Sushi fit for a princess

The sunshine seems to have realised it was too early to be out and about and has hidden itself behind a cloud. Cold, drizzly days passing along rather glumly one after the other. March 3rd in Japan is 'Girls' Day' (or Dolls' Festival - hina matsuri), a heteronormative ritual involving lots of dolls, much pink and red in general, and also, for some reason, a dish called chirashi-zushi, or 'scattered sushi'.

The white rice is prepared as it is for making any other sushi by being mixed lightly with rice-vinegar, sugar and salt. To this toasted white sesame seeds are added. One can also slice up shiitake mushrooms and carrots very finely and mix them into the rice but I put them on top, along with dashimaki tamago (rolled egg) cut into thin ribbons and fresh salmon. In England we don't eat nanohana (rape flowers), used in this dish (abroad they are mainly used for oil), but they are very tasty. They are also quite good lightly cooked and mixed with dashi-joyu (dashi stock plus soy sauce) and sugar. Chirashi-zushi is, like nabe, a rather casual dish in that to an extent one can mix and match ingredients according to one's likes and dislikes, or to utilise regional specialities. Unfortunately I couldn't find denbu sakura (ground cod coloured with red food colouring) and so my sushi was not as pink as might be appropriate for the annual girly festival, though we tried to jazz up the table a bit with some hina matsuri decorations a friend had given me. I served the chirashi-zushi with sliced avocado, soy sauce and wasabi on the side.

The March 3rd traditional celebrations - the dressing and display of a rather ostentatious stepped arrangement of princess-like dolls in Heian period court costumes - the composition of which portrays an aristocratic hierarchy - looks incredibly pretty, elegant and innocent. Japanese dolls are indeed beautiful, and I intend to see this exhibition of them next week at Hokyoji (also known as The Doll Temple, for its collection and the funerary services it offers for discarded dolls). But doll culture in Japan is, to me anyway, riddled with ideological strangeness (well, the gender-role institutionalisation is creepy enough). The idea that a doll is imbued with a living spirit is par for the course when you consider the strands of animistic beliefs in Japanese culture as a whole. But what is quite distinctive in the work of many modern doll-makers is the sexualization of female children. Throw in the animistic bit and it gets disturbing. I wish Girls' Day and Boys' Day would get together and make 'Persons' Day'... one day. In this futuristic gender-neutral world of mine we’ll keep the traditional dishes though - I was really pleased with my chirashi-zushi, and I love these photos I got of Yumika tucking in and looking so delighted.