Ginger Brooks Takahashi: Perilla People

The smell of perilla floated through the village

Prologue

Ginger, it’s been a while.¹

I see you’re researching what happened in former Manchuria. I went there once with my father, so I’ll tell you what I know. My father always said he wanted to go back to Manchuria, where he used to live. So about 18 years ago, in 2007, we went to Manchuria together. Since it was in China, we had a travel agency arrange an itinerary for us, with a guide who spoke Japanese.

Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. My grandparents’ family moved to Manchuria around 1940 when my grandfather got a job on the Manchuria Railway. They lived in a place called Jinzhou, in company housing. When we visited, 62 years had passed since the end of the war. The company housing building was still standing and Chinese people were living there. It was a sturdy, beautiful brick house with a stove in the middle of the living room when my father lived there. While people in mainland Japan were struggling with food shortages during the war, my father and his family lived comfortably. The Manchuria Railway company housing was large and had many units, so my father didn’t know exactly where they lived.

They stayed in Manchuria until the end of the war in 1945, so I think it was about four or five years.

After Japan lost the war, my grandparents’ family was able to board a ship from a place called Huludao and return to Kyushu, Japan. My father was 14 or 15 years old, and your mother was about 2 or 3 years old.

Because they lived near the sea and our grandfather worked for the Manchuria Railway, they were able to get information quickly and board ships returning to Japan after the war was over. Those who lived further inland were taken prisoner by the Soviet army, died on the way south to board the ships, got separated from their children, and some parents killed their own children because they were a burden. I don’t know what would have happened to my father or your mother if they had lived further inland. They might have become orphans left behind in China.

I had heard from a young age that my father had been in Manchuria, but after going there with him I learned a lot and became interested in it. As my father grew older, his memories of his time in Manchuria grew stronger, and he said he wanted to go to Jinzhou again. He wasn’t able to bring anything back from Manchuria, and he doesn’t have any photographs from that time.

My father passed away in 2020, and I can no longer listen to his stories, so I now realize that I should have listened to him more. I think my father would be happy to know that he is still alive and well and you are interested in our family’s past in Manchuria.

Coming to understanding

Growing up, we always had a spot in our yard where we grew shiso. We moved a lot, but it was always there. We brought the seeds with us. It felt like an articulation of a connection to my Japanese ancestors. I don’t remember any Asian grocery stores in the places where we lived, until we moved to Oregon and then we would drive up to Portland and stuff our faces with sushi and my mom would buy all kinds of ingredients to make special Japanese food.

My birth certificate lists my mother’s birthplace as “Red China”. This filled me with questions, because my mother is Japanese and grew up in Japan. She told me the story of her family’s journey from Japan to Manchuria, on a boat. She wasn’t born yet, but she remembered the story her mother told her, of travelling with a child, and being pregnant, and carrying a pot of rice for the journey. They went there because her father worked for the railroad.

Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and occupied it until 1945.

My mother was born in 1943. The Japanese settlers who went to Manchuria to develop the area as part of national policy after the creation of Manchukuo in 1932 were called the Manchuria-Mongolian Development Group. They were often farmers sent to rural areas to cultivate land and secure Japanese control.

My grandfather went to work on the Southern Manchuria railway, so he wasn’t technically considered a settler, but they were part of Japan’s settler-colonial presence in Manchuria. When I ask my cousin about these distinctions, she is clear that our family were not settlers, but I beg to differ.

In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, she writes about her mother who was born in Manchuria, during the Japanese occupation. She writes, “You are not Chinese. You are Korean. But your family moved here to escape the Japanese occupation. … You live in a village where the other Koreans live. Same as you. Refugees. Immigrants. Exiles.”

Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945.

I did not grow up with this knowledge. I think a lot of Japanese people are hidden or hide from this history. In college, I remember learning about the so-called comfort women from Korea. And when I was a student in Kyoto, my best friend Taka-chan told me in confidence that she was Korean when she had gotten the opportunity to do a study abroad in Seoul, which she was immensely excited about. I don’t think I really understood the historical context for her secret then.

I read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko in 2019. Around that time, I attended KojiCon, a conference on Koji, the fungi that is used to create miso, and soy sauce, and other important fermented foods. At the conference, historian Victoria Lee presented on the impact of Japan’s occupation on Korea’s fermentation culture and how the occupation made home brewing and the wide range of fermented food practices illegal. I learned about the tradition of brewing makkeoli and even made some of my own.

Back to perilla

I’m thinking about naming, translating, and misunderstandings. I’ve been interviewing people with relationships to perilla—seed savers, farmers, and cooks, who are mostly Korean and Japanese. I’ll play some of these clips now. They’ll help to shed some light on this shared plant.

Ken Suzuki and Ryo Kobayashi:
Chotto matte, anoo, sono shiso no korean to do iu kankei nan desu ka?
The relationship between the shiso and the kkaennip?
Kkaennip?
Yeah, kkaennip is the name in Korean.
Because it’s the same—they’re cultivars or cultigens of the same plant. The two plants are related.
I never heard that from Korean people. Korean people usually use leaf of sesame.
Ah, sesame, goma.
Yeah in English its called sesame leaf, but actually it’s perilla frutescens, it’s related to shiso,
Hmmmmm. But, but, it tastes different and it smells different.
It tastes different.
Yes
The leaf is a little bit bigger, it’s a little bit thicker
Yeah, yeah

Sunni Park: I don’t remember when I learned the name perilla. I think I figured it out because I was reading, like the package at a store, and it said “sesame leaves”, and I was like, sesame leaf? Like what? This is not sesame. Oh, why is it called sesame leaves? This doesn’t make sense. But kkaennip actually means sesame leaf. Like the literal words because kkaennip, that gets, sesame. But the name for perilla, which we call kkaennip, which is the name of the leaf is the plant is called ddeulkkae, which means wild sesame. So, there’s, there’s wild sesame and regular sesame. But because the way it’s like, the name was like abbreviated to be kkaennip instead of ddeulkkaennip. So the name for the leaf directly translates to sesame leaf, but it’s wild sesame leaf and wild sesame is perilla. I don’t even know if, like actual sesame leaves can be eaten, like, I mean, it’s a completely different plant. It has nothing to do with perilla.

Will you tell me about your earliest memory of Perilla?
Eungie Joo: Oh, sure. When we were young, Perilla was something that, you know, I think a lot of Korean immigrants grew. And so my mom was in—She did her PhD at Cornell. And so when we were young, we lived in Ithaca. And I do think that somebody was growing Perilla there, because I remember having perilla leaves and there were many things we couldn’t get in the US.
Yeah, especially seasonally. And, like, sometimes we couldn’t get napa cabbage. And, but but I remember maybe it was only summertime that we got perilla leaves and it was something that was, you know, probably only eaten fresh with like, with, like ssamjang, which is, you know, like a doenjang, you know, that kind of a paste—fermented soybean paste that has also garlic and a little bit of gochujang and like something that’s a little spicy and salty.

Kristyn Leach: I grew it just kind of like in my own backyard for a couple years. And yeah, I mean, it was very easy to just, like, be really enamored with it because it’s like, just so interesting and so beautiful. And then I do feel like after bringing it to Korean community functions, really saw like this kind of like visceral transport that people had as soon as they encountered it again. My experience with it was first was just like a plant person and really appreciating it and feeling like I could sit there and kind of glean little bits of information of just like that curiosity of like—why is this so particular? Why do people feel like this is like there is like a really particular Korean form for this plant that is not able to be substituted with other types of perilla? It felt like a very sort of like devoted take on it.

I was always struck by the fact that outside of the Kitazawa catalog, like when you see Perilla, which increasingly is like introduced by a lot of other seed companies in the US, it all gets called shiso. So it’s interesting because if you’re Korean or Japanese or Vietnamese, you don’t conflate all of that as like one thing. And I think even like with Western taxonomy, it is considered just like a single species genus. But in East Asia, they’re classified into chemotypes. So there’s like no less than five different subspecies of perilla, at least in how it’s talked about, because the chemical constituents are just really different. Practitioners of traditional medicine care a lot about this because the applications are really different depending on the form of Perilla. But I do think it’s like a funny thing because it ended up feeling like the weird like PSA that I got dragged into giving all the time with other farmers was like, they call it shiso. Oh, it’s not shiso actually, now I’m not going to try to get everyone to speak Korean and say kkaennip properly, just say it’s just perilla.

The smell of perilla floated through the village

The seeds were saved in the fall
collected around the harvest moon
The stalks cut in the fields and laid
in a shady dry place, with a cloth
underneath to catch any jumpy
seeds

Vigorously shake those stalks into buckets
on a dry day
We know those seeds that fly out
of the bucket will mean
little perilla plants coming up here
next year
I don’t mind.
There’s never
too much
perilla.

You take the bucket of seeds
to a little shop.
When you open the door
you are inside the toasty seed.
They have a roaster grinder press
where you pour your carefully collected seeds,
And out comes
liquid gold

For drizzling over
your vegetables your porridge
So you can taste the nourishing
warmth of the sun any time of year

Did my ancestors grow perilla too?
How many different kinds
were grown in Manchuria?
Zǐsū, deulkkae, shiso,
kept separate but
together they were