It looks like Christmas has arrived early at Dahlia, the Japanese restaurant tucked away in a remote corner of the Kaveri complex on Nungambakkam High Road.
Colourfully decorated Origami paper balls folded into many-sided shapes hang down from the ceiling. Sailing across the edges of the wall are pastel-coloured folded paper cranes – a thousand flying cranes – made by the staff for their owner Naoki Yamauchi, under the watchful eye of his Tamil partner, Revathi Nagaswami, when he went through a health crisis two years ago.
Celebrations at Dahlia restaurant | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
“It’s been a year of celebrations for Dahlia,” says Revathi Nagaswami, the Indian half of an unique example of Indo-Japanese collaboration in the food industry. “This year is the 30th anniversary of the Dahlia restaurant in Chennai.”
“We have celebrated Yamauchi San’s 88th birthday this year and now the Japanese Consul General TAGA Masayuki has felicitated him for promoting a bridge between India and Japan during the last thirty years,” she explains.
Naoki Yamauchi and Revathi Nagaswami | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
She holds out the original citation in Japanese, beautifully calligraphed in the Japanese Kanji script that has been rolled inside a painted cylinder in lacquerware. “Yamauchi San also insisted that we frame a copy of the citation,” she adds, displaying the framed document that will stand testimony to the pair’s dedication to serving Japanese style food at Dahlia.
For most of the diners, Dahlia is known for it’s Japanese food, artfully presented in a number of combinations. You can have a full set menu in a Japanese style Bento box, or in bowls, or if you opt for their sliced raw fish items, rolled and place with slivers of pale pink ginger and dabs of green paste that will knock out your tonsils, unless you dip it in the soya sauce served by the side. The refreshing draughts of cool, roasted, boiled and strained wheat-water are on the house.
For others, of course, Dahlia is more like an exclusive club. Far-eastern diners prefer to sit at the low tables on cushions. Most non-Japanese sit at the tables under the watchful eye of Yamauchi who sits at the till. Behind him, high up in one corner on a TV screen, you may watch the enormous Sumo wrestling champions go through paces. The referees flap around exactly like the sacred cranes of Japanese folklore.
Yamauchi and Revathi change the painted scrolls on the walls according to the seasons. Each one tells a story. The one about a Thousand Cranes refers to a young girl called Sadako Sasaki who was two years old at the time of the Hiroshima bombing on August 6, 1945. Ten years later when she fell ill with radiation sickness, she was told that if she could make a thousand cranes, birds that were revered for their long lives, she would overcome her illness. Different versions are told on whether Sadako folded a thousand paper cranes. There is a monument to her in Hiroshima.
This time round when I meet Revathi, I want to ask her whether Yamauchi has ever spoken about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the context of the Oppenheimer film. He was ten years old at the time and living in Osaka with his family.
She shakes her head. “Disasters, natural, and otherwise have been a part of the Japanese way of life. They never talk about it. They say it makes them strong to be able to face them.”
As it happens, Yamauchi lost his only son Hirokazu in the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake that swept away those who were at the Fukushima nuclear station, where he worked as a chef. Earlier Hirokazu had come and revamped the Dahlia menu to cater to a new clientele. It’s still his menu that they make.
Chennai, 22/07/2019: Revathi and her Japanese business partner who run Dahlia in Nungambakkam for many years. They closed last year because of his health, but have now reopened again. Photo : R. Ravindran/The Hindu | Photo Credit: RAVINDRAN R
At that time Yamauchi had said, “At least he did not die alone. He went in the company of other people.” As it happens, the body count was 19,759 for that disaster, with many more suffering the after-effects.
This time round, I ask Revathi about their own story, though she is reticent by nature.
She tells me how she was sent as a Japanese interpreter to Yamauchi who had been working in Kochi as an exporter of tuna and cuttlefish from India to Japan. He had to travel via Chennai to Japan as there was no direct flight. His wife and two children, a daughter and a son, were also with him in India at the time.
Revathi herself as the youngest of five very independent-minded sisters had decided to train as a Japanese interpreter after doing her graduate studies from Queen Mary’s College, and further studies in Sociology. She picked up Japanese from visitors who came to the city and was so adept at the language, she was sent on a training programme to Tokyo along with others from different countries.
“It was a time when Japan was emerging as a leading economic power in Asia,” she says, “It was booming.” Though she never gave up her vegetarian diet, despite being in Japan, except for a fondness for cuttlefish, she confesses that what she really enjoyed was being introduced to the Hot Springs.
“You forget everything, who you are, when you’re there,” she explains.
“Did she shed her Indian skin and become Japanese?” I ask.
She laughs. “You become yourself.”
Yamauchi in the meanwhile had recognised the need for a Japanese diner with the opening of the Maruti Suzuki plant in the North; with Japanese engineers reaching out to the ancillary manufacturers of automobile parts in Tamil Nadu.
He himself liked to cook, after his family had gone back to Japan. When he lost his wife in a car accident, he once explained how coming to the land of the Buddha was a way that he found of coping with his loss.
He had become friends with Revathi’s father who worked in the Imperial Tobacco Company. “They had a common interest in cigarettes that Yamauchi liked to smoke and the coffee made by my granny,” says Revathi.
It was Revathi’s father who suggested that they become partners in the setting up of Dahlia. With the early demise of her father, Revathi stepped in as the partner. Her mother is still on the board.
“We had no menu as such, but we had a Japanese chef. He would ask our first customers what they liked and prepare those items. At the end of the year, we went through the most popular dishes and this became our menu,” says Revathi.
After his recent illness, (it was serious enough for him to give up smoking) both of them were able to make a trip to Japan where Yamauchi’s daughter lives with her family. They had just missed seeing the Sakura blossoms or the annual cherry blossoms festival.
“For the first time we visited Nagasaki,” she says. She does not elaborate on the war memorial. “I did go to the Hot Springs near Nagasaki,” says Revathi. “It was very peaceful.”
