Small yellow flowers have begun to bloom. Just in front of Palaceside Building in Takebashi, Tokyo, in the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace south of Midori no Izumi, a single aburachan plant grows. Many buds are swelling; ignoring winter buds that look ready to sprout at any moment, three to several flowers bloom clustered together.
Lauraceae, Lindera genus. It is widely distributed in wild hills from Honshu through Shikoku and Kyushu. It flowers in early spring; in the early-spring forest where leaves have barely sprouted, the small yellow blossoms stand out. Like spicebush (kuromoji), whose branches are used for toothpicks, the branches have a distinctive fragrance.
Hearing "aburachan," it sounds like someone's name or a nickname — but it is not. Written in kanji, it is 油瀝青 (aburachan). 瀝青 is read "chan" in the Chinese reading, meaning natural asphalt, tar, or pitch. Who would imagine that those delicate yellow flowers, in characters, become oil-soaked black asphalt or tar?
Yet there is reason to write it this way. As a plant it is very rich in oil; set fire to living wood and it burns well even in rain — used not only as torches, but oil squeezed from bark and small ball-shaped fruit was once used as lamp oil, and the extracted oil was called aburachan, they say. Abura seems not to be edible, but with methane hydrate, shale gas, and other new energy sources in the spotlight, one wonders whether oil could be pressed from this aburachan, which grows abundantly in Japan, and used as a natural energy source...