It’s a surprisingly hot and bright mid-October day in Kasai, Hyogo Prefecture. I don’t know who said it first, me or one of my companions, but it’s true: this place is like something out of My Neighbour Totoro.

The atmosphere and the scenery are what you might call Ghibli-esque: bucolic and serene, but this is not just a postcard-perfect patchwork of rice paddies and old wooden buildings. The farmland of Kasai is functional, active, and lived-in—which is to say, it’s full of life.

Golden fields, green forests and blue skies are punctuated by the more utilitarian colours of modern agriculture: cobalt plastic tarps, silver wire-framed polytunnels, lightly rusted beige metal barns, and low-slung houses of slate-grey roof tiles and white cladding. We rush past it all over bumpy roads, in a little pickup truck. For a Londoner like me, riding— without a seatbelt!—in the back of a pickup truck feels like an adventure. The view is constantly in flux with the parallax of our movement. Objects are hidden from view just as soon as they appear. Nothing lasts.

In his 1993 review of My Neighbor Totoro, Roger Ebert admires how Hayao Miyazaki’s films have “an unforced realism in the way they notice details.” He offers an example, one of many he could have pointed to in the film: “the children look at a little waterfall near their home, and there on the bottom, unremarked, is a bottle someone threw into the stream.” It feels silly to describe actual reality as feeling real, but Kasai’s beauty—as compared to, say, the manicured temples and gardens of nearby Kyoto—lies in its unpretentious, down-to-earth nature.

We are also not far from Osaka—it’s only an hour’s drive, but it feels like a world away. Far from the sensory overload of Japan’s second city, here in Kasai, the air and the mind become clearer. Without constant distraction, it’s easier to notice details. And attention to details, I learn, is key to making great sake.

***

I am in Hyogo as a guest of Hideo Shōji and Mari Momiki, representatives of a sake brand called Saku, or ‘new moon.’ Shōji is one of the company’s founders, and he’s interested in more than simply producing delicious drinks. He’s passionate about what he calls “sake as storytelling;” the capacity for sake to express narratives and even abstract concepts.

At first I’m afraid this might all go over my head, but Shōji and Momiki are both enthusiastic, good-humoured, and most of all, thorough guides. They take me on an in-depth, whirlwind tour of the entire sake-making process. We visit a sacred water source on top of a mountain, we meet the farmer who grows the rice, and the man who grows the kōji used to ferment it. With all of this presented to me, it becomes easier to understand how sake really can be imbued with meaning, and a sense of place that goes deeper than terroir.

But how do you convey a sense of place if you’re far removed from that place? In the UK, producers of Japanese food and drinks tackle this question with various approaches, and varying results. At worst: worn-out, stereotypical signifiers (lucky cats, photos of Shibuya Crossing, geisha, sumo wrestlers, etc,) are co-opted into displays that can be readily understood as ‘Japanese,’ but have no substance, specificity, or depth. At best, however, a great deal of thought goes into creating an evocative and meaningful space, imbued with real cultural context, and details that come from personal experience and first-hand familiarity with Japan. British sake breweries—which now (surprisingly!) number three—seem to be especially good at this.

For example: Dojima Brewery, near Ely. Dojima was founded by sixth-generation sake brewer Yoshihide Hashimoto, who began his career in Osaka in 1972, and established Dojima in Cambridgeshire in 2018 after previously setting up outposts in Korea and Myanmar. Dojima’s website describes their adopted home near the Suffolk border in glowing, almost spiritual terms:

““This is a great way to continue to express my love for Japan, in a different form, overseas.””

— Tracey Delaney, The Sparkling Sake Brewery

“We are blessed to make sake here on a site as rich in history and culture as it is abundant in nature. Purity of water is essential in our pursuit of sake brewing and painstaking excavation has uncovered a water source that runs through strata dating back to the Ice Age. This same water runs in a small river bordering the estate in which rare Japanese halfbeak fish swim, a species highly revered in Japan.”

Dojima takes its connection to Japan much further than fish. The brewery is located on the grounds of Fordham Abbey, a Georgian estate that has been reshaped in Japan’s image. The abbey now boasts Japanese gardens, a shrine dedicated to the god of sake, a Japanese restaurant, and a calendar of events celebrating Japanese art and culture. There are moon viewings, cherry blossom picnics, art exhibits, and festivals that recreate the jubilant atmosphere of matsuri, complete with food stalls, taiko, rakugo, martial arts performances, and of course, plenty of sake.

The premises have even been outfitted with high-end electronic Toto toilets—an often overlooked but incredibly important detail. The entire estate has been rebuilt as a heartfelt, living tribute to traditional Japanese culture.

Meanwhile, the UK’s very first sake brewery, Kanpai, takes a different and altogether more urban approach, more suited to their own South London setting, and more connected to the sensory landscape and daily rhythms and of Japanese city life. Instead of the trickle of water from a nearby stream, Kanpai’s taproom is soundtracked by the noise of traffic and trains. The outer walls of the brewery are decorated with a mural depicting a rainy night in Tokyo. While the sake itself retains an important connection to Japanese agriculture through the use of premium Japanese rice, Kanpai founders Tom and Lucy Wilson know better than to attempt a pastiche of pastoral life in Peckham (or at their newly opened site in London Bridge.) Instead, they embrace the London-ness of it all, celebrating our famously hard water and its unique effects on sake, and making the most of an immutably inner-city setting.

They’ve constructed tucked-away drinking dens that feel like places you might stumble upon in rustier Japanese cities like Yokohama or Kitakyushu. They serve food in keeping with a true izakaya spirit: bold, creative, and unfussy. And events such as the ‘Kanpai Kurafuto’ market feature the kind of handmade fabrics, ceramics, and stationery you might find in a particularly cool shopping arcade in Japan. Kanpai has been able to recreate the relaxed yet intimate, elbows-on-the-counter atmosphere of so many Japanese bars by considering how to best contextualise their product. And, of course, the sake itself, which is delicious and unique, helps create this atmosphere as well.

***

Both Dojima and Kanpai are fortunate to be built into premises with an innate sense of character, and they have each made the most of those premises by expanding on them in delightfully divergent ways. But the third, newest brewery in the UK, The Sparkling Sake Brewery, doesn’t have a railway arch or a Georgian estate where they can present their product in a carefully constructed context, so their particular challenge is to express an aesthetic sensibility solely through the sake itself.

The Sparkling Sake Brewery was launched in October 2021, by partners Tracey Delaney and Naoki Toyota. Delaney, who was born in New York but has spent many years living in Japan and is now a certified international kikisake-shi (sake educator and sommelier), explains the motivation to establish a brewery in the UK in a succinct, and highly relatable way: “This is a great way to continue to express my love for Japan, in a different form, overseas.”

For Toyota, the company’s head brewer, making sake is also a process that allows for personal creativity and artistic expression. He tells his sake origin story with a clear narrative imbued with a strong sense of self and purpose, going all the way back to his childhood.

“I was born in Japan and grew up in Kyoto,” he says. “When I was a little boy, I was always curious about the way nature changes. I used to look at the sky and see the fleeting movement of the clouds, and changing weather patterns; I used to like feeling the change of the seasons.”

In 2017, Toyota moved to the UK from Japan, and after the birth of his first child, he chose to take paternity leave—“an unusual choice in Japanese culture,” he reflects.

“Looking back, that decision might have really been about my curiosity—how I could mature by going beyond the beliefs that shaped my life up to that point,” he says. “Then I started cooking for my family. To be honest, I wasn’t experienced with cooking, but I realised that cooking is very creative, and also it has the power to get people smiling.”

These experiences all set the stage for Toyota to discover homebrewing—something that is not allowed in Japan under strict laws regulating the production of alcohol. He first started making cloudy, unfiltered sake, which he compares to the process of making naturally sparkling wine.

“That sake was so amazing for me—very fresh and lively. And I was also surprised to find how the rice, water, and microorganisms change themselves and interact with each other to create new flavour and texture through the fermentation process,” Toyota says.

Key to this process, of course, is kōji—the mould that converts starch to sugar and creates floral, fruity, fungal aromas, often in surprising, unpredictable ways. Toyota says: “[It’s] more than just an alcoholic beverage—it’s a collaborative work of art, bridging nature and craftsmanship.” Kōji—and yeast—forms the framework of that bridge.

“Of course I have a recipe for each batch, to achieve a particular profile,” Toyota says. “But as a brewer, I am very, very excited to see how it goes during fermentation. I want to let the fermentation express itself as much as possible, because the world of fermentation is related to nature.”

Toyota is fascinated by how changes in the weather, the temperature, and the humidity of his environment affects the outcome of the product.

““At the kōji workshop, I recall odes to patina from Junichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. I think of ikigai: dedication to a life’s purpose.””

“Even if you use the same ingredients, or make it with the same recipe, each batch has its own subtle, unique flavour profile,” Toyota tells me. “Also, we don’t pasteurise after bottling, so fermentation is still ongoing in the bottle. That means consumers can experience a beautiful, fleeting moment of nature.” In other words, each batch, each bottle, and even each glass of their sake is unique–a particular flavour of a particular moment, never to be tasted again.

Since The Sparkling Sake Brewery doesn’t have its own venue, like Dojima and Kanpai do, I ask Toyota where and how to best enjoy it. “It would be great if people could drink our product while immersed in nature; while listening to the tweeting of the birds or the sounds of rain, or watching the movement of the clouds,” he says.

I look out the window, onto my nondescript suburban street in Lewisham, and I reminisce about Kasai, thinking of the view from the back of the pickup truck. Always changing, always new.

***

The rice farmer, Fujimoto-san, drove us halfway up a mountain, through a forest of tall, slender pines, to where we could drive no further. We then took a short but steep hike further up, to feel the spray of the spring that feeds the crops in the valley below, and which is revered as a deity due to its live-giving importance. We watch our steps, careful not to slip on damp stones or to tread on the tiny crabs that live among them.

Later, we visit a kōji workshop in nearby Tatsuno, where the kōji master, Itō-san, shows off ceiling-high stacks of ancient, wooden inoculation trays. He takes us into the cultivation room, which is warmed solely by heat of the fermentation itself, to a sweaty 35ºC. We also meet a brewer, Inaoka-san, who has developed his own unique process to encourage a more thorough inoculation of kōji through the core of each rice grain, and a chef, Nakae-san, who pairs the sake with kaiseki cuisine made strictly with Hyogo produce. He is so protective of his palate that he doesn’t allow himself chillies or garlic, out of concern that they might permanently alter his sense of taste and balance.

There are stories within stories here, and all along the way, I can’t help but think of a catalogue of Japanese aesthetic and cultural concepts that I learned about as a student. It’s like touring a textbook of Japanese art theory. In the forest, komorebi: the sunlight that filters through a forest canopy, dappling the ground. At the kōji workshop, I recall odes to patina from Junichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. I think of ikigai: dedication to a life’s purpose. Kaizen: perpetual self-appraisal and improvement. Mono no aware: ‘the sadness of things.’ Ichigo-ichie: ‘thoughtful appreciation of once-in-a-lifetime experiences, meetings, or moments.’

I often recoil from words like these, because they are frequently deployed as glib cliches that support an othering, overly simplistic view of Japan. They are often, in my view, used to rob Japan of its messy, flawed humanity, and reduce it to a series of conceptual stereotypes.

Of course, just because an idea has become a cliché doesn’t mean it has no truth. But you have to pay attention to the details to fully appreciate that truth. Shōji-san is right: sake can tell a story—the story of a land, its microbes, its people and their values—but those stories are worth nothing if they fall on deaf ears. In Kasai and Cambridgeshire, brewers are dedicated to imbuing their sake with meaning. Our job is to do more than just taste. We also have to listen.