is a salted, dried and fermented fish that is produced in the

Izu Islands The are a group of volcanic islands stretching south and east from the Izu Peninsula of Honshū, Japan. Administratively, they form two towns and six villages; all part of Tokyo Prefecture. The largest is Izu Ōshima, usually called simply � ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

. It has a pungent smell and is similar to the fermented Swedish herring surströmming. Niijima kusaya

Taste

Though the smell of kusaya is strong, its taste is quite mellow. Kusaya is often eaten with Japanese

sake Sake, also spelled saké ( ; also referred to as Japanese rice wine), is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Despite the name ''Japanese rice wine'', sake, and in ...

shōchū is a Japanese distilled beverage. It is typically distilled from rice, barley, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, or brown sugar, though it is sometimes produced from other ingredients such as chestnut, sesame seeds, potatoes, or even carrots. ...

, particularly a local drink called ''Shima Jiman'' (literally ''island pride''). The brine used to make kusaya, which includes many vitamins and

organic acid An organic acid is an organic compound with acidic properties. The most common organic acids are the carboxylic acids, whose acidity is associated with their carboxyl group –COOH. Sulfonic acids, containing the group –SO2OH, are ...

s such as

acetic acid Acetic acid , systematically named ethanoic acid , is an acidic, colourless liquid and organic compound with the chemical formula (also written as , , or ). Vinegar is at least 4% acetic acid by volume, making acetic acid the main componen ...

propionic acid Propionic acid (, from the Greek words πρῶτος : ''prōtos'', meaning "first", and πίων : ''píōn'', meaning "fat"; also known as propanoic acid) is a naturally occurring carboxylic acid with chemical formula CH3CH2CO2H. It is a li ...

and

amino acid Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha ...

s, contributes much nutritional value to the resulting dried fish.

History

Kusaya originated in the

, probably on

Niijima is a volcanic Japanese island administered by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. It is one of the Izu Seven Islands group of the seven northern islands of the Izu archipelago, and is located approximately south of Tōkyō and south of S ...

, where, during the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was character ...

people used to earn a living through salt making. Villagers paid taxes to the government with the salt they made, and as taxes were high, salt for fish-curing was used frugally. The same salt was used many times for this purpose, resulting in a pungent dried fish, which was later called kusaya. The resulting tea-colored, sticky, stinky brine was passed on from generation to generation as a family heirloom. Though kusaya is made on several of the Izu Islands today, it is said that kusaya from Niijima has the strongest odor.

Making kusaya

Mackerel scad (''Decapterus macarellus''), flying fish and other similar species are used to make kusaya. The fish is washed in clear water many times before being soaked in a brine called ) for eight to twenty hours. This mixture has a salt concentration of 8%, compared to the concentration of 18% to 20% in common fish curing brines. After this process, the fish are laid out under the sun to dry for one or two days. The Niijima-Mura Museum on Niijima has several installations, including a video, on the making of kusaya.

References

External links

Niijima Fish Processing Co-operative

Niijima-mura Museum

Kusaya photos
{{Dried fish Dried fish Fermented fish Izu Islands Japanese seafood

Taste

History

Making kusaya

See also

References

External links