savor the moment

A slowed-down approach to food has taken hold in bucolic northern Kyushu, offering a new way to access the mellowest of Japan's main islands

- Maggie Shipstead

One February afternoon, I pulled on rubber boots and followed the writer and photographer Prairie Stuart-Wolff into a weed-choked gully not far from her rural home in northern Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. "The inoshishi got here first," Prairie said, using the Japanese word for wild boar. She pointed to an area of uprooted soil. Our porcine friends were after grubs, but we were hunting for fukinoto, or butterbur, a bitter leafy perennial and early harbinger of seasonal change. Clambering around a thickety slope, we picked our fill of vibrantly green fukinoto buds; the best would be set aside for tempura, while the others would be blanched and chopped into miso paste to make a relish. "Fukinoto is considered the first taste of spring," Prairie said. "There might still be snow on the ground, and the wind may still be blowing, but the earth is waking up. When I moved here, it was the first thing I ever foraged. I feel in a way that fukinoto is a symbol of my life in Japan."