Tag Archives: Fukushima sake brewer
Fukushima sake brewer warms shattered Japanese fishing community
Daisuke Suzuki is helping by doing what he does best as life tentatively returns to normal for the devastated fishing communities of Japan’s Fukushima region: making sake. The “toji” sake master and his family were lucky to escape with their lives when a huge earthquake and tsunami devastated the area in March 2011, killing about 18,000 people and knocking out the nearby nuclear plant. In the town of Namie, the disaster obliterated the old port of Ukedo and its local fishing industry, as well as the Iwaki Kotobuki sake brewery that Suzuki’s family has owned for five generations. For two centuries, at least, it had made the rice wine that revived many a fisherman’s spirits after returning to port from the capricious Pacific Ocean with a hold brimming with fish. They would drink cups of Iwaki Kotobuki sake over white-meat sashimi of flounder and bass, delicacies from the Fukushima coast. “The sake was always there, just like the fish,” said one taciturn local fisherman, not wishing to be identified. “That is the way it has been here since my childhood.” Two years ago, the government gave the all-clear for the sale of fish from the Fukushima region to resume. The fisherman needed something to drink, and Suzuki then built a new sake plant back in Namie. >>click to read<< 15:42
