The locals of this area spent spring to autumn collecting food from the mountains and elds, and preserving what they didn’t immediately eat to store for the winter. Their ancestors in this region came up with systems for preserving food that were ingenious and impressive.
One of those is the daikon tsugura – a cold storage system for the white radish. Mr. Masamori Takizawa, a born and bred resident of Ketto, continues to make these daikon tsuguras today. Nobody taught him how make them. He just has the memory of his parents making them and works from that.
Every year, when the rice harvest has finished around the end of October/beginning of November, he weaves a cylindrical container out of straw which is known as a “tsugura”. Just before the snow falls he fills it with things like radishes and carrots. Then throughout the winter, the inside of this tsugura is the perfect environment for keeping things fresh, and the vegetables stored within will be eaten all the way until May the following spring. It is always placed close to the house so it is easy to access with no need to go digging through deep snow. When spring arrives it becomes possible to collect mountain plants again, and the tsugura is left in the fields to become fertiliser. The daikon tsugura is a special kind of YUKIGUNI cold storage for the winter months.
When he was younger he often headed to the city to try to make a living. “The outside world is tough. My home deep in the mountains is the best place to be!” he laughingly admits. From his cheerful expression you sense that he loves living in the land of deep snows.
Masanori Takizawa
In 1980 he started a soba restaurant called Kudari in his own home.It is an old farmhouse with an open hearth which serves local style soba noodles that use mountain burdock as the binding agent, along with home-grown vegetables, and wild plants.
