Drinking Japan. Chris Bunting

      Japan: A Drinker’s Paradise

      The idea first struck me while walking through Tōkyō’s Shinjuku district. I had just left a whisky bar stacked with more than 500 bottles of single-malt whisky and I was heading to another which specialized in Japanese whiskies, of which it offered more than 250 varieties. En route I had noticed a makkori bar, which I was later to discover offered a world-beating selection of the Korean rice wine makkori. Within a kilometer of where I stood, there were at least three superb sake pubs, another bar laden down with more Scotch whisky than you could sample in a lifetime, a Bourbon bar with a stock of 400 premium American whiskies, and a hotel which boasted the best range of American wines in Asia. And this wasn’t even particularly unusual for Japan. For drinkers in Roppongi, Shibuya, Ginza, Akasaka, Ōsaka and Kyōto, such drinking opportunities were commonplace. Many of Japan’s provincial cities were not far behind. Japan, it occurred to me, was the best place to drink alcohol in the world.

      Unlike most grand theories cooked up in the rosy glow of a good evening out, this idea did not immediately crumble in the sober light of morning. In fact, it has grown into a conviction. Visitors who know their way around the bars perched in Japan’s high-rise drinking districts, each stacked with hundreds of bottles of their chosen drink, can access a range of whiskies, beers, wines and spirits that I believe is unrivaled anywhere else in the world. Of course, there are better places to enjoy particular types of alcohol. If you want a wine holiday, for example, you would do better traveling to France or South Africa than the back streets of Shinjuku. If you like whisky, take a trip to Scotland or Kentucky. For beer, try England, Belgium or Germany. But if you want to try them all or just want to explore a little beyond your usual tipple, I believe there is no better place than Japan.

      The claim that Japan has a uniquely rich alcohol culture is not original. Long before my epiphany in Shinjuku, Taylor Smisson, the doyen of Tōkyō whisky drinkers, had already convinced me that Japanese whisky bars were the best in the world. He called Tōkyō “the Scotch single-malt drinker’s heaven on earth” and also introduced me to many of the non-whisky bars featured in this guide.

      “Tōkyō is probably the best place to drink Scottish single malts, not to mention Japanese single malts, as well as many other alcoholic beverages,” Smisson says. “But most visitors from overseas are not aware of this and come and go without taking full advantage.”

      Nicholas Coldicott, who writes about alcohol for The Japan Times, says, “Tōkyō has a more diverse drinking scene than any city I’ve been to. You can drink Suntory Kakubin whisky highballs in a hole-in-the-wall, or Château Pétrus by the glass in a Ginza salon. I’ve seen 50 yen glasses of quasi-beer, and a 1919 Springbank for seven million yen. From cocktail bars to izakaya, from ’snack’ pubs to roof top beer gardens, there seems to be an unusually wide array of drinking venues here.”

      John Gauntner, a leading authority on sake, says he sometimes has problems getting foreign visitors to understand just how devoted to good alcohol Japanese bars can be: “I was taking a group of 15 people around and I found myself having to chide them. We were waiting for a taxi at a hotel lobby, and one guy orders a martini. The taxis come soon here; the martinis take 20 minutes. They don’t just pour you a martini. The attention to detail is such that it has to be made perfectly.”

      The Golden Gai drinking district in Shinjuku, Tōkyō, is home to dozens of tiny bars.

      Atsushi Horigami’s Shot Bar Zoetrope (page 190) offers an astonishing selection of about 250 types of Japanese whisky and 100 other Japanese alcohols.

      Of course, the proposition that Japan is “the best place to drink alcohol in the world” goes considerably further than mere admiration for a rich drinking culture. I spent a wonderful year up and down the country meeting hundreds of brewers, distillers and bar owners trying to marshal the evidence for my over-reaching claim. Each trip seemed to open a new field of inquiry and a fresh pile of Japanese language histories and guides to be laboriously deciphered. I have some wonderful memories: the rasp of untouched snow underfoot at the Yoichi distillery; the haunting bird song deep in the forest at Kagoshima’s Manzen distillery; a plastic glass of awamori poured for myself on an empty white beach near Nago; and the subtly different rich, sweet smells of all the brewing and distilling halls I visited from Okinawa to Hokkaido.

      Mine is the sort of far-reaching claim that will always leave room for dissent. Indeed, I expect more people to be vaguely annoyed by it than those who accept the case. New Yorkers no doubt had a thing or two to say about the claims of 1960s London to be the world’s capital of music and fashion. The international media was full of debate a couple of years ago about whether Tōkyō had indeed surpassed Paris as a gastronomic capital, just because it had earned more Michelin stars. Similarly, I have had numerous spirited arguments with people reluctant to accept the idea that Japan is also a land of rare alcoholic opportunity. In one sense, this book really just offers my final tuppence worth to all those debates: for the fellow who assured me that Japanese beer was always dull, the chapter on Japanese beer will hopefully open a few doors to all the smoked brews, yuzu ales and imperial stouts coming out of the independent makers. The lady who insisted all Japanese wine was sweetened bilge water drove me on while I was writing about wine, and the whisky chapter goes out to the Scotsman who sent me a three-page long poem/invective assuring me that whisky could only properly be made in Scotland!

      I have had many enlightening conversations with Japanese bar tenders about specific short comings in the Japanese scene and Nicholas Coldicott of The Japan Times has pointed out the relative immaturity of the rum (see page 235), tequila (see page 222) and gin markets (see also Coldicott’s excellent analyses of Japan’s cocktail scene, page 221). But there perhaps lies the key point and the reason why I am serious about the claim that Japan is the best place to drink alcohol in the world at the moment: the fact that a debate can even be entertained over whether the Japanese cocktail scene is superior to that of the United States, whether its rum and tequila bars surpass those in other countries, or whether Tōkyō and Ōsaka offer better ranges of Scottish whisky than anything to be found in London or Edinburgh, must put the issue into some perspective because, of course, Japan also offers a whole world of superb alcohols that are almost completely inaccessible in any of these places.

      Most people have heard of sake, though fewer will have experienced the thousands of sublime jizake lining the walls

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