Fishing and " Tempura

Mamoru Doi, Professor, Institute of Astronomy

When I was a child, I went fishing every week. I would put on bait, cast a line, and head out into the blue ocean. As I waited patiently for the bite, I would get a thump, and then I would pull myself up. I was excited, wondering what kind of fish it would be until I saw the fish. When I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, I was fishing for a small Mebaru or Bella, and was casting the line just below the shoreline in a depth of only about one meter when I got a bite and caught a sea bream of about 25 cm. I remember my friend exclaiming, "Dekar! I remember my friend exclaiming, "Decar!

After moving to Tokyo, I took a break from fishing and devoted myself to astronomical observation. After the Subaru Telescope was completed, I started observing supernovae to measure the expansion of the universe. Supernovae are rarely found. He took photographs of a very large area, used a computer to find brightening objects, and made spectroscopic observations a few days later. I never know what kind of object it is until I find the spectra buried in the noise, and I feel the same excitement as when I go fishing. In 2016, Jiang Jian, then a first-year PhD student, found a supernova with the Subaru Telescope, a star with a dense core of carbon and oxygen surrounded by a thin film of helium gas, and found that the entire star exploded when a nuclear explosion first occurred in the thin film. Although this was not what we had originally intended, we were able to report it in Nature as a rare example of an explosion mechanism being understood. It was a sea bream caught by aiming at a small mebaru.

This summer, when the "nest egg" of the new Corona disaster had been settled, I went fishing with my family to the Miura Peninsula. It was very pleasant to cast a line in the sea breeze while looking out over the ocean. Of course, we were aiming for a big one, but all we caught were small fish less than 10 cm in length. My wife fried them because they had little flesh, but the light pink-colored small fish were very tasty. I looked up the name of the fish on the Internet and found that it was called "firefly octopus. In Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture, where I was born and raised, it is called harambo, and is the main ingredient in the specialty jakoten. It was a small fish, but I was moved by this unexpected encounter. I think that most of the research conducted in the sciences may be fishing.

In my hometown of Uwajima, they do not call it jakoten. There are two types: the darker colored "skin tempura" and the lighter colored "body tempura. Uwajima tempura is also available in Hongo. If you order "Uwajima Jakoten Udon" at "Kadoya Terrace" in the basement of the University of Tokyo Hospital, you will find a piece of skin tempura on the udon, and the more you chew it, the more the flavor of the harambo soaks into the udon. The fish paste is made from ground sea weeds and egg whites, and is thin but chewy. Kadoya Sanjo Conference Hall's "Kadoya Sanjo Tei," which was closed due to the new Corona, will be open for business again in October 2022. One piece of skin tempura is served separately at this restaurant, but if you order the slightly more expensive "Uwajima Sea bream meshi gorgeous set," you can have a piece of the body tempura as well. Incidentally, "Kadoya Shokudo" was originally located near JR Uwajima Station, and I sometimes went there with my family when I was a child. However, what I was looking forward to was not the tempura or the taimeshi, but the melon cream soda.

Figure: Skin tempura (right) and body tempura

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Published in the January 2023 issue of Faculty of Science News