Wasabi cultivation is said to have begun in the Keicho years, around 1600, in Utogi, a settlement in what is now Shizuoka city. Someone took wild wasabi growing on Buttokusan and planted it beside a spring near the village. That is the whole of the origin, and the technique spread out from there across the rest of the country.

To make the pickle itself, the stems and the roots are chopped fine and then left overnight in salt. Sake lees are worked together with sugar and sake until they are smooth, the salted wasabi is wrung out in a cloth, and then the two are folded into each other.

Then it is sealed and left for two or three days, and only then does the heat appear. That surprised me. Fresh from the bowl it is mild. The pungency has to develop first, inside the closed container, in the dark, over a couple of days.

It became a Shizuoka souvenir through the railway. From 1889, when Shizuoka station opened, it was sold on the platform, and it has stayed on the souvenir shelf ever since. What it does when you eat it is not a tongue sensation at all. The heat goes upward and arrives behind the nose, and then it is gone almost immediately.