The Secret Life – WWII & Sake
Heather’s current assignment is to write a couple articles about some local sake breweries. So she had two tours with a private tour guide last Wednesday. Since it also happened to be her birthday, I decided to take the day off work and go with her. Hanging out all day without kids, watching Heather “work” – its a sweet deal.
We took the local train up to Nikko in the Northern part of Tochigi. We haven’t had a chance to ride a train since last year so it was nice. Also there was nobody around, which made it relaxing.
The first brewery was called Watanabe Sahe Brewery. There were tons of little details that the owner shared with us. The passion really can’t be transcribed. But the cool points were that we got to see the fermenting sake tanks from below.
All the tanks 
You can hear the bubbling
Then we got to go to the floor above and look into the tanks.
Floor above the tanks 
Inside the tanks
After more discussion with the owner, we learned that he has an old typewriter in his crazy messy office from Dayton, Ohio!
The next brewery was really cool. It was called Shimazaki Brewery. Their claim to fame is that they age their sake in caves like wine. The cool point – they were WWII caves. They said they are the first brewery in Japan to age sake, but I wasn’t really convinced. I think someone else had to have done it first.
First we sat down and talked to the owner. Then Heather had some tasting samples. She was able to compare a 5 year old sake to a 10 year old sake.
The brewery is in the middle of a town, but the storage cave is a 15 minute drive into the mountains. So we went there next. We had a private tour of about half of the cave system. It was a man made tunnel into the side of a mountain originally intended for WWII military vehicles. They said the plan was to actually produce military vehicles there eventually, but the war ended before they were able to do it.
The guy said that the tunnels were dug by hand tools, not blasting. And supposedly that makes them stronger. He said there has been no structural damage in 75 years of earthquakes. So I guess they are pretty strong.
They also have a sake storage rental space. Many people will buy a bottle for a newborn baby and pay to store it for 20 years. Then when the kid turns 20 (the legal drinking age in Japan) they can come get it and drink it.
If you are outside the cave, you would never really know there is something tucked away there. It was honestly a really good location for war preparations.
It was a cool experience walking through the caves, but also really weird. We were behind enemy lines walking through their war preparation area, looking at alcohol. Weird.
