indigenous distilled spirit, has its own traditions in the southern part of the country, stretching back centuries. There are six major types of premium shōchū, all using different ingredients. The products of hundreds of small distilleries can be sampled in the specialist shōchū bars. There is also awamori, a separate distilling tradition on the islands of Okinawa, where people have been making and long-aging their spirit for centuries. When you have exhausted all that, there is a well-established wine industry, a thriving craft beer sector and the second largest single-malt whisky industry in the world. Japan’s whiskies are currently shaking up international competitions in much the same way that New World wine did to the wine industry in the 1970s.
Why is contemporary Japanese drink culture so rich? All sorts of theories were put to me during my year-long research and many struck me as convincing. Certainly, historical factors played a part in ensuring the survival of the country’s own alcohol traditions. Japan was never colonized and was largely isolated from the international trading system until the Meiji period (1868–1912). Unlike rums, whiskies, brandies and wines, the major Japanese alcohols never became internationally traded commodities and still remain largely unexplored outside the country. But Japan’s unusual resistance to Western colonization had benefits too: its premium markets were never completely dominated by foreign tastes and its alcohol industries were never swamped by foreign capital. Japan retains a domestic industry, which is still, in many sectors, based on small- to mediumsized producers. This is particularly the case in its indigenous alcohol industries—sake, shōchū and awamori—where the most interesting makers are often very small indeed.
Yorozuya Matsukaze in Ikebukuro, Tōkyō (page 73), has known various incarnations since its opening in 1955—as a sweet shop, a coffee shop, a restaurant and now as a traditional izakaya.
“Hanami” cherry blossom viewing parties began as an aristocratic pursuit in the Heian period (794–1185), but now much of Japan can be found under a cherry tree in March or April enjoying the season’s ephemeral beauty and free-flowing alcohol.
There are also economic and cultural forces at work: the country has a mature and prosperous consumer economy and, unlike many developed, non-Western countries, has been importing high-quality alcohol from across the world for more than a century. Interest in these alcohols goes back to the opening of the country in the late 1800s and, while not eclipsing the native traditions, has strongly influenced Japanese alcohol culture. The chapters on whisky, wine and beer in this guide tell various parts of the story. In recent years, tariff barriers have tumbled and a diverse drinking-related media has helped to inform young Japanese consumers, often in extraordinary detail, about the flood of new, relatively cheap imports. These people are demanding higher quality from both importers and domestic alcohol makers and this demand is both supporting and being supported by Japan’s innovative and highly professional bar owners and staff. In Chapter 7, I take a closer look at the historical development of bar tending in Japan and the profession’s key role in developing the myriad of drinking opportunities now on offer.
Twenty years ago, the drinking districts of Japan did not offer the quality they do now. Twenty years from now, I have a sneaking fear they may not offer the bustle of activity that overwhelms the visitor these days. There might be something evanescent about this “golden age.” Post-war Japanese business culture was at least partly built on hard drinking and, while money has been short since the 1990s, we are still riding on the coattails of that booze-fueled epoch. In the 1980s, and to some extent this is still the expectation in some workplaces, the cultural norm was for salarymen to spend endless long evenings out on the town with colleagues and clients. It wasn’t an option. In many companies, it was part of the job, and that culture was critical to building and sustaining the tens of thousands of bars in Japan’s cities. If you visit any whisky bar, you will see salarymen still doing their bit for the alcohol business, but younger men are increasingly resistant to devoting their entire social as well as working lives to their companies. Such changes may turn out to be more deadly to the Japanese drinking districts than any of the short-term issues caused by temporary economic problems. On the other hand, as I explore below, Japanese culture has always found a prominent place for drinking and the same social shifts that are starting to see men demanding more time with their families are also bringing more women into the workforce and therefore the drinkforce. Nobody really knows what will happen from here but, right now, I believe Japan offers a uniquely rich and diverse drinking culture. I hope this guide will open some doors to new experiences.
Japan’s Drinking Culture
At the height of the prohibition era in the United States, a few voices in Japan hesitantly suggested that their country should impose a similar ban. Japan had been assiduously copying its neighbor across the Pacific since the Meiji reforms of the late 19th century. Perhaps the next enlightened thing to do was to follow America in outlawing alcohol?
The opposition was immediate and vociferous. The Japan Chronicle, a leading English-language newspaper at the time, reported people driving around cities throwing pro-alcohol leaflets onto the streets. The propagandists claimed that there was no example of an advanced civilization that had not embraced alcohol. Booze was essential for progress! Of course the claim was false, but it is a measure of alcohol’s place in Japanese culture that its proponents were considered mainstream while the prohibitionists were widely dismissed as extremists. The idea of a ban never really got off the ground. A law was introduced in 1922 forbidding children from drinking and a grand total of 17 villages nationwide went “dry,” but the rest of Japan spent the prohibition era picking the bones of America’s alcohol industry, shipping over second-hand equipment from defunct US firms to help build its fledgling beer and wine sectors.
The Japanese people seem to have been enthusiastic about their alcohol from the earliest times. The first written record of Japanese drinking is actually found in China. The History of the Kingdom of Wei, written in AD 297, reported that the Japanese were “fond of their alcohol.” At funerals, the Chinese observer wrote, “The head mourners wail and lament, while friends sing, dance and drink liquor.”
In the oldest Japanese chronicles, the Kojiki (c. AD 712) and the Nihon Shoki (AD 720), there are drinking songs, stories of intoxicated emperors (“I am drunk with the soothing liquor, with the smiling liquor,” he sang) and several bloodthirsty tales of getting the better of opponents with alcohol. In fact, if the chronicles are to be believed, serving sake to unsuspecting foes and then skewering them was a very popular ruse indeed: an eight-headed serpent meets his death after getting plastered on eight buckets of sake, a murderous soldier is stabbed as he lifts his cup, and a group of enemies are made drunk by the emperor’s men only to have their heads cracked with mallets. (“Ho! Now is the time/Ho! Now is the time/Ha Ha Psha!/Even now, my boys/Even now, my boys,” sings the Imperial commander as his warriors bludgeon the tipsy tribe.)
Ordinary Japanese people seem to have acquired their taste for alcohol early. Some established accounts would have you believe that alcohol was restricted to the elites and to festivals where the rich doled the good stuff out to commoners. It is certainly true that the officially sanctioned sake made by the religious foundations and, later, by commercial firms was far too expensive for most people to drink regularly until quite recently. But there is plenty of evidence of a popular drinking culture. Some working-class consumption in the towns hung on the coattails of the sake industry. Poor housewives would offer to wash the bags used in sake making, from which they squeezed a weak brew for their families, and there is a genre of jokes from the Edo period (1603–1868) about eating solid alcoholic sake lees (the friends of one notoriously penniless drunkard ask: “How much did you drink?” He replies: “Half a kilogram”).
