Sake News from Japan / Sake Muse

The Campaign Japan site reports on the recent New Economy Summit Tokyo (NEST), and one headline that caught my eye was from former national football athlete and current sake ambassador Hidetoshi Nakata.Speaking at the event, he warned that sake brands were at risk of...

The Sankei News reports on a new book that picks six tōji responsible for famous brands and interviews them, putting the focus on people in the bigger story of sake. The six subjects include those born into the position, like Kenji Hiroki, tōji for Hiroki from Aizu,...

The Mainichi newspaper site reports on the fruit of the love of your home region - in this case Aichi Prefecture and a desire to promote regional development.Koji Oguri, a lecturer in intelligent information processing and biomedical engineering at the Graduate School...

The new thing for hard-working kurabito, according to writer Miki Tonomura on the Zakzak site, is continuous professional development. No longer required only by businesses, these days public figures and celebrities seem to be flocking back to university to keep on...

Here's the final instalment on Isseki Nagae's long and fascinating blog post about why you won't get rich exporting sake on Blogos (if you missed them, you can go back to part 1, part 2 and part 3). After pointing out that half of sake production costs are taken up by...

Continuing with Isseki Nagae's dense blog post on Blogos, he moves on to a recent shift in the Japanese sake industry that also impacts how sake is sold abroad - the rise of junmai and "premium" styles. He produces another graph, this time based on research by...

After his initial salvo about how exporting sake is a terrible get-rich-quick idea (covered in "Why you won't get rich exporting sake" part 1) Nagae starts to dig into some juicy Japan National Tax Office data on the sake industry.He starts with a very interesting...

Blogger Isseki Nagae, publishing on the Blogos site, goes against prevailing wisdom by warning that there's no big business to be had exporting sake, or at least that it's not as easy as it might look.The post is a response to an article on the Horiemon site (tagline:...

The Sankei West has a food column written by shōgi player Tetsuro Itodani, who recommends sake with a burger - although the burger may not quite be what you imagine.Japan is renowned for taking foreign imports and putting its own spin on them, and the humble hamburger...