A few years ago, a Japanese magazine called Appetite approached me about writing an article on Umi’s guiding philosophy. (For new readers, Umi is the noodle business I run.) The magazine was started by the same organization that founded the Tokyo Farmers Market, and they were curious about Japanese foods with a farmers market ethos in the U.S. A few weeks after I submitted my story, the magazine ceased publication. I had been almost too excited about seeing the article translated into Japanese, and I was sad to lose that experience.
I love the translation process. My friends Yuri and Saki and I went around and around with translator Makoto on the miso article I wrote for our Making Miso, Sharing Cultures book. My favorite conversations were about the word messy. I used it a few times at the end of the story. “My favorite foods, my favorite things, are made through closeness with other people and the natural world. We need to get messy together. I am certain that this is how the best stuff is made,” I wrote. I meant: I think it’s important for people to be physically and emotionally up in each other’s business sometimes, and that’s not always neat and clean.
In Japanese, there is no word that means “messy” the way I wanted to use it. There’s filthy, slovenly, sloppy, unclean. But messy—as in tangled and connected and a little uncontrolled—no. We capitulated and used the word in English. It ended up looking like this:
私の好きなもの、コト、食べ物は全て、自然や人との触れ合いを通して生まれる。Get messy together. その手を、全身を泥や粉、豆まみれにしながら出来上がる。そんな過程から、最高のものは出来上がると確信している。
Get messy together. I picture a bunch of hippies in a mud bath. I imagine the Japanese readers looking this up in their dictionaries and reading 汚い: dirty, filthy. Or 混雑: congestion, confusion. In Japan, cleanliness is more culturally ingrained than in the U.S.—it’s not so benign to be “messy.” And so, we never did quite solve that, which I think is a beautiful thing about languages: they do not correspond one to one. To learn a language is not to transpose your own with new sounds—it is to learn a different way of thinking and interacting with the world.
My friend Sasha shared this exceptional interview with poet/scholar/Classical hero of rearranged meaning Anne Carson, who had this to say about translation:
I like the space between languages because it’s a place of error or mistakenness, of saying things less well than you would like, or not being able to say them at all. And that’s useful I think for writing because it’s always good to put yourself off balance, to be dislodged from the complacency in which you normally go at perceiving the world and saying what you’ve perceived. And translation continually does that dislodging, so I respect the situation—although I don’t think I like it. It’s a useful edge to put yourself against.
Thinking about translation this way, as a (dare I call it) messy undertaking that moves you away from complacency and towards new perception, towards a poetry of mistakenness and its fruits, is in a sense what our business, Umi, is about too.
Recently, we were approached with the opportunity to apply for a Kiva loan. Kiva is a platform that allows small scale businesses to borrow small amounts of money at zero interest. The first step is like crowd-funding. We ask members of our community to loan us $25 and up. Once 50 people participate, a whole community of strangers kicks in. Umi used a Kiva loan at a crucial moment in our growth and paid it back. We now have the chance to do it again, to help grow our school food business. (It’s true, this is a not-so-sneaky fundraising request. See details at the end.)
I was working on the application a few weeks ago, and one question asked for my personal business story. This question wasn’t about how I will use the money or the familiar boilerplate about the business. It was about my relationship to the business. I found myself returning to the Appetite story I had written a long time ago. There are many ways to describe why Umi is meaningful to me. This is a central one. I thought I would share it now. Maybe, someday, this story will be translated into Japanese, and I will learn something completely new about it. For now, the translation is happening in the noodles themselves and that seems right.
It was a warm June day. My mom, my friend Ayla, and I were eating lunch on the side porch of my home in Portland, Oregon. For months, we had been discussing our budding plans to start a business making Japanese-inspired noodles and sauces. On this day, for the first time, my mom asked what the name of the business would be. Although I hadn’t thought about it before, the name came to me instantly. “I want to call it Umi,” I answered. Umi, like umami. Umi, like yummy. Umi, like you and me. But most of all umi, the Japanese word for ocean. I think of the West Coast and Japan as tied together through ribbons of water and wind. The Pacific is the physical link between our countries. Its currents represent the flow of ideas back and forth and the way these ideas churn and change. This business would be an expression of that dynamic connection.
I’ve studied Japanese since I was five years old and flown with and against the jet stream a dozen times to visit Japan. As a kid, I delighted in regional soft serve ice cream flavors—mikan citrus in Ehime, sumomo plum on Shodoshima—and eki-ben, train station bentos. For such a small land, there is so much culinary variance from place to place. During college, when I spent a year studying at Doshisha University in Kyoto, I started to recognize a mysterious and alluring depth lying within these differences. These foods held stories about the people and land.
As I continued to travel to Japan and make Japanese and Japanese American friends in Portland, I became fascinated by the way context, landscape, seasonality, history, and creativity overlap in Japanese food culture. Food is an expression of place and personality. This was the spirit I embraced when we launched Umi in 2016. Our first product was a ramen noodle made with local organic wheat and whole grain barley flour. Japanese visitors who came to our farmers market booth often asked, “is that soba?” It’s not surprising because the whole grain barley flour makes our noodles brown rather than white or yellow. But no, this noodle has the koshi-chewiness and slipperiness of ramen, but with a nuttier flavor and admittedly darker color.
I wanted the flavor of our noodles to hint at the character of where we live. We added whole grain barley because it grows well in western Oregon and is a good crop for organic farmers. I was engaging the idea that perhaps “authenticity”—what a tricky word to use—could be an approach to making food rather than the act of perfect replication. Within that approach we made a commitment to excellent texture and mouthfeel, but also to our region, its climate, its soil, and its farmers. Much as ramen changes from place to place in Japan, our noodles are distinct to the Pacific Northwest. We get our barley directly from farmers Del and Angie Blanchard of Myrtle Creek, Oregon who mill it to order.
When we served hot bowls of ramen at the farmers market a few years ago, we used produce grown by farmers working alongside us at the market. Our ramen wasn’t a second-rate version of great tonkotsu in Fukuoka or a dense and fudgy miso ramen in Sapporo—it was decidedly a Portland-style soup. The building blocks were all there: the broth had richness and a creamy mouth feel. It clung to the noodles as you slurped them. There was a slick of oil and a pickle. But you also got vegetables grown and picked that week, which revealed the effects of frost in winter, sun in summer, and all the rain shower variations in-between.
After the ramen, the next noodle we developed was yakisoba. It’s made from organic whole grain durum, a traditional pasta flour, and Edison, a winter wheat developed in nearby Washington State to grow well in our climate. Both flours are grown and milled by Camas Country Mill, a stone burr mill two hours south of Portland. Our yakisoba has a heartiness that matches well with tangy sauce, alongside a pleasing, familiar chew. More than a dozen Oregon school districts serve our yakisoba noodles at lunch, where they’re wildly popular with kids.
When yakisoba is served in public schools, students learn about Japanese food and flavors. But when they taste the barley flour, they are gaining a sense memory of Oregon that I hope will travel with them as they grow older, hidden in their personal suitcase of experiences. We are giving them both a taste of home and of Japan.
I believe that if we invest our food with an expression of place, that expression should include a commitment to that place: its health, its citizens, and its future. For us, that means Umi works directly with farmers who grow organic grain and nurture the soil. We are part of a movement to redefine food quality to include the backstory of the ingredients. We are excited to join the ongoing conversations between Japan and Oregon about food, quality, and our shared future across the ocean that connects us.
Support Our Kiva Loan
If you are in a financial position where you could loan $25 or more without stress, we would love your support of our Kiva loan! Kiva staff invited us to be the first business within its network to solicit $25,000! When we repay the loan, I will reach out with instructions on how to retrieve your money. We plan to use the funds to grow our school food business within Oregon and to our neighbors to the north and south, Washington and California. Thank you so much!