Sushi and Beyond by Michael Booth

Author:Michael Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448180547
Publisher: Random House

Chapter 23

The Sake Crisis

THE JAPANESE SAKE industry is in crisis. Consumption of what was for centuries the country’s most popular alcoholic drink, so integral to the economy that it was used as a tax substitute and its industry run by the government, is in decline, and has been for years. The Japanese now drink just over a third the amount of sake they did thirty years ago – 700,000 kilolitres compared to 1.7m in 1975. Instead, beer has been the drink of choice for the majority of Japanese since 1965, with wine rapidly on the ascendant too – both are now produced with varying degrees of success domestically (Japanese beer: terrific. Japanese wine: I’ve tasted it, so you don’t have to).

Sake breweries are closing up and down the land (down from 30,000 a century ago to just 1,450 today), with many more facing bankruptcy. Making sake is a tough, labour intensive, low profit business and young members of the Japanese workforce would rather work in offices and shops than slave in uncomfortable conditions making a drink no one wants any more. The skills of the master sake brewer are in danger of disappearing for ever. The world of the sake brewery is one of the most traditional, hierarchical and chauvinistic in this most traditional, hierarchical and chauvinistic country. Until very recently – and still to this day in some cases – sake breweries were run more along the lines of a monastery than a business, closed to the outside world and suspicious of innovation.

Which makes it all the more improbable that my two sake contacts turned out to be an Englishman and a woman. We’ll meet the Englishman first, because he gave me my first real introduction to the intriguing world of sake, a baptism of firewater.

Philip Harper and I had arranged to meet in a vast sports hall an hour or so outside of Hiroshima. I could already smell the sake in the car park, the sweet, yeasty aromas of rice wine wafting gently on the breeze. Inside the fumes were almost overpowering as Japan’s best sake producers displayed their wares and tasted each others. The hall was filled with ten rows of trestle tables sporting serried ranks of green sake bottles; each table had a long winding queue of patient sake enthusiasts – around five hundred in all – brandishing plastic tasting cups. This was the largest and most prestigious sake tasting event of the year, the National Assessment for New Sake, founded by the Sake Research Institute, itself founded by the tax department of the Ministry of Treasury in 1904.

It was clearly a serious-minded occasion. The hall was virtually silent but for the odd chink of glass and porcelain, and a symphony of staccato slurps and exaggerated sniffs. The floor, covered with plastic sheeting, was sticky with spilt sake. I joined a queue with my own plastic beaker, having spotted the only other Westerner – presumably Philip – in the room, a little ahead.

I began tasting my way up the table.

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