With a powerfully pungent smell and super stringy, sticky texture, natto (fermented soybeans) is one of Japan’s more divisive foods. Traditionally natto has been less popular in west Japan than in the east, but there’s another demographic that has less gusto for gobbling the gooey soybeans, and oddly enough it’s surfers. This curious phenomenon comes up periodically, and it’s back in the spotlight recently after a Twitter user posted about how roughly 80 percent of their surfer friends don’t like eating natto, because they have allergic reactions to it.
That’s a much larger proportion than among the general public, as natto allergies aren’t particularly common in Japan. As the tweet briefly points out, there’s actually an indirect connection between surfing and natto allergies, and the junction comes in the form of one of the unpleasant inevitabilities of spending a lot of time in the sea in Japan: jellyfish. Okinawa excepted, outside of summer the weather in Japan isn’t warm enough to be very conducive to marine sports, and June is characterized by frequent rain and thunderstorms.
That makes July and August the prime surfing months. Once August comes around, though, you can expect to encounter jellyfish at just about any beach in Japan for the rest of the summer, but if you’re a surfer, that’s also likely to be when you’re trying to get in as many sessions as possible, and there’s a very good chance that on one of those sessions, you’re going to g.
