confided to his personal journal: “I got back at night. I had drunk so much I puked a lot.” Bunzaemon’s diary, the Ōmu Rōchūki (“Diary of a Caged Parrot”), has left us a wonderfully vivid and vomit-stained picture of the Genroku era, a time of relative peace and prosperity when it seems the life of a warrior was largely about downing vast quantities of sake and suffering the inevitable consequences.
Bunzaemon and his friends were allowed to drink on their night shifts and liked to get properly drunk on their days off. Since only one out of every nine days was spent on guard duty at the castle (the euphemism for the other days was “training at home”), they had plenty of time to carouse. “Around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, Shinzō came around,” Bunzaemon writes. “We drank together and then went out. Then to ‘Jinsa’. Had sake and warm tōfu. Got back home at dawn.” Another entry: “I got so badly drunk and puked so much, I was almost beside myself. Choked and took a big breath. How stupid!”
Sake casks.
Keisuke Terada, head of the Terada Honke brewery in Kozaki, Chiba, where they have been brewing sake since 1673.
I introduce Bunzaemon at the start of this chapter because foreigners like myself, given to overly romantic visions of Japan as a land of light-dappled shōji screens and Zen stripped interiors, can sometimes get the wrong idea about sake. I have often caught myself adopting an oddly one-eyed view of Japan’s national drink: as a particularly refined alcohol, connected umbilically to Japanese religion and national identity, a liquid of such delicacy that some people devote good parts of their lives to its appreciation. Of course, sake is all of that, but it is something else too and, in a way, something more: Japan’s bog-standard brew. It is the drink of the common people, Japan’s beer, if you like, and the drinking culture has often had more in common with the 14-pint-a-night lager swillers of my hometown in Yorkshire than the sniff-and-sip connoisseurship you will find in some of the better sake bars today.
Take, by way of illustration, the sake kassen or drinking contests of old Japan. In 911, eight hard-drinking courtiers at the retired Emperor’s palace played a game in which they passed around 20 cups of sake. Everyone drank in turn and the cups just kept going around the circle. One drinker ended up face down outside the palace, another threw up all over the floor, but Korehira Fujiwara drank eight rounds without getting unseemly. He was awarded a swift horse for his prowess.
The participants were less aristocratic in 1648, when 16 “Eastern Army” drinkers fought 14 “Western Army” drunkards at the famous Daishigawara drinking battle in Kawasaki. They drank until they dropped and there is still dispute about which “army” won. In October 1815, four months after Waterloo, the Senju district of Tōkyō hosted its own battle: between 100 local soaks. The contestants could choose to quaff from a range of cups: from a relatively small 5-gō vessel (900 ml, more than a bottle of wine) to the monstrous “Green Haired Turtle Cup” (4,500 ml) and “Red Crowned Crane Cup” (5,400 ml). The winner was said to have filled and emptied the “Green Haired Turtle Cup” three times, equivalent to seven and a half of the big double-sized “Isshōbin” bottles in which sake is now sold. In 1927, second place in a similar contest went to a woman called Otome who stomached 34.5 liters of sake in a single sitting. These quantities verge on the unbelievable (and anybody trying anything like this with modern strength sake would risk killing themselves) but, even allowing for some exaggeration, they do show that sake drinking, like all alcohol cultures, has never been a wholly civilized affair.
There are endless accounts of these drinking contests, but I will introduce just two more, held at the Imperial court in 1474, to clarify my point. In the first, called Jūdonomi, two groups of 10 men competed with each other to see which team could neck their sakes the fastest. The second game was called Jusshunomi. Again, two groups of 10 competed: each drinker was served three types of sake and then had to try to identify the samples they had tasted from a range of 10 sakes. These two themes—sake as an object of connoisseurship and sake as an uncomplicated intoxicant—run throughout sake history and have helped shape a modern market in which, as the Kyōto sake bar owner Yoram Ofer said to me, “There is a lot of garbage and a lot of heaven.”
Preparing the organic rice used for sake making at the Terada Honke brewery.
A brief history of sake
Beginnings
Sake was probably not Japan’s first alcoholic drink. That honor probably belongs to prehistoric fruit wines (see page 196). Rice-based alcohol had to wait until the arrival of rice cultivation from the Asian continent between 1000 BC and 300 BC. The earliest sakes would have been quite different from today’s refined drink. They were probably made by villagers chewing rice to promote fermentation and then spitting it out (kuchikamizake). There is a report from the 8th century of peasants in southern Kyūshū still using the chewing method, and Hateruma Island in Okinawa prefecture was holding a chewed sake festival until the 1930s. It would have been an opaque whitish color and quite sour. Some of it may not have been a drink at all: one early account appears to describe a semi-solid alcohol served on a tree leaf.
By the 6th century, kōji molds (see below) imported from the continent were offering a slightly more sanitary way of breaking down the starches than peasant spit. There are also records of priests making and selling sake as a commodity from the next century. Some of this alcohol was quite sophisticated: in the early 900s we know that aristocrats were warming sake, which would have required highly filtered beverages to taste good. Some of the ruling class became very fond of a tipple. When the nobleman Michitaka Fujiwara was on his deathbed in 995, his priests told him to face west toward heaven and chant a sacred prayer. He flatly refused:
Company employees play drinking games at a party in the Nishiura Hot Spring resort, Aichi Prefecture, in 1961.
The since-closed Shikishima sake brewery in Kamezaki, Aichi Prefecture, in the early 1960s.
“What is the point of going to heaven when there is nobody to drink with?” Less wealthy drinkers who got a taste for the cripplingly expensive temple sake faced bigger worries than a lack of drinking buddies in the afterlife: there is a ghost story from the 9th century about a man who bought 37 liters of alcohol from a temple on credit but was unable to pay his debt. He was reincarnated as an ox and had to return to the temple to work off his bill.
The Kōji riot
From about 1200, sake began to be sold as a commodity to commoners in the cities, and over the next three or four centuries this growing popular market transformed the industry. The grip of the religious foundations on sake making loosened slowly and commercialized, commoner-run businesses began to dominate. The transition was never more dramatically illustrated than in the Kōji riot in Kyōto in 1444.
The famous Kitano shrine had a legal monopoly on Kyōto’s production of kōji, the mold used to prepare sake rice for fermentation. But for many years the city’s 340-odd sake makers had been complaining that the supply provided by the shrine’s guild was not meeting booming demand and that the prices were grossly inflated. They started building their own “moonshine” kōji rooms which, throughout the 1420s and 1430s, were periodically smashed by soldiers sent to enforce the monopoly. In 1443, the situation came to a head when the sake makers simply stopped buying the shrine’s mold.
The
