"Light & Zesty Simmered Chicken" (tori no sappari-ni) is what it's called. It may not look good (it doesn't), but its combination of acidity, saltiness and sweetness is indeed refreshing on a hot summer evening. A typical recipe calls for the following (and I followed this recipe myself):

16 chicken wings
1 cup vinegar
1 cup soy sauce
6 tablespoon sugar
1 clove garlic
1 inch ginger
1/4 cup water

You basically dump everything in a pot (after browning the surface of the chicken, that is) and let it simmer for about an hour to make this dish, but what truly stands out is the exorbitant amount of vinegar that the recipe requires. When I first saw the recipe, I was stunned. A quarter of that amount would probably be enough, I thought. Then I realized: this particular dish was probably made popular, if not invented, by Mizkan, the largest producer of vinegar in Japan. Mizkan produces about half of the vinegar consumed in Japan, so it makes sense that they want Japanese housewives to empty a whole bottle of vinegar for just one family dinner.

I went to their website, and sure enough, there was what seemed to be the original recipe of all the variations you could find online. Many Japanese food bloggers say that they learned about the recipe through a variety of media outlets that Mizkan has used: TV commercials; Mizkan's online recipe book; cooking segments in late-morning and early-afternoon news shows; newspaper ads; and affiliated web sites about health and/or food. Some bloggers say that they followed the recipe they found on the label on the vinegar bottles.

Many bloggers say that they've modified the original recipe to use much less vinegar and soy sauce. This may sound like a failure for Mizkan, whose interest it is to increase the amount of vinegar consumed in Japan, but it is not so. The point of the PR campaign was to introduce the use of vinegar in nimono (simmered-down method of cooking), in which vinegar was almost never used. (The traditional usual suspects for nimono are soy sauce, sugar and some type of stock base.) Many bloggers confess that they'd never thought of using vinegar for nimono before they saw the Mizkan recipe. There may be regional variation, but where I grew up, vinegar's main use was for marinating veggies, making sushi rice and concocting sauces for fried fish. With an exception of sushi rice, these dishes don't require much vinegar--a few tablespoons at the most--and in my mom's kitchen, a bottle of vinegar lasted for a long time. Now that they know they can use vinegar in nimono and add refreshing zest to it, many Japanese cooker-bloggers proudly declare that they keep a bottle of vinegar at hand and turn to it quite often. Some even go as far as stocking more than one kind of vinegar--something completely new in the Japanese down-home cooking.

The Japanese used to consume less than 200,000 kiloliter of vinegar in 1970. In 2003, 450,000 kiloliter of vinegar was used in Japan. The consumption of vinegar more than doubled in 30 years. A graph created by the South Kyushu branch of the Development Bank of Japan (available here, but in Japanese) shows a steady rise of vinegar consumption throughout this period, rather than an explosion in recent years, so it's not entirely fair to attribute all of it to Mizkan's recent PR campaigns. And yet, looking at the online "personal" recipes very similar to Mizkan's version and reading their accounts of how they became interested in cooking this unfamiliar dish, I'm inclined to think that Mizkan's campaign played an important role in increasing the Japanese consumption of vinegar.

There's more about vinegar and PR in Japan, but this post's long enough already, so I'll save that for tomorrow. Stay tuned.