History– category –

In 1899, Japan's liquor tax overtook the land tax as the largest source of national revenue. In other words, brewing changed enormously in a single generation. Meiji era sake, the nihonshu brewed between 1868 and 1912, still began with r...

In 2025, Japan exported about 45.9 billion yen of sake to a record 81 countries and regions. Meanwhile, the country's own sake drinkers kept buying less, as they have almost every year since 1973. Contemporary sake is the story of how th...

In fiscal 1973, Japan's breweries shipped about 1.77 million kiloliters of sake, more than in any year before or since. Fifty years later, the figure was under 400,000. Modern sake is the story of how Japan got from one number to the oth...

Beneath the grass of the Heijo Palace site in Nara, archaeologists uncovered a well surrounded by hexagonal stone paving. Nearby lay wooden pipes, the sockets of large ceramic jars, and wooden tablets carrying notes about brewing. These ...

In 1697, roughly 640,000 casks of sake arrived in Edo by sea. Almost none of it came from Nada, although that district later dominated Japanese brewing. Edo period sake is not really a story about better brewing, since most of the key te...

In 1425, a document kept at Kitano Shrine in Kyoto recorded 342 sake businesses inside and around the capital. By then, that number marks how far sake had travelled. It was no longer mainly a courtly ritual drink, but rather a commodity,...

Ancient sake in Japan was not the clear, filtered nihonshu poured today. The term covers a loose family of rice-based alcoholic drinks tied to farming, ritual, and early political life. Some were cloudy. Some were probably closer to a th...

The history of sake stretches back roughly two thousand years, at least if you use the word broadly for Japanese alcoholic drinks made from rice. Yet the earliest rice-based drinks were nothing like modern nihonshu. The sake people pour ...