Rakutendo owner Takashima Chiaki
As a bureaucrat in Tokyo, Takashima Chiaki never expected to become known as the “bean lady” of Kyoto. Takashima now runs Rakutendo, a mame ryori (bean cuisine) club and fair trade goods shop in a 90 year old machiya in the west of the city.
After university, Takashima entered the Justice Ministry’s Immigration Bureau with the hope of improving the human rights situation in Japan for minorities and abolishing the finger printing system. However, after 5 years she felt that trying to change the law from within the male-dominated bureaucracy was extremely difficult. “It took me a long time to accept that,” she says.
The food crisis will become serious if people eat more meat, but it will be OK if it’s beans.
So, she moved her young family to Yamaguchi prefecture, where her father had a large clothing store. However, life in Yamaguchi wasn’t as idyllic as she had hoped, “These days, the inaka is a real car society. Small, local shops are disappearing to make way for American style shopping malls with large car parks. We had to work hard to stay in business as we only had a small car park.”
Takashima decided to close the store and spend more time with her family. Soon after, she says she had a dream in which the idea came to her of starting a bean cuisine business – supplying dried beans and recipes. “When the clothing store closed, the terrorist attack in the US had just happened and the war in Afghanistan started. It was a pretty dark time and cooking delicious food with beans everyday was a help. I then decided that I had to start selling beans.”
Takashima also says she felt that if the popularity of environmentally-friendly beans spread, it might be a kind of solution to world problems such as poverty and also the destruction of the environment in the US and China, for example, which has been caused by the over-consumption of beef. But, she says, it’s not only about cooking and eating beans. “We shouldn’t gain pleasure just from consuming. I think it’s important that we also enjoy working for and creating something, and that it is something we teach children about.”
In March 2003, Rakutendo opened in Nishijin with the following philosophy:
- Beans are delicious.
- Beans are cheap.
- Beans are easy to store, you can enjoy cooking them and they are good for you.
- The food crisis will become serious if people eat more
- meat, but it will be OK if it’s beans.
- That people all over the world can have a satisfactory meal,
- this is the hope of Rakutendo and the Bean Cuisine Club.
In front of Rakutendo
Starting a new business in an old area of Kyoto can be a difficult venture but Takashima says that it has been a remarkably positive experience. “For a start, most Kyoto machiya are built for commercial and domestic use. The genkan and front room are perfect for business. On top of that, the people in this area of Kyoto seem to be quite relaxed about people selling produce in front of their homes.” As soon as Takashima and her family moved into their machiya, opened Rakutendo for business and put a table of beans outside the front door, customers came.
The beans that Takashima sells are from an organic farm in Hokkaido (“it’s been going for 27 years!”) and an environmentally friendly company in the US, which also distributes beans from Canada and Mexico. Takashima said she was initially quite anxious when she found out that there was an established bean shop in the area. “The owner came here to look a few times and I was worried that we would become fierce rivals. But, it’s turned out to be a great relationship. Neither of us were selling exactly the same beans or even cooking them in the same way. Now we share information and recipes.”
The Rakutendo Bean Cuisine Club currently has hundreds of members nationwide. Members receive bean cuisine recipe kits which contain a variety of pulses and other ingredients such as pasta or herbs and spices. Takashima says that traditionally Japanese saw beans as a sweet food and cooked them with sugar. “The good thing about the recipe kits is that they introduce new kinds of dishes from all over the world and teach people how to use herbs and spices in cooking.” Takashima is constantly scouting out new ways to cook with beans. Just recently she met an Egyptian woman living in Kyoto who taught her how to cook beans Egyptian-style.
Rakutendo also publishes a newsletter called “Rakuten Tsushin” which introduces more unique recipes and eco-lifestyle information to club members, as well as telling readers about other businesses in the local community with a similar philosophy to Rakutendo. In fact, Takashima has very quickly become a mine of information about other small environmentally friendly businesses in her local community and Kyoto in general.
Rakutendo might be a little difficult to find for those unfamiliar with western Kyoto. However, once you are heading in the right direction it’s easy to spot - the front of the machiya and the inside walls of the genkan shop are covered with colourful organic cotton shirts, felt bags and handknitted woollen ponchos and of course, bags of beans. The shelves are stocked with fair trade Peruvian and Nepali coffee, Swaziland chutney and Bolivian chocolate. “I think fair trade goods go well with my bean business and it’s also really enjoyable,” says Takashima.
Rakutendo is on the north side of Shimodachiuri-dori, west of Senbonmatsu-dori, directly north of Kyoto Asny and the Central Library on Marutamachi.
Check the map on the website: www.rakutendo.com Tel/fax: 075 811 4890.
Open 10.00 – 19.00. Closed Monday – Wednesday, Sunday and National Holidays.
