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Sangon
Sangon — a three-course New Year's ritual meal of soup, sashimi, and soup, cup by cup
A New Year ritual from Amami: a red-lacquer soup, sashimi, then a black-lacquer soup, eaten in order with a cup of shochu passed round the family between each course. It traces to the honzen banquet style of the Muromachi period, and in Amami the custom still holds.
- Origin: Kagoshima
- About 1260 km southwest of Tokyo
Lineage
What it's made of
This ceremonial New Year meal of the Amami islands is built from three courses: a red-lacquered bowl of clear soup with mochi, a plate of white fish sashimi, and a black-lacquered bowl of clear soup with chicken or pork. Cups of shochu are passed between courses, and the soups' gentle savoriness sits in contrast to the clean, light taste of the sashimi. The ritual pacing itself, a toast shared after each course, becomes part of the meal's flavor.
How it's made
The ritual begins on New Year's morning with a call from the head of the household. The first course, in the red bowl, is a clear soup holding mochi, kamaboko, fish, and shrimp. The second course is sashimi, usually white fish or sometimes octopus, and the third and final course is a clear soup with chicken or pork served in the black bowl. Between each course, the family is said to pass around cups of shochu, and some households add a small plate of salt, dried squid, and kelp known as shiimori.
Why it took this shape
Sangon traces back to a formal style of dining established in the Muromachi period and developed further through the Edo period, a tradition now reserved mostly for weddings, funerals, and other special occasions elsewhere in Japan, yet it is said to have taken firm root in Amami as a New Year custom of its own. One account holds that Saigo Takamori, hiding on Amami Oshima after the Ansei Purge, held this very meal to mark his marriage to Aikana, daughter of one of the island's most prominent families.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Osechi and zoni for the New YearA guide to the meaning behind osechi's tiered boxes, the regional differences in zoni (square vs. round mochi, clear vs. miso broth), and the nanakusa-gayu custom.
- Setsubun: ehomaki and lucky beansA guide to ehomaki, the uncut sushi roll said to be eaten facing a lucky direction on Setsubun, and to mamemaki, the bean-throwing custom with roasted lucky beans.
Dishes in the same style
- Agonoko UmaniThe roe of egg-bearing flying fish, caught only in early summer, is simmered in stock and soy sauce as an Oki bar snack. Its large grains and dense, sticky texture are prized as a delicacy said to be scarcer even than the fish's flesh.
- Funa MisoCrucian carp is simmered slowly with soybeans for around five hours, then finished in a sauce of red miso and coarse sugar. A freshwater fish dish of the Kiso rivers' lower basin, made with fatty winter carp simmered until the bones soften through.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Kagoshima
- Abura ZomenPork and somen are fried together with a splash of broth, the oil and stock emulsifying into a silky coat on the noodles. Just how somen took root in wheat-free Amami isn't clear, but the dish is a fixture whenever people gather, not least for the August Dance festival.
- AkumakiMochi rice steeped in wood-ash lye is wrapped in bamboo sheath and boiled for hours in more lye water — a Boys' Festival sweet said to have fed Saigo Takamori's troops in the field. The lye's alkalinity holds bacteria back, letting it keep for days in Kagoshima's heat and humidity.
- Amami Kokuto-jochuKokuto-jochu permitted to be made only in the Amami Islands of Kagoshima Prefecture. It's said to carry a sweet aroma distinctive to islands where sugarcane cultivation thrives, and around 30 breweries are said to compete on character while observing the liquor tax law's condition that rice koji be used.
- Buta JiruPork simmered with daikon, taro, and other roots in a miso broth, built on Kagoshima's own pork — the prefecture raises more hogs than any other — paired with a barley miso high in koji and correspondingly sweet. A warming bowl for winter, common at home and in school lunches alike.
- Buta MisoBoiled pork is pounded together with miso and sugar into a keeping paste, with peanuts and bonito flakes added in Amami versions. It's said to have grown out of the need to use every part of the one pig a household slaughtered each year, alongside salting and other preserved forms.