The Birth of Sake is a 1.5h-long 2015_11ya documentary about an obscure traditional Japanese sake brewery, Tedorigawa Brewery in the inner-coastal Ishikawa Prefecture, founded in the Meiji Era (so not that old). It follows the aging laborers through a “winter” of brewing, showing the tough manual toil of traditional brewing methods, and briefly profiling workers; it focuses on the heir apparent, a youngish man who appears to have solicited the documentary as marketing Tedorigawa (or at least raising the profile of sake in general) and part of trying to bring Tedorigawa Brewery into the 21^st century.

A reader noted I had enjoyed Jiro Dreams of Sushi and asked if I had seen this one. I had not, as I have no interest in sake. (The few times I’ve tried it, I’ve found it either boring or repellent, and clearly an acquired taste, and one I had no reason to acquire.) However, they pointed out that it was surprisingly easy to stream for free on a suspicious-looking ad-supported streaming service I had never heard of, “Tubi”, which turns out to be quite legit. (Amusingly, uBlock origin turns out to block the ads entirely aside from a brief hiccup every 10 minutes or so. I salute all the normal viewers who subsidized my viewing.)

It was interesting although it defied my expectations: I thought it’d be much more about, well, sake, than it was.

But it winds up being a lot more about the blue-collar guys they employ for all that grunt work.

Beyond that, it is an excuse for lots of atmospheric filming. Not that I blame them, all the steam and Japanese winter is a great setting for taking footage (which might be half the film). The documentarians also enjoyed being a fly on the wall and pulling stunts like recording the workers discussing porno mags in a Japanese 7/11 while filming them from outside. (If they weren’t wired up with mikes beforehand, I have no idea how that was done.)

Indeed, the reason Birth makes such great cinematography (samples) is the reason it is so depressing: the working conditions are sadistic.

You might think that’s an absurd description: “Brewing sake, even traditionally, can’t be that bad. It’s not like you are growing the rice by hand. Sake is just rice that is fermented with yeast. The yeast is doing most of the work for you. Sure, you might have to brew big vats or spend a lot of time cleaning, but it could be worse. We’re not talking about, like, oil rig workers in the Arctic who can’t see their family for months at a time—nothing crazy like that!”

It turns out, we are talking about like that. The most shocking revelation is that what ‘traditional’ here means is that during the sake brewing ‘season’ (all winter), they are expected to go to the sake brewery in the local city, live there with all the other workers, wake up at 4 AM in the freezing dark and work all day. This is why the cinematography is so cool: the fog in the dark as they arrive, the billowing steam against the lights as they prepare a big mound of rice, the snow and ice, the rain—miserably picturesque.

When do they go home if they are working all day and live there? They don’t. So they might not see their family for half a year. One interviewee describes how his father would go to the brewery for the season and just… not come back until the next year, and how little he saw of his father. Even in the current setup, they might only get back to their families once a month!

It is mindboggling that this could be a thing in Japan in 2014_12ya, for… making some sake? The most extreme point of this comes towards the end, when a big galumph of a worker, Yoichi, is paused mid-karaoke, and we are informed that he had a heart attack at that point and died. This is shocking because he wasn’t even that old, just 44. It raises the question: what was his life for?

One of the biggest differences from Jiro is that sushi is enormously popular worldwide. I like sushi myself. And Jiro has to turn away customers. Doubtless countless people watched Jiro and at least briefly were tempted by the idea of one day going there. (Or Alex Honnold has no shortage of admirers, and young men queuing up to imitate him.) But I don’t think too many non-sake fans watched Birth and became curious to check their local liquor store, because one of the things that Birth depicts about sake is that… no one really seems to care about it anymore.

Few people involved seem to be ‘sake otaku’. (And I don’t know any sake fans myself.) The workers have some occasionally, but aren’t ‘sake otaku’; they’re there mostly because their other options are worse, they think. (The implied levels of turnover suggest that most of them decide after just 1 ‘season’ that their other options are better, and the brewery, given the general shortage of young Japanese men, appears to be shrinking.) They spend their free time on ordinary things like Japanese baseball; they seem to enjoy the more collective work activities, but more for the community than the work. (In one scene, the heir apparent has them all drink some Western wine—which many of them somehow never have—to get an idea of ‘the competition’. They don’t seem to care about that either, although they don’t quite call it horse piss.)

None of the relatives seem to treat it as anything but a blue-collar job—and a poor-paying, dead-end one at that.

The heir apparent seems more trapped into inheriting the brewery by the weight of expectations than any genuine enthusiasm for sake or sake brewing. (After all, what’s he going to do after all this time ‘learning to brew sake exactly as we have for 150 years with no updates, not even modern chemistry’? Not exactly a transferable skill-set. Ironically, the marketing he does to try to save the brewery is his most valuable skill; his English and rapport with foreigners are especially good.) We see the heir apparent in the other half of the year, outside the brewing ‘season’, which he spends marketing their wares, pitching the new vintage to bar owners, who seem to taste the sake and find it… fine. (As in, not better than sake made with less traditional methods, like ‘seeing your kids at the end of the workday’.) He also promotes sake by holding tasting sessions with foreigners, which requires constant travel and flopping in cheap hotels and eating cup-ramen for dinner (he apparently has no wife or girlfriend); he is good with the customers, and they seem to find the sake… fine. (As in, an entertaining novelty, but not better than other alcoholic drinks, which are cheaper and easier to get and they are already familiar with.)

And if there is any major community pride or support, the documentary does not show it to us. Instead, the filmmakers tell us that sake sales are in rapid decline with the aging of Japan and dying off of old people, and that other kinds of liquor (like wine) are taking its place, and that hundreds of sake breweries have been closing over the past decades with no end in sight.

To be honest, Tedorigawa Brewery seemed to be so doomed by the end of the documentary that I went to check when it had closed, and was surprised to find its website still up (albeit a bit worse for the wear—copyright 2016, and the last official Facebook update was in 2020).

It has lasted this long, but it is hard to imagine it lasting even the heir apparent’s lifetime (another 50-odd years?), never mind generations beyond that.

So…

Why?

Why do all this?

When no one seems to care about it or like it that much? (Maybe sake in general just isn’t a good idea. Maybe it was just the cheapest alcohol rice farmers could easily create. There’s no law of nature which says that every form of fermenting alcohol has to be a good idea.)

It’s not even that ancient a brewery. (It’s no Ise Shrine, that’s for sure.) It’s hard to call it ‘traditional’ either when they use all that modern equipment, too.

Should we admire ‘the work’? That they work hard and sacrifice all this ‘because it was there’? That attitude illustrates the downside of over-conscientiousness and craftsmanship and taking pride in doing the task: there is no point in doing well that which should not be done at all, and pride in doing things the right way can slowly transmute into pride in doing things the costliest and most wasteful and most harmful way, as everyone becomes trapped by face.

We can admire the cinematography, and perhaps admire the sheer perverse stubbornness of clinging to the old way despite being wildly uncompetitive against both other kinds of drinks and other ways of making that drink, as ‘art’. But you can’t drink art.

In the end, you only drink the bottle of sake.

(This review is ostensibly about a Japanese man who makes overpriced traditional ethanol. But it is actually about a Western man who makes overpriced traditional essays.)