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Sake Festival

A Day for Drinking The Saijo Sake Festival
Kanpai! Every year, for two wonderful days in October, the town of Saijo in Higashi-Hiroshima transforms itself into one enormous party.

Saijo is a sake town, and proud of it. The local brewing industry has a history stretching back over 300 years, and even today plays a major role in the life of the town. The government’s National Research Institute of Brewing is located here alongside the old breweries themselves, whose black and white walls and narrow, red brick chimneys line the ancient Sanyo Road.
Saijo sakes are famous for their full, mellow flavor, often described as soft and sweet. About ten of the town’s sakes are famous nationwide, and increasingly popular outside Japan as well. In winter, when the breweries are busiest, the air is redolent with the perfume of their labor. But it is earlier, in the fall, that Saijo shows its colors most vividly to visitors.

The Saijo Sake Festival is held every year in early October. Visitors are treated to parades, craft stalls spring up along the sidewalks, and classical concerts are given in several of the breweries. But of course, the main attraction is the sake itself. At the 2006 Festival, for example, \1,500 yen bought visitors a souvenir cup and access to around 900 varieties of sake from producers across the nation. Entering the main pavilion, one finds great crowds of happy festivalgoers sprawled on picnic blankets beneath the trees, drinking and eating. As the hours pass, boundaries between friend and stranger collapse and people mingle, talking and laughing, singing and above all sharing the clear, sweet beverage that is the Festival’s reason for being. Don’t pass it up.

■Sake
Sake

Sake is one of the great pleasures of Japan, and despite some waning popularity in recent years is still regarded as the hallmark national drink
Sake is also called Nihonshu, which just means Japanese alcohol. The earliest written reference to sake comes from the third century AD, and the basic methods used in its manufacture have gone unchanged for five hundred years.
Though often referred to as a “rice wine” outside Japan, sake is a brewed beverage, more closely related to beer than to wine. In the purest sakes, only four ingredients matter: water, rice, yeast, and the koji.
The rice used for sake is different from rice meant to be eaten. The first step in preparing the rice is to mill away the surface of the grain. The starches which are fermented are concentrated in the center of the grain, and the amount of milling greatly influences the flavor of the finished sake. In the highest grades of sake, at least 50% of the grain must be polished away before the rice can be used.
Dozens of strains of yeast are used in sake production, throughout Japan, though three or four are considered most important. Yeast converts sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide (though finished sake is not carbonated), and also creates other chemical compounds, differing from strain to strain. These play a vital role in the development of a finished sake’s characteristic flavor and aroma.
The koji is the last ingredient, and without it there is no sake. Koji is steamed rice on which koji-kin, a mold, has been cultivated. This mold converts the starches in the rice into sugars, which can then be fermented by the yeast. Koji production is an extremely important component of the sake brewing process, and most breweries keep a separate room, called the koji muro, devoted entirely to this process. Over the years a number of machines have been developed to aid in making the koji, but for their best sakes nearly all breweries still make koji by hand.
During wartime rice shortages, sake producers began to add alcohol to the finished product to increase their yield. After the war, this continued, particularly for the lower grades of sake. However, some premium sakes also have small amounts of alcohol added. Brewers say that this teases out elements of flavor and aroma in finer sakes that might otherwise be lost. Many premium sakes are still made without added alcohol, however. Any sake with the word junmai in its name is one of these, made in the original way from the four basic ingredients.
Sakes are divided into different grades, the lowest being futsuu-shu or ‘normal’ sake and the highest being either Daiginjo-shu or Junmai Daiginjo-shu. There is a lot of overlap between grades, however, and sake connoisseurs will tell you that the highest grades often have less ‘personality’ than those a rung or two down the ladder.
A final word about serving sakes. Drinking warmed sake is traditional, and especially pleasant in winter. However, this practice may have developed in response to flawed sakes, whose flavor improved with warming. Quality standards have improved immeasurably since the war, and sake is increasingly drunk slightly chilled. Sake cocktails, which have acquired some popularity outside Japan, are regarded as an abomination by purists. You owe it to yourself to try the very best sakes on their own, rather than using them as mixers.

■Shochu
Shochu is the other great alcoholic drink of Japan. In fact, while in recent years sake consumption in Japan has decreased, shochu has enjoyed a steep rise in popularity. Shochu is a distilled beverage, like whisky. It is stronger than sake, and can be made from any of a number of raw ingredients, including sweet potatoes, rice, buckwheat and barley. Less common varieties are distilled from ingredients ranging from brown sugar or chestnuts to carrots.
Shochu probably originated outside of Japan, but in Japan it became very popular in Kyushu before spreading to the rest of the country. Kagoshima, in Kyushu, is considered by many to be the Japanese ‘home’ of shochu, and people from Kagoshima are justly proud of their complex, earthy sweet potato shochu.
Shochu serves better as a mixer than sake, and the ubiquitous chu-hi, shochu with various fruit flavors, is one of the most popular cocktails in Japan. However, purists tend to drink it straight, with ice or a little added water. In winter, especially, many drinkers enjoy their shochu oyu-wari, which simply means mixed with a little hot water. Very, very pleasant.

■Saijo
Sake

The town of Saijo is part of the larger Higahi-Hiroshima city, about 30 kilometers east of Hiroshima city. Until the relocation of Hiroshima University from the city center in the 1980’s, Saijo was a quiet town whose primary industry was sake production. Now, of course, Saijo is a thriving university town. Hiroshima University (or Hirodai) is the prefecture’s national university, and very well regarded. The main reason for non-academic visitors to Japan to travel to Saijo will be the Saijo Sake Festival, held the second Saturday and Sunday of October in each year. If you’re in western Japan while the festival is taking place, it’s well worth a trip.

On weekends and holidays, at least 2 breweries are open to the public. The breweries are near JR Saijo station.

>> Date & Place
Date: Second Saturday and Sunday of October
Place: Around JR Saijo Station, Higashi Hiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture

>> Access
The Kodama shinkansen is the only one that stops at Higashi-Hiroshima Station, and from the station travelers can make the 20 minute trip into Saijo by taxi or bus.

Traveling from Hiroshima Station, take the JR Sanyo-line train bound for Saijo, Shiraichi and Okayama. The train usually departs from platform 5, but will sometimes depart from other platforms. Check the schedule board, which offers information in both Japanese and English. Don’t worry about whether to catch the express or the ordinary train. The express arrives in Saijo after about thirty minutes, and the ordinary train after forty. Get off at Saijo Station.

>> Map
Saijo sakefestival map>>Click here to view
Hiroshima prefecture map>>Click here to view

>> Website
Sake festival official HP (in English)

■Takehara

A bout 90 minutes east of Hiroshima city on the local JR Kure train line, visitors will arrive at Takehara Station. If you intend to spend some time in Hiroshima prefecture, Takehara is definitely worth a daytrip.

>> History
Located along the Honkawa River, Takehara’s interesting history still shows in the excellent collection of older buildings concentrated in the eastern part of the city. In the 17th century, the locals began trying to reclaim land along the east bank of the river for farming. Although they were successful, the new land proved to be too salty for cultivation. Undaunted, the town converted the land to salt pans, and Takehara began to enjoy a prosperity far greater than would have been afforded by agriculture. Wealth from the salt industry allowed the rise of a number of famous merchant scholars, including the great Confucian historian and poet Sanyo Rai.
Today, the streets of Takehara are well known for their many fine historic merchants’ and scholars’ homes, with their tiled roofs and white walls. There are also old breweries and their wells, and several interesting museums devoted to local history and craft traditions. A little farther to the east, visitors can take a pleasant stroll among the many old Buddhist temples dotting the mountainside. At the Takeno Yakata (House of Bamboo), a bamboo ecology garden about ten minutes car ride from the Station, visitors will even find an enormous pipe organ with pipes made from sections of bamboo. Where else will you ever see that? Come on, get on the train.

>> Access
From Hiroshima Station, visitors can take the local JR Kure-line east to Takehara Station, with a travel time of about an hour and a half. From the station, the historic sections of the city are about a fifteen minute walk. Ask station staff for directions to the Honmachi section of town.

>> Map
Hiroshima prefecture map>>Click here to view

-Matt Mangham

>>Hotels and Ryokans in the center of Hiroshima