ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM 23 Left: Utagawa Kuniyoshi 歌川国芳 (Japanese, 1797–1861) SeaweedGatherers at Ōmori, fromthe series Famous Views of the Eastern Capital, ca. 1834 Color woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper MaryA. AinsworthBequest, 1950.533 Women in a small boat use chopsticks and a small rake to carefully gather a kind of edible seaweed used to make the popular dried, paper-like sheets of seaweed called nori 海苔. Nori is widely used, but most famous as the wrap for sushi. It is highly nutritious and packed with vitamins andminerals, especially iodine. During the Edo period, people in Ōmori, on the west coast of Edo Bay where the water was relatively shallow, developed a system to mass-produce nori. They harvested it from special beds where the seaweed, technically a kind of red algae, grew on bamboo poles or nets. It was then chopped into a paste and spread on small screens, where it dried into thin sheets. Right: UtagawaHiroshige I 初代目歌川広重 (Japanese, 1797–1858) Iwami Province: Mount Takazuno, Salt Beach, no. 43 fromthe series Pictures of Famous Places in the Sixty-oddProvinces, 1853 Color woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and color on paper MaryA. AinsworthBequest, 1950.1298 Salt was important not only as a seasoning but also in drying and preserving foods, particularly fish, for storage and transportation. The most common method of salt making in Edo-period Japan was by evaporating sea water, a process called agehama 揚げ浜, seen in this print. First, sections of beach sand are flattened with large rakes, seen here on the right. Buckets of sea water are spread over the area and left to dry in the sun. Then, the top layer of salty sand is carefully scraped off and put into a square, wooden tank, andmore sea water is added to raise the salt content. Here you can see these tanks, covered with little roofs, on the beach. This concentrated salty brine is then drained from the tank and put into a large cauldron, where it is slowly boiled, leaving salt crystals behind. The cauldrons are seen in the larger huts on the beach—note the piles of firewood next to them. This sea salt was made with tremendous variety throughout Japan, and its high mineral content was an added benefit to people’s health.
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