he will return to Hiroshima because as he said, he is the first son in his family and it will be his responsibility to care for his parents when they grow old and to take care of the family estate.