Camellia Tea Ceremony
🌊🍙MOTHER OF THE SEA🍘✨
Kathleen Mary Drew-Baker (キャスリーンメアリードリューベイカー 1901-57) is not well known in her homeland, but in Japan she has become a national hero, remembered at Sumiyoshi-jinja in Uto (宇土-Kumamoto Prefecture) as the savior of the seaweed industry.
On April 14th Japan's nori farmers travel to pay their respects to Drew-Baker's memorial overlooking the Ariake Sea, a huge bay filled with seaweed farms.
#Japan #Kumamoto #seaweed #KathleenMaryDrewBaker #キャスリーンメアリードリューベイカー
Camellia Tea Ceremony
Drew-Baker was the first person to discover how porphyra worked, which enabled Segawa Sōkichi (with Drew-Baker's advice and the assistance of other marine biologists) to save the seaweed industry in Japan (which in the post-war period likely saved many livelihoods and many lives).
Camellia Tea Ceremony
To the Japanese, Drew-Baker is celebrated as 'Mother of the Sea'. Although she died before she could visit Japan, aged only 55, she was honored with a monument in Uto (enshrining her graduation gown and scientific papers) paid for by hundreds of grateful nori farmers.
Beginning her academic career as a lecturer in botany at the University of Manchester, when Drew-Baker married in 1928 she was instantly dismissed as the university did not employ married women😐
Camellia Tea Ceremony
Until the early Edo period villagers had harvested naturally growing algae by hand (in the 8thC it is recorded that some fishermen paid their taxes to the emperor in kelp), but farming allowed for cheaper and more readily available seaweed (a valuable food source in winter).
Camellia Tea Ceremony
The paper-making industry would inspire the creation of nori (海苔) in the 18thC. Using similar techniques to paper production, seaweed was shredded, moulded and dried on racks, creating sheets of edible algae.
Nori would come to play an important role in Japanese cuisine🙌
Seaweed came to be known as the "Gambler's Grass" because it is super sensitive to environmental change. Villages that solely depended on the algae found out the hard way that harvests were temperamental.
Camellia Tea Ceremony
Then, shortly after WWII, porphyra all but vanished from Japanese shores😱
A perfect storm of war (namely the use of underwater mines by the US military and the over-reliance on seaweed as food source), industrialization, pollution and back to back typhoons decimated the coast and effectively wiped out porphyra colonies in Japan.
The situation was dire.
Camellia Tea Ceremony
Drew-Baker's research into the mysterious life cycle of 'porphyra' solved the problem of how to artificially seed seaweed🙌
It is no exaggeration to say that Drew-Baker inadvertently saved Japan's entire seaweed industry.
Marine biologist Segawa Sōkichi (瀬川宗吉) read about her detailed findings in 'Nature' magazine in 1949 and was finally able to piece together how to revitalise seaweed production.
Camellia Tea Ceremony
To provide fresh fish for shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康 1543-1616), bamboo pens were constructed in Edo Bay to hold live catches.
It was discovered that seaweed thrived on the bamboo fences, and soon fishing communities were actively farming the algae on sunken wooden frames.
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