Sake Breweries of Japan

About this book

35 vs 300. The award-winning English sake book visits 35 breweries. This guide covers 300 — every region, every one of Japan's 47 prefectures, in one uniform format you can actually travel with.

From Nada, the largest brewing district on earth, to a single sake brewery in subtropical Okinawa; from houses founded in 1505 to the mountain brewery that reinvented itself as Dassai — each of the 300 entries gives you the same practical fields: where the brewery is, when it was founded, its character and signature sake, how visiting works, the nearest station where one is recorded, and how to read its name and labels in a Japanese shop.

Inside: a plain-English primer on what sake is; a complete chapter on how to read a sake label (grades, polish ratios, nama, genshu, yamahai and the numbers on the back); a guide to visiting breweries — kura shops, museums, open days and manners; essays on the great districts (Nada, Fushimi, Saijo and the snow country); a profile of every prefecture's sake character; and a full index.

Every brewery was checked against public records — registry data and the breweries' own official sites — for the publisher's companion sake guide (478 breweries documented; the 300 deepest-documented are here). Where a fact could not be verified, the book says so instead of guessing. That is what a map owes you.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.