In Japanese restaurants, cooked hijiki is often served as a small starter dish or as an accompaniment to a set menu. Salad bars at buffets sometimes include a hijiki salad, too. Since I am a health conscious person, I used to eat a lot of hijiki when I was in Japan, because hijiki is said to “contain a lot of minerals and is highly nutritious.”

I still cook Japanese food, including hijiki, quite often at home after moving to the United States. I cooked some hijiki just the other day and decided to check out its actual nutritional value. As a result, I have found out that hijiki is particularly high in calcium. I sometimes hear that “Japanese people do not get enough calcium.” This is because soil in Japan does not contain very much calcium and Japanese people can not get enough calcium supply just by drinking water and eating agricultural crops. (It is said that America and European countries have soil rich in calcium, and people normally do not experience calcium deficiencies in those regions.) In order to correct this problem, Japanese people began to eat seaweed, which is high in calcium and much easier to store for long periods than fish and shellfish. In addition to calcium, I found out that seaweed contains many other minerals such as iron, potassium, and magnesium. It is also high in dietary fiber! Although before I was eating hijiki without having proof about its rumored nutritional value, I now know that general Japanese belief in the benefits of hijiki was well-founded.

People usually use dried hijiki for cooking. After being soaked in water for about 30 minutes, hijiki expands five to ten times in volume. I cook hijiki with deep fried tofu (soy bean curd), carrots, and noodle shaped pieces of yam cake.

As for carrots, Japanese people shred them with a knife or a shredder. But here in America, shredded carrots are readily available at the supermarket! (Maybe shredded carrots are also available in Japan nowadays) These shredded carrots are very convenient to use for many other dishes besides this hijiki dish. But that is beside the point. I wanted to discuss the nutritional information and health benefits of hijiki, which is a staple food in Japan, where people enjoy one of the longest life spans in the world.
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