Personally, I’m not very familiar with this region. When I was in high school, I went to Hagi, Tsuwano, and Hiroshima on a school trip. Hagi is a town in Yamaguchi Prefecture and famous for its pottery. I remember we drew pictures on pottery to make our own tea cups. Tsuwano is a cozy castle town in Shimane Prefecture, where we cycled along a waterway with beautiful carps swimming in it. It was the nicest place in the trip. Hiroshima is a big city where an atomic bomb fell on August 6, 1945. During the school trip, I couldn’t see exhibits in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum very well because we didn’t have much time and the museum was very crowded. After grown up, I read a series of comic books “Barefoot Gen” by Keiji Nakazawa who survived the bomb as a child. He depicted his experiences so vividly that I was absorbed in the books though I felt numb sometimes to learn the reality during the war and the bombing.
Among the five prefectures in Western Honshu, I have never been to Tottori Prefecture, but I’d like to visit Mizuki Shigeru Road in Sakaiminato someday. Mizuki Shigeru is a cartoonist known for his masterpiece Gegege-no-Kitaro (鬼太郎) with many yokai or monsters. It has been animated for several times since I was little. Along this road, there are 177 bronze statues of monsters, and I think it may be exciting to stroll there during a summer night or while it is getting dark.
Though Western Honshu is far from here, you can still have their traditional sweets easily. In the basement of Entetsu Department Store, there is a corner selling sweets from all over Japan. Today, I went there to see if there were kibidango from Okayama Prefecture. I think most Japanese people have heard about it before as it was told in one of the most famous Japanese folk tales Momotaro (Peach Boy). Momotaro is a boy born from a peach, who went to Demon’s Island and fought with the demon. On his way there, he gave kibidango to a dog, monkey, and pheasant. They followed Momotaro to Demon’s Island, and with their help, Momotaro beat the demon and took the demon’s treasures home.
Kibidango literally means a millet dumpling. On the shelf of sweets from Chugoku or Western Honshu, there were four kinds of kibidango. They were all from Koeido, an old confectionary store founded in 1856.
I chose the original type made from sugar, starch syrup, glutinous rice flour, maltose, wheat flour, rice flour, proso millet flour, and trehalose. On the package, there were pictures of characters in Momotaro painted by Gomi Taro, a famous illustrator for children’s books.
In the box, there was a leaflet describing kibidango and Momotaro.
There were ten kibidango separately wrapped with paper. I could find all the characters in the story, except the monkey.
This is kibidango. It was pale yellow and soft. Despite the wild image of the story of Momotaro, this kibidango had a refined taste. I slightly recognized the flavor of millet, but it was too sweet for me.
I turned the box upside down to check the ingredients again. Then I found something that I had never seen before on a Japanese food package. A HALAL mark!
In Western Honshu, they have also prepared a guide for Muslim people in addition to the vegetarian guide. As for foods for travelers from abroad, they seem to make much more efforts than people in Shizuoka Prefecture. I imagined how convenient it would be if vegetarian/vegan marks would be prepared soon and come in use.
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