As a child, Miho Imada promised herself she would never perform “women’s work” to support her family’s sake brewery. She saw how her mother juggled looking after five children with cooking three meals a day for groups of visiting seasonal workers, and devoted what little time she had left to doing the accounts.
“I never saw my mother sleep, and she never seemed to catch a cold,” Imada said. “She was always working. I thought ‘there’s no way I’m going to do that.’”
Imada kept her promise, almost. She had little interest in business and housekeeping, but she was captivated by her family’s long history of turning rice into sake. Now she is one of a tiny number of female tôji, or master brewers, who are challenging centuries of tradition and winning recognition far beyond Japan.
The small batches of award-winning premium sake produced by Imada Shuzô in Akitsu, a fishing town overlooking the Inland Sea in rural Hiroshima prefecture, have attracted the attention of sake lovers in the US and Europe. Imada, 59, appears in the 2019 documentary Kampai! Sake Sisters, and last year joined the Hong Kong democracy activist Agnes Chow and Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, on the BBC’s list of 100 influential women.
In one sense, she and other female tôji are taking the production of Japan’s traditional tipple back to its ancient roots, when according to folklore, shrine maidens made a primitive “mouth-chewed” version of the drink as an offering to the Shinto gods.
By the time sake was being mass produced in the Edo period of 1603 to 1868, however, the industry was dominated by men. Male brewers shunned women, it is said, not least because they risked invoking the wrath of jealous female sake deities.
Even today, of the 1,200 master brewers in Japan, only 20 or 30 are women, Imada said. “When I became a tôji 25 years ago, there were only five of us, so there’s definitely been an improvement, but not a particularly dramatic one.”
Breweries depend less on seasonal workers who spend the winter making sake before returning home, leaving room for breweries’ female employees to demonstrate their expertise. And downsizing means the task of making sake is not as physically demanding as it once was, with workers handling much smaller quantities of rice.
“The amount of really back-breaking work has decreased, and I think that’s part of why there are more women involved,” Imada said, adding that she had never encountered any sexism during her 25-year involvement in brewing. “No one told me that I had no place becoming a tôji.”
After graduating with a law degree from Meiji University in Tokyo at the height of Japan’s bubble economy, Imada worked in exhibitions and Noh theatre production for 10 years before the bubble burst and corporate sponsorship of the arts dried up, forcing her to return to Akitsu to consider her future.
Her father, Yukinao, had reached the age when he was beginning to think about how to carry on a family business that had begun with his grandfather in 1867. The most obvious choice of successor, his only son, had set his heart on becoming a doctor.
That is where Imada stepped in. After eight years learning her craft under the man her father employed as a tôji, Imada became a fully-fledged master brewer when he retired in 2000. “Rather than run the business, I decided I wanted to be at the heart of making the sake itself,” she said.
When her father retired in 2016, she became the fourth head of Imada Shuzô.
Her ascent came at an uncertain time for sake, with younger Japanese increasingly shunning a drink associated with inebriated salarymen. As recently as the mid-1970s, the Japanese drank 1.67bn litres of sake a year, according to the national tax agency. By 2014, domestic consumption had shrunk to 557m litres. In the 1980s there were about 3,500 breweries. Now there are 1,200.
To survive, Imada decided the brewery should focus on high-end sake that would set it apart from mass-produced versions. “I could see that if we didn’t make really good sake, even if it was more expensive, then our brewery wouldn’t survive,” she said.
Her approach has been vindicated by widespread acclaim for Imada Shuzô’s output of 10 regular varieties and a handful of seasonal sakes marketed under the Fukucho label. The brewery employs nine people, and deals with only 100 specialist sellers across Japan.
Like other small breweries, it exports a modest quantity of sake, including to France and Italy, to help cushion the financial blow from the decline in popularity at home.
“I want people to understand the real value of sake and the skills that go into making it,” she said.
Imada, though, is slightly embarrassed by the suggestion that she is a role model for Japanese working women, who are woefully underrepresented in the upper tiers of the corporate world. “There are other women who work, marry and bring up children. I think they might be better role models,” she said.
“I have only ever worked, but that is all I have wanted to do since I was a child. My job, brewing sake, is what makes me happy.”
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