Matsumoto's food and crafts: Sanzoku-yaki and the mingei movement
Matsumoto and Azumino's food and crafts share the same underlying story: something that arrived from outside, grown into something local.
Two things stand out in Matsumoto and Azumino's food and craft culture: the chicken dish Sanzoku-yaki, and a craft culture that grew out of Yanagi Muneyoshi's mingei movement. Both spread from a single idea or a single encounter and eventually took root as something distinctly local.
This article sets the castle town's street plan aside and instead traces how Sanzoku-yaki came to be, and how the mingei movement turned Matsumoto into a craft town.
Matsumoto's signature dish: Sanzoku-yaki
Sanzoku-yaki is a fried chicken dish, and a support group formed in 2011 helped spread it to more than 100 restaurants in the city.
What Sanzoku-yaki isSanzoku-yaki
Sanzoku-yaki is a local dish popular across the Chushin region centered on Matsumoto and Shiojiri: a single cut of chicken marinated in sauce, dusted with potato starch, and deep-fried. Despite the name containing "yaki" (grilled or roasted), it is in fact a fried dish, and some restaurants call it "sanzoku-age" instead. This is said to be a holdover from a time when oil was precious and frying with only a small amount of it was described as "roasting." Sauce flavor and batter thickness vary noticeably from restaurant to restaurant, which is why many people make a point of comparing several shops.
Origin stories and the Sanzoku-yaki support groupthe Sanzoku-yaki Ouendan
Several origin stories circulate for the name. One holds that the grandparents who ran Matsumoto Shokudo, the predecessor of the Shiojiri izakaya Sanzoku, invented the dish around the Second World War, naming it after the grandfather's rough, bandit-like (sanzoku) look. Another is a play on words, since chicken (tori) shares a sound with a verb for "taking things by force," the way a bandit would. The dish had already been a fixture of home cooking and local restaurants for 40 to 50 years, but a support group called the Matsumoto Sanzoku-yaki Ouendan, formed in 2011, pushed its visibility further, and it is now served at more than 100 restaurants across the city, arguably Matsumoto's most recognizable specialty.
Yanagi Muneyoshi's mingei movement and Matsumoto
The mingei movement, proposed in 1926, was brought to Matsumoto through one man, Maruyama Taro.
What the mingei movement wasmingei undo
The mingei movement was a cultural movement proposed in 1926 by Yanagi Muneyoshi, Kawai Kanjiro, and Hamada Shoji. It gave everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople the name "mingei," and argued that beauty belongs not only to fine art but to ordinary life itself.
Source:Mingei movement
Maruyama Taro and the Matsumoto Mingei-kanMatsumoto Mingeikan
Maruyama Taro, born into a long-established Matsumoto wholesale merchant family, traveled to Tokyo in 1936 after reading a newspaper article about Yanagi Muneyoshi founding the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, and was moved after seeing genuine mingei pieces firsthand. In 1946, he established the Nagano Prefecture chapter of the Japan Folk Crafts Association, and in 1962 he founded the Matsumoto Mingei-kan, which today holds a collection of 6,800 pieces. A single person's response to Yanagi's movement became the starting point for Matsumoto's entire craft culture.
The exchanges the movement brought, and a craft town
Yanagi began spending summers in Matsumoto, and exchanges with the movement's leading figures nurtured Matsumoto's craft culture.
Exchanges with the mingei movement's leading figuresexchanges with the movement's masters
After Maruyama Taro established the Nagano chapter, Yanagi Muneyoshi began spending his summers in Matsumoto. This created opportunities for leading mingei figures such as Hamada Shoji, Kawai Kanjiro, Bernard Leach, and Munakata Shiko to visit Matsumoto and interact with local craftspeople and with Maruyama himself. It is an unusual case of a movement centered in Tokyo putting down direct roots in a regional city.
From a mingei town to a craft townfrom mingei town to craft town
Over time, more craftspeople and workshops making furniture, woodwork, and lacquerware settled in Matsumoto, and the way the city was described gradually broadened from a "mingei town" to the wider label "craft town." A movement that began with one person's admiration grew, across generations, into a genuine local industry drawing in a wide range of makers. Matsumoto today is home to everything from furniture workshops to small ceramic and woodworking studios, evidence of how far a single movement's influence eventually spread.
FAQ
Is Sanzoku-yaki grilled or fried?
It is actually deep-fried chicken coated in potato starch. The name "yaki" is said to be a holdover from an era when oil was scarce and frying with just a little of it was described as "roasting."
When and by whom was the mingei movement started?
Three men working together in the mid-1920s gave a name to something that already existed everywhere: the quiet craft of tools nobody signed. That act of naming, more than any single invention, is what later pulled this city into the story.
When did the Matsumoto Mingei-kan open?
In 1962, founded by Maruyama Taro after he was moved by Yanagi Muneyoshi's mingei movement.