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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 of Japan’s sake bars, but there are other interesting drinks to be tried. Shōchū, Japan’s 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.