Verdant inexperienced okra, golden brown croissants, shiny dango, roasted fish: No, this isn’t a farmer’s market or a boulangerie or a Japanese evening market or a themeless ceremonial dinner; it’s a peek into Namiko Hirasawa Chen’s kitchen drawer, devoted to her meticulously organized assortment of hashi oki, or chopstick rests.
“I’ve preferred miniature hashi okis since my childhood,” says Chen. “I’ve been gathering them since school and my mother has a good looking assortment. At any time when we journey in Japan on household journeys, we all the time cease by an area ceramic retailer to purchase hashi oki.”
Chen’s assortment, collected over practically 30 years of cooking and touring backwards and forwards to Japan, is as huge as it’s eclectic, a summation of her journey because the prepare dinner behind JustOneCookbook, the web’s largest English-language Japanese cooking website. It’s additionally an inheritance, in additional methods than one, from her mom — the unique hashi oki collector within the household. If you happen to peruse the lots of of recipes that Chen has tablescaped on her web site, you’ll discover her images embody items from her assortment — a few of which she discovered, some she inherited from her mom — from the tiny ceramic eggplant she staged for her miso-glazed eggplant recipe to the shiitake mushroom hashi oki seen in her sukiyakidon recipe. For Chen, hashi okis are an unsung but important supporting participant in Japanese tablescaping, and a straightforward, inexpensive, and significant approach for hosts to raise their eating tables.
“I feel it’s one of the cheap investments out of the entire tableware that folks could make,” Chen explains. Whereas assertion tableware items can run a reasonably penny, hashi okis are remarkably inexpensive and approachable, with many priced round $10 in the USA — and even much less in Japan, as a result of favorable change charges. “Ever since I began running a blog, I’m all the time fascinated by how I can match my hashi oki with the dish based mostly on the colour, season, or meals,” Chen says. “It’s a small factor that makes an enormous distinction within the presentation of a meal.”
Whereas the cutlery rests you see in eating places and meals editorial spreads sometimes undertake a sterile, brutalist aesthetic designed with perform and minimalism in thoughts, hashi okis are, in distinction, delightfully whimsical. They’re often handmade by craftsmen in Japan and are endlessly diverse in kind, perform, setting and origin. Sometimes, they’re maximalist for the sake of being maximalist, regardless of serving a easy, sanitary perform: to carry the information of your used chopsticks. In an period of laissez-faire, anything-goes tablescaping, hashi okis are an ideal outlet for self-expression and experimentation.
For essentially the most half, Chen likes to match her hashi okis with the components within the dishes she makes, however she additionally likes mixing it up, letting her instinct information her.
Namiko Hirasawa Chen
“Hashi okis are positively vital for a correct arrange,” Chen says. “I choose issues that deliver me pleasure. For summer time, I’ll use a hashi oki formed like a fan or made from clear glass, but when I’m serving a vegetable-based dish, I’ll use a vegetable hashi oki.” Her absolute favorites are hashi okis formed like Mount Fuji.
Chen’s husband and enterprise associate, Shen Chen, has his personal choice. “My favourite is the iron tea kettle hashi oki, the tetsubin, that may match a set-up that entails tea,” he says. “There’s an indescribable happiness that comes with matching hashi oki with a meal. Hashi oki actually completes the story of the meal.”
Whereas hashi okis might be an limitless outlet for artistic tablescaping, there are limits towhat constitutes a conventional Japanese tablescape, Chen says. For instance, your chopsticks and hashi oki ought to by no means be positioned vertically in your set-up (“That’s an enormous no no,” says Chen) however as a substitute positioned “between your self and the plate horizontally.” A part of that is etiquette (“it’s impolite to level the soiled ideas of your chopstick to another person,” Chen explains) and context (“When chopsticks are vertical, it’s used for a funeral in Japan”), however there’s additionally a deeper historical past at play, one which dates again to hashi oki’s origins as a ceremonial device in seventh century Japan.
Lengthy earlier than they arrived on eating room tables, chopstick rests had been initially used by members of the clergy of Shinto shrines as a option to preserve the purity of their chopsticks when providing sacred meals to the gods. Known as mimikaware (耳土器), these clay rests had been unglazed and, like their namesake, ear-shaped, and utilized in a horizontal orientation with chopsticks to signify a sacred boundary between the divine realm of nature and the impure human world. Whereas mimikawarake advanced and within the Heian interval turned hashi oki for aristocrats and the imperial household, this sensibility lived on as chopstick rests arrived at eating tables for most people through the Meiji interval with the introduction of western-style communal eating to Japan. At present, when Japanese folks say “itadakimasu” earlier than a meal and elevate their chopsticks from their hashi oki, they invoke a bit of this historical past, breaking a symbolic barrier with the impure to devour a sacred reward from the divine: meals.
It’s this ethos — that eating and desk settings are deeply intentional acts, loaded with historical past, that means, and, sure, magnificence — that Chen inherited from her mom, and one which she hopes to impart to diners trying to form their very own tablescapes with hashi oki, whether or not it’s discovered on-line or at tableware shops throughout Japan. This sensibility is a big a part of the explanation why hashi okis are a distinguished featured class on the Chens’ tableware retailer, JOC Items, which they launched final September after visiting 15 kilns throughout Japan. The method of beginning the enterprise, together with a visit they made to kilns within the Aichi prefecture final February, furthered their appreciation for the craftsmanship and deep historical past behind one thing as easy and small as a hashi oki.
Jason Leung for Simply One Cookbook
“In Japan, there are totally different areas and totally different areas have totally different clay, which results in totally different types of ceramics and craftsmanship,” explains Chen. “We would like folks to know that while you see hashi oki, somebody put care into making this, forming the clay, portray it, glazing it, baking it within the kiln, and inspecting it. A lot is put into it in comparison with one thing that’s mass produced.”
If you happen to’re trying to purchase hashi oki of your personal, Chen recommends gathering particular person items slowly over time, whether or not that be in your travels or looking on-line. She believes that intentionality is essential to the enjoyment of hashi oki, and that your assortment ought to replicate your preferences and experiences. “I all the time choose issues I really feel linked to,” she says. “You probably have hashi oki you want, simply utilizing that each day, simply stopping and it, that can provide you a lot pleasure.”
For the Chens, every hashi oki is a reminiscence and a spot; a reminder to pause, decelerate, and admire the sacred in on a regular basis life, whether or not that be a meal or a visit. There’s the country, flat lotus root hashi oki they purchased throughout an eye-opening 2023 journey to the Imbe township within the Okayama prefecture, the birthplace of the millennium-old craft of Bizen pottery recognized for its earthy red-brown tone and texture. There are the numerous variations of ceramic hashi okis that they’ve present in shops throughout the Japanese countryside on summer time household journeys. After which, there are the hashi okis that began all of it: those that Chen grew up setting on the desk for her mom and carried together with her midway the world over in suitcases to the USA, the place they now sit in her kitchen drawer, reminding her of how far she’s come.