KYOTO, Japan — On a recent Saturday morning, Sayoko Sugiyama was busy making some warabi mochi, a soft and chewy confection that is just one of the many delicate traditional Japanese sweets called wagashi.
It was a regular workday for Ms. Sugiyama and three of the six part-time workers she employs at Okashimaru, her online wagashi business. They turn out about 1,000 pieces a day — including snow-white representations of petal-covered blossoms and crystallized plants — each a little piece of art created from ingredients like sticky rice or adzuki beans pounded into paste.
“I learned how to make wagashi by myself, by watching how it was made,” Ms. Sugiyama said as she put a pot of warabi starch, a white powder, on the workroom’s stove top and quickly stirred in some water and granulated sugar. After a few minutes of heat and exertion, the white powder dissolved into a very sticky paste.
“It requires a lot of strength to mix,” she said. “That’s why traditionally, men tend to dominate the industry.”
She then scooped up a teaspoonful and, after wetting her fingers, shaped it into a small sphere and then wrapped that in some caramelized bean paste. Once she was satisfied with the shape, she set it on a dish coated with charcoal-colored bamboo powder, sprinkled more of the powder over the ball and then sprinkled again, this time with a mixture of the powder and cane sugar. The sweet was ready.
Wagashi, which traditionally are served with green tea, have a special meaning in Japanese culture.
“Wagashi remind people of the changing seasons and festivals, which we tend to forget in our daily lives, and convey the beauty and greatness of nature and the importance of traditional events” through their shapes and their flavors, Manami Tsuji of the Kyoto Confectionery Museum wrote in an email. The small museum, established by the Kyoto confectionary maker Tawaraya Yoshitomi, features a program that allows guests to try making some sweets themselves.
“Wagashi is thought to have originated more than 2,000 years ago, when rice cultivation began, and later were greatly influenced by food culture from foreign countries,” including China, Portugal and Spain, Ms. Tsuji wrote, noting that the appearance of the sweets and the techniques used to make them have evolved.
Well-known Japanese wagashi brands include Toraya, one of the oldest family-run businesses in the country, established in the early 16th century in Kyoto. Today, Toraya has three factories and about 80 shops across Japan, as well as a boutique in Paris. Its signature item is yokan, a thick gelatinous sweet made from adzuki beans.
‘On My Own’
Ms. Sugiyama, 39, was born in Mie Prefecture, in the central part of Japan’s main island of Honshu, but moved to Kyoto for college and then became a clerk in a wagashi shop. During her first year with the company, she taught herself to make some of the sweets and began selling them in her free time.
“My personal business gradually spread,” she said. “And before I knew it, I was on my own.” She established Okashimaru in 2014.
Things have been changing, slowly, for women in the Japanese confectionery business. “In big companies, mostly men are found in the kitchen, but in smaller companies and boutiques, the number of female workers is increasing,” Ms. Sugiyama said. “Women who make wagashi are usually independent. In Kyoto, that number has increased, but not by much.”
She began the business at a different location in the city, but the small kitchen it now occupies has two work tables with metal tops where much of the work is done; a handwritten recipe book, scales and some dish towels were scattered on one surface. Lining one wall was the kitchen sink and a small cooktop with two gas burners, the type of appliance typically found in home kitchens here.
Over the years, Ms. Sugiyama has developed her own recipes, although some do use traditional ingredients. “First,” she said, “I imagined the recipe in my mind, and then I made several prototypes to make sure it matched the image I had.”
One is a petal-studded ball called shushi, which, in English, means “seed.” “When you take a bite,” she said, “inside is a spicy chai-flavored anko,” or red bean paste.
To make shushi, Ms. Sugiyama created a thick paste from a mixture of yama no imo, or Japanese yam; white adzuki beans and white kidney beans that had been cooked and mashed; and beet and cane sugars. She added some spices to a small amount of the paste and shaped it into a ball.
Then, putting some of the original mixture into a pastry bag with a decorating tip, she began to cover the ball with tiny petals until it looked like a flower in bloom. “The white exterior signifies gentleness, and the darker interior means warmth, energy,” she said. “I was inspired by chai, with a white milky exterior.”
Ms. Sugiyama also uses seasonal ingredients. One of her signatures for spring is hittosai, made from the edible shoots of the horsetail plant. She removes the leaves and then coats the shoots in candied rice to produce a crunchy texture and pleasantly sugary taste mixed with a deeper botanical flavor.
She used the English word “cell” for another of her specialties, which contrasts the flavor of hassaku, a Japanese citrus about the size of a grapefruit, and the scent of kuromoji, a shrubby and aromatic Japanese tree (she steams a branch and captures the resulting moisture).
The flavorings are mixed into separate small amounts of kanten, a firming agent obtained from algae often used in Japanese desserts, put into pastry balloons and then refrigerated. Once the kanten has congealed, Ms. Sugiyama pops the balloons to release the spheres that have been created inside.
“You should eat both spheres together to combine the flavors,” she said. (I did. The taste was delicate, juicy and refreshing.)
Ms. Sugiyama’s business caters to individual customers across Japan, as well as cafes. Some of her sweets are made only for events — like the warabi mochi, which gets hard after a day — but she will ship her baked apricot sweets, which can last for 10 days, in nine-piece boxes for 3,800 yen ($28.80) or a box of eight hittosai for 1,200 yen.
During my visit, a young man, who works as what Ms. Sugiyama described as a tea sommelier, came to pick up a shipment of wagashi to serve as he does the traditional Japanese tea ceremony at a cafe in the city.
Ms. Sugiyama said she doesn’t plan to open a brick-and-mortar shop. “I don’t see the significance of just handing the wagashi to customers,” she said. “In Kyoto, many people buy their wagashi online anyway.”
But she does dream about a cafe: “A place where I can serve something warm right from the oven. I see a meaning in having a cafe.”
For Ms. Sugiyama, what matters is to enjoy the taste of her wagashi; after all, she eats the leftovers. “Even after spending the day cooking, I still want to eat them,” she said. “That kind of aspiration and motivation is required.”
