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 shrine petitioned the shogunate and, in a sort of strike to put pressure on the authorities, its kōji makers locked themselves in their sacred precincts while they waited for the decision. Initially, the shogunate seemed likely to back the shrine and the status quo, but popular protests in the city and the lobbying power of the sake makers (who were among the richest citizens and the main money lenders) brought a dramatic change of policy. Soldiers were sent, not to break the moonshiners’ kōji rooms, but to root the kōji guild out of the shrine. The scene quickly turned ugly. Forty people were slaughtered. Kitano shrine and other buildings in the area were torched, and the priests’ domination of sake brewing was smashed forever.
It took centuries for the transfer of power to be completed, but the trend was toward secular commerce. In the Muromachi period (1392– 1573), we see increasing differentiation between sake makers, distributors and shops selling to the public. Brands start to emerge and, of course, we get the fitful, often barmy government regulation that seems to be a feature of any mature drink market. At one stage, the shogunate even tried to legislate what commoners could eat at a party: they could either have three different food dishes and one soup or one soup, two dishes and three glasses of sake. Needless to say, no one seems to have taken much notice.
Edo sake
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the population of the city of Edo (modern-day Tōkyō) grew from about 400,000 people to more than a million. Bunzaemon Asahi, the vomiting samurai we met at the start of this chapter, was typical of the population: a man from the provinces living on his own in the big city with money burning holes in his pockets (there were 1.5 times as many men as women). At the peak of Edo’s binge, at the start of the 19th century, the revelers were drinking one barrel of sake a year for every man, woman and child in the city (about 200 ml per person per day). Much of this was a cheap, unrefined style of sake called doburoku, which would have been consumed cold. There were more than 1,800 doburoku makers in the city in 1837. But more prosperous drinkers were drinking warmed sake made out of much more refined brews imported in huge quantities from Kōbe, Ōsaka and Kyōto in western Japan. You will sometimes still hear modern Japanese call poor quality goods kudaranai. The phrase literally means “did not come down” and refers to the Edo view that if something had not “come down” from Kansai’s prestigious production centers it was not worth buying. The view was particularly strong among drinkers, and Kansai’s sake (kudarizake) overwhelmingly dominated Edo’s market, accounting for about 70–90 percent of refined sake consumed in the city.
It was a formidably sophisticated industry. When patronizing Westerners arrived in Japan during the Meiji period to “teach the natives” about modern science, they were astounded to learn that the Kansai brewers had been heating their sake to destroy microbes for more than 250 years before Louis Pasteur’s discovery of “pasteurization” (Pasteur had initially been working for the wine industry). Charcoal filtering was also common practice. The story went that a worker at an Ōsaka sake kura in the early 1600s had become angry with his master and dumped ash from a stove into a batch of sake. The kura owner made a fortune when he discovered that the alcohol rescued from the barrel was of unusual clarity.
Modern sake
The taste, appearance and ways of serving sake have been in constant flux throughout its recent history. In a similar vein to the American economist George Taylor’s famous theory that women’s hemlines rose and fell with stock prices (miniskirts in the boom times, ankle lengths when the crashes come), the Japanese food historian Osamu Shinoda suggested that sake’s sweetness varied with war and peace. Indeed, records do seem to give the theory at least superficial credibility. In the relatively peaceful 1870s, a typical sake seems to have been quite dry by modern standards. In the war years between 1915 and 1920 and from the 1930s to 1940s, sakes became very sweet.
A quick guide to sake
When the sake bug gets you, the seemingly endless variety of types of sake is great fun to explore. But, for the newcomer, these different categories—ginjōshu, honjōzōshu, junmai and yamahai—can be a little overwhelming. So, what do you really need to know to make a start in sake?
Basically, sake is a brewed rice beer (though much more alcoholic than beer, so be careful). It is usually called Nihonshu in Japan, not sake. To find good sake, you need to look for junmai or pure rice sake (with nothing else added). The characters for junmai (純米) should appear somewhere on the bottle. The other type of sake that is highly sought after is ginjō (吟醸), which is made from highly polished rice. You will sometimes hear people talking about daiginjō (大吟醸), which is a more refined version of ginjō. You can drink any sake at any temperature you like, from hot to refrigerator cold. For more information on getting by in Japanese shops and bars, see the Appendix (page 253).
We currently seem to be headed in the opposite direction: away from the obsession with the super-dry sakes of the 1990s. (Maybe it’s all those North Korean missile tests?) Other tastes wax and wane as well: cedar wood smells and flavors imparted by sake barrels were valued in the Edo period—the bottom of a sake barrel could have a positively gin-like spiciness—but the rise of bottling has led to these tastes falling out of favor for the very best sakes.
The most significant change over the past 100 years has been a dramatic shift in the geography of sake. In the 19th century, the dominance of Kansai’s brewers seemed unassailable. Not only did they sell more than anybody else, but their sake was acknowledged to be of a higher quality. They swept the board at the first national sake tasting competition in 1907. Rakugo performers, Japan’s traditional sit-down comedians, used to tell jokes about the poor quality of jizake (地酒, local sake) from local breweries. But, in 1913, the New Sake Tasting Competition (“Shinshu Kanpyōkai”) dealt a stunning blow to these preconceptions: provincial sakes from Akita, Okayama, Ehime and Hiroshima shared the top prizes with Kansai’s famous Fushimi and Nada districts. Worse, a detailed look at the results revealed that only 60 percent of Nada and Fushimi’s sake had earned top medals, while Hiroshima boasted an 80 percent success rate and Okayama 70 percent. The country hicks kept on winning big prizes and, by 1919, the Nada makers had become so angry that they refused to take part.
These competitive reversals had little immediate impact on Kansai’s dominance in the real market, but impending war in the 1930s brought long-term changes that still shape contemporary sake. A government push to reduce rice use hurt the jizake makers in the short term. Half of the smaller kura were closed, and those that were left were given strictly limited rations of rice, which made it virtually impossible to expand. It was the big Kansai makers who invested in mass production and made most of the cheap, adulterated sake that was all that was available to most people during the war. Disgruntled drinkers talked of “goldfish sake,” which had so much water added that fish could live in it. After that was regulated out of existence, a more potent but equally knavish innovation called zōjōshu hit the shelves. It had so much distilled alcohol and sugar added that rice use was cut by more than two-thirds.
Just as zōjōshu tended to give wicked hangovers to its consumers, so its production affected the industry long after the end of rice shortages. The basis of some of the big