Eat, drink, travel Japan.
Japanese rice wine — breweries, regions, tastings, food pairings.
The trip almost didn’t happen. I’d booked an Aomori brewery visit at the end of a rushed week, the second of three trains had run late out of Sendai, and I walked into the brick warehouse of Hachinohe Shuzo apologetic and damp, wanting only to nod my way through the tour and find a hotel. … Read more
Hyogo and Kyoto produce more sake than the next eight prefectures combined. Two of Kansai’s six prefectures, side by side, brew over half of Japan’s nihonshu in any given year. Most travellers I’ve met think Niigata when they think sake. They’d be wrong about where the country actually makes the stuff. Kansai is the heartland. … Read more
The third nigiri at Sushi Sho in Yotsuya was where it landed for me. Hokkaido shima-aji, brushed with a single drop of soy, the rice still warm. The pour beside it was a junmai from Akita served at room temperature, almost room-cool, in a small ochoko cup. One bite, one sip. The fish stopped tasting … Read more
The first person to write the recipe for otoso was a third-century Chinese physician named Hua Tuo, and he wrote it for a man who probably did not deserve it. Hua Tuo was the personal doctor to Cao Cao, the warlord whose name still echoes through every Three Kingdoms novel and video game in East … Read more
The first sound is the knock of the wooden bath bucket against the stone rim, and then the slow tip of the small ceramic flask into a cedar cup the size of a large thimble. Steam comes off the water at a height somewhere around your collarbone. It is January in Akita, the bath outside, … Read more
The first time hot sake actually surprised me, the steam came up off the cup before I tilted it, and the smell hit before the heat did. Cooked rice. A whisper of caramel. Something almost mushroomy under the alcohol. Not the sharp clean snap of a cold ginjo. Something rounder, broader, the same liquid wearing … Read more
Hiroshima Station to Saijo by local train: 31 minutes, ¥420. From the platform, you walk five minutes to a thousand-year-old sake town with seven working breweries lined up between two thin streets. The Peace Memorial Park, the place every guidebook starts you, is in the other direction. Most foreign visitors never make it to Saijo. … Read more
Niigata Prefecture has 91 active sake breweries, more than any other prefecture in Japan. The next-densest, Hyogo and Kyoto, are still well behind, and they are giants of population and visibility. Niigata sits on the Sea of Japan with under two million people, and yet for every 22,000 residents there is a working kura turning … Read more
The bowl came down on the counter at Amatsubo just before nine on a wet March evening, kaisendon piled until the rice underneath had given up trying to be visible. Sweet shrimp, snow crab, yellowtail, two kinds of tuna, salmon roe in a glossy heap, and on top of that the proprietor laid down a … Read more
You’re standing in the basement of a department store in Shinjuku, holding a bottle of sake by the neck, and the only character on the front you can read is ¥. The label is a wall of kanji, two numbers with a plus sign, a percentage, and a date that does not match the western … Read more
The first thing you notice is the smoke. Charcoal smoke, the lighter-fluid kind nobody admits to using, drifting between the lower branches of a hundred-year-old somei-yoshino. Then the sound, which is plastic on plastic: the click of a paper cup against a 300ml bottle of nama sake, the crinkle of a konbini bag, the squeak … Read more
It’s a Wednesday at 19:30 on the tenth floor of a Shinjuku building I would never have walked into without instructions, and the proprietor is sliding three small glasses across the counter towards me. Niigata. Yamagata. Akita. He pours each one to the brim and a little over, the way most sake bars in Tokyo … Read more
The first time I really understood sake pairing, I was sitting at the counter of a tiny seven-seat kappo in Yanaka. The proprietor, Mr Sato, watched me start with a chilled daiginjo and a piece of grilled mackerel and shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Then he poured me a cup of warm kimoto junmai from … Read more
Can you day-trip a sake brewery from Tokyo and actually be back in Shinjuku for dinner? Yes, and you do not need a JR Pass, a tour guide, or a single word of Japanese to make it work. The harder question is which brewery, because the answer reshapes the day. A 90-minute Ozawa Shuzo tour … Read more
The brewer at Matsumoto Shuzo poured the first cup, watched my face, and said: “Kyoto sake is not Niigata sake. It will not punch you. It will sit beside what you eat and let the food do the talking.” That sentence rearranged how I drink in Kyoto. I had been chasing the bigger, drier, mountain-rice … Read more