from “Seven elves getting drunk” by Kitagawa Utamaro (1753–1806).
In the countryside, the peasants were more proactive. The Zōhyō Monogatari, a sort of management manual for samurai officers published in the mid to late 1600s, advises against giving too much food to the lowest rank of soldiers drawn from the peasantry. “You can give rice enough for three or four days but not more than five days. If you give ten days worth of rice they will put eight or nine days of it into making sake. If you let that happen, they will starve and die,” the guide advises. “With three or four days of rice, they will still make their unrefined sake but they will not starve.”
In the villages themselves, a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities continued well into the 20th century. One old woman interviewed in Nōka ga Oshieru Doburoku no Tsukurikata (“Farmers teach unrefined sake making”), a wonderful little book published in 2007 about the Japanese home brewing scene, said she still brewed late at night because of memories of police raids in her childhood. The Japanese sake writer Hisao Nagayama recalled that, in his own village in the 1950s, farmers would ring bells, blow conch shells and clang pots if any official-looking stranger came into the area. (At the time, about 40,000 people a year were being arrested for illicit brewing or distilling.) Nagayama’s parents kept their home brew in the ceiling above the toilet because the stench there disguised the smell of the alcohol from prying noses.
Office workers raise a toast at Kaasan, Shinjuku, Tōkyō (page 59).
The importance of being frank
Many Japanese people look upon office parties as a sort of safety valve. The theory goes that lowly workers should be able to talk honestly to their bosses about feelings they would not normally be able to express. Everybody is supposed to relax, act and talk freely and forget about any indiscretions in the morning. But tread carefully! There may be more politics going on than you think.
In 1323, courtiers acting under the auspices of the Emperor Go-Daigo started organizing bureikō parties. Bureikō meant “putting aside rank” and is still the term used for the frankness encouraged at office gatherings. At Go-Daigo’s original bureikō parties, humble warriors and priests were allowed to mix with favored members of the court. Sake and food were consumed in great quantities. Everybody let down their hair, dressed simply and were prompted to speak honestly about their frustrations, politics and hopes for the future. These curious events were not taken seriously by the Kamakura shogunate, the warrior government which had a stranglehold over the Imperial state at the time, but were the first steps in building support for Go-Daigo’s long and eventually successful campaign to smash the shogunate.
If there is a theme running through Japanese alcohol history, it is the people’s endless inventiveness when it comes to obtaining drink. The established view is that Japanese alcohol culture begins and ends with the rice wine sake, but the rural brewers interviewed by the authors of Nōka ga Oshieru Doburoku no Tsukurikata revealed recipes using just about any ingredient that came to hand. In fact, more obscure ingredients may have been easier to use than the heavily taxed and regulated rice. One 91-year-old, for instance, recalled a recipe for yamabudō sake, a wine brewed from mountain grapes. Other villages used other fruits, millet, corn and even sweet potatoes. Home distilling also seems to have been common. The Koume Nikki (“Koume’s diary”), kept by the wife of a school headmaster in the 19th century, records the use of a family still to give a bit of oomph to unsatisfactorily weak sakes.
There have been numerous attempts to suppress alcohol in Japan. Buddhism, one of Japan’s two main religions, takes a far dimmer view of liquor than Christianity and most other religions. The prohibition efforts of the 1920s were, in fact, just the latest in a long line of campaigns by religious and government leaders. There were Imperial decrees against alcohol in AD 722, 732, 737, 758 and 770 and similar proclamations recurred regularly throughout the succeeding centuries. The problem has been that normal Japanese people have consistently ignored or sidestepped these regulations, tending more towards a philosophy of life encapsulated by the 8th-century poet Ōtomo no Tabito: “Rather be a pot of sake than a human being/To be saturated with sake.”
Customers at the Daizen sake bar, Chiyoda, Tōkyō.
The folk religion Shinto and indeed much of the fabric of traditional Japan incorporates alcohol consumption at almost every turn: the most sacred part of a Shinto wedding is the san-san-kudo, where the couple ceremonially drink alcohol to bind themselves in matrimony; the Girl’s Festival in March is toasted with the sweet, low-alcohol amazake (March was a prime time for home brewing when arrests were still common because the booze could always be excused as amazake gone bad); the coming of the cherry blossom brings hanami picnics celebrating spring with enthusiastic drinking; in autumn, full moon viewing parties are also soused and the New Year celebrations are incomplete in many families without toso, a herb-infused sake thought to guarantee health in the coming months.
The details of these traditions vary widely between different localities but a common feature is that the consumption of the alcohol often seems to be as important as the excuse for it. The American scholars Robert Smith and Ella Wiswell, describing 1930s rural society in Suye village, Kumamoto prefecture, quoted a Mrs Toyama, who was organizing a cherry blossom party: “It is called hanami (flower viewing) but, since the cherry blossoms are gone, we will look at the violets in the fields instead.”
Smith and Wiswell were astonished by the Bacchanalian energy of the Japanese farmers they studied: “The people of Suye were always ready for a party, and one cannot but be impressed by their seemingly limitless capacity to find occasions for them. Most parties, whether attended by both women and men, or by men or women only, involved dancing, singing, eating, and heavy drinking, and almost invariably considerable sexual joking and play. There were parties given to mark the naming of a new baby, returning from a visit to a shrine or temple, celebrating a variety of festivals and holidays, sending off conscripts and welcoming them back, dedicating new buildings and marking the end of rice planting and the harvest, the completion of the silk-producing cycle, and every other enterprise involving more than two or three people.”
An Encouragement of Learning
The statesman and scholar Yukichi Fukuzawa is chiefly remembered today as the founder of Keio University and for his presence on the 10,000 yen note, but his tremendous energy produced an English–Japanese dictionary, best-selling books on Western culture, influential political and philosophical works, children’s textbooks, a national newspaper and the 17-volume An Encouragement of Learning . His own method of keeping himself at the scholarly grindstone was more carrot than stick: he would put a bottle of sake on top of his oil lamp as he studied. By the time the sake had warmed up, it would be midnight and he would relax with a drink of the hot sake before retiring to bed.
On one occasion, Wiswell attended a “vaccination day” at a school: “Mothers came from all directions, and the school room looked like a nursery with babies crawling all over the place.... When I left all the older children had got their vaccinations and the doctor was well through the babies. On my way down the stairs I met the custodian with a barrel of shōchū and bottles of beer. ‘The drinking is starting,’ he said. It had not occurred to me, after all these months, that even a vaccination clinic calls for drinking afterwards.”
Alcohol was a part of life for almost all adults. If anybody tells you that Japanese drinking was traditionally only for the men, ask them to explain this account by Wiswell of a “baby naming party” in Kumamoto: “Everyone got very drunk. The old grandmother became very playful with Masakichi,
