Super Sushi Ramen Express by Michael Booth

Author:Michael Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250099792
Publisher: Picador

21. 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 forty years ago—185 million gallons per year compared to 449 million in 1975. Instead, beer has been the drink of choice for the majority of Japanese since 1965, with wine rapidly on the rise, 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 throughout Japan (down from 30,000 a century ago to just 1,450 today), with many more facing bankruptcy. Making sake is a tough, labor-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 anymore. The skills of the master sake brewer are in danger of disappearing forever. 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 monasteries than businesses, 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 introduction to the world of sake, a baptism by 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 parking lot, 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 other’s products. 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 National Research Institute of Brewing, itself founded by the tax department of the Ministry of Finance in 1904.

It was clearly a serious-minded occasion. The hall was virtually silent but for the odd clink of glass and porcelain and a symphony of staccato slurps and exaggerated sniffs. The floor, covered with plastic sheeting, was sticky with spilled 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 tables. Each bottle had a small porcelain dish in front of it, like an ashtray but decorated with a blue spiral and traditionally used to judge the clarity of sake.

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