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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”).

Detail 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, and Ichiro’s father was pawing one of his sisters-in-law. Mrs Wauchi was very far gone, and the two of us must have made a funny sight coming home huddled under her shawl, as I was without a coat. We stumbled along, talking loudly, and she kept telling me how good it felt to be so drunk. [Later] Mrs Hayashi stopped by completely drunk, saying how sorry she was that she had not left the party when I did. Her husband will be angry at her at being kept waiting, she said, but she does love to drink, and just could not tear herself away any sooner. She was sure her husband will divorce her, she laughed, for coming home late and drunk again. Today the women were discussing the Kawaze women’s escapade of the night before (which we don’t learn more of) and how drunk they were and where they finally went for their after-party.”

This all comes from a description of peasant life in southern Kyūshū in the 1930s. Middle-class city dwellers at the time and farmers in other parts of Japan may have had quite different norms (at one stage, Wiswell quotes a school principal’s wife from outside the village finding the antics of the village women “quite surprising”). It was certainly perfectly normal for respectable women in post-war Japan to largely abstain from drinking, and we are currently in the grip of a moral panic about younger women who like to drink. There were, and still are, all sorts of drinking cultures in the country. Today, if you look at a map of Japan’s alcohol consumption, you will find the people of Kyūshū (including Suye village) drink nearly twice as much shōchū per person per year as the rest of the Japan and four times more than parts of Kansai. The heartland of sake is the center and north of the main island. In Niigata prefecture, they drink about 16 liters of sake a year, while in Okinawa and Kagoshima in Kyūshū, they drink about a liter. The same goes for other alcohols: Northerners like whisky, Kyōto and Ōsaka are big on liqueurs, Yamanashi likes its wine. Two prefectures, Tōkyō and Hokkaido, drink just about everything to excess. Perhaps the only generalization that it is possible to make is that, wherever you travel in Japan, you are in the midst of a complex and deeply rooted drinking culture. There are new things to be discovered at every turn.

Sakamukae

Traditionally, when a traveler was expected back from a long pilgrimage, friends and family would wait at an incline at the border of their village to welcome him home. It was customary at these sakamukae to drink sake while waiting. An early Edo-period account has it that one fellow got a little too drunk waiting for an unpunctual friend. He began groaning loudly and his worried friends told him to stop drinking. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I am groaning because the intoxication will go away so soon.”

Detail showing revelers from “A willow tree by the gateway of Shimabara” by Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858).