Reflections | Anpan – the Japanese red-bean bun that brought a Singaporean widow comfort in her later years
In ancient China, red beans were called ‘seeds of longing’, and, according to legend, one widow’s grief turned her into a red bean plant. The same cannot be said for this writer’s grandmother, who also lost her husband, but she did have a fondness for anpan
As people were busy pointing their phones at cherry blossoms in Tokyo last month, I was holed up for a week in a cafe near Ginza rushing to meet several deadlines. The tiny coffee shop had the most delicious anpan, of which I had rather too many during the week. Part of our family lore is that my paternal grandmother loved the sweet rolls so much that she would stand in line each week to get a bagful at the bakery of a Japanese department store in Singapore. Every time I heard this story, I pictured a prim, stern schoolmarm queuing up for her weekly indulgence of sweetmeats.
Anpan is a sweet roll invented in the late 19th century by an unemployed samurai who made Western bread more agreeable to Japanese palates by filling it with a traditional sweet paste made from red beans. It gained instant popularity and his bakery, Kimuraya Sohonten, still stands in Ginza.
Known by different names – adzuki bean, red cowpea, red mung bean, or, simply, red bean – Vigna angularis has been cultivated in Asia for thousands of years. In ancient China, red beans were also called “seeds of longing” because, according to legend, a widow whose husband had died in battle succumbed to her grief and turned into a red bean plant.
My grandmother was a widow for much of her life. My grandparents met in Singapore, where my grandmother was born and where my grandfather was studying. Their courtship seemed happy and they took many photographs together. They were both educated in Chinese-language schools and, like many Malaya-born Chinese of the early 20th century, they shared a patriotism that was anchored in a faraway China. My young grandmother wrote on a page of my grandfather’s autograph book in a rather uneven hand, exhorting him “not to forget the precarious and calamitous state of the nation”. She signed her inscription as Yishuang, or “Resolute Frost”, an alias that echoed her aspiration for steadfastness in tempestuous times.
They married in Singapore in the late 1930s but when the Japanese invasion seemed imminent, they relocated to my grandfather’s hometown on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. After the occupation ended and before the British returned to restore order in Malaya, my grandfather was executed with a bullet to the back of his head by the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, apparently because of a personal feud with one of its members.
