About a year ago, in December 2021, I attended the 蔵開 (kurabiraki, a brewery open day), at Hirano Jozo 平野醸造 in Yamato, Gifu Prefecture, in celebration of the new sake season. Located in a valley next to the Nagara River, the brewery is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2023. Though an old tradition harkening back to when sake had religious importance and locals only ever drank what was available at their nearby 酒倉(sakagura, sake brewery), the kurabiraki had long been forgotten in Yamato until Hirano Jozo revived the event a few years ago. The brewery doors were opened to the community for the weekend and the tiny courtyard was filled with food stalls. When I visited, it had been a year and a half of isolation due to Covid-19—after which, drinking sake with others and eating local foods like deer sausage was a welcome comfort. It was also what happened towards the end of the event that was the genesis of this special section of Mantis

To explain, however, I need to rewind some seven hundred years to the fifteenth century. Yamato, located in the Gujo region of Gifu Prefecture in Central Japan, was once an important crossroads between Kyoto and the Kamakura capital, and had a castle run by the Toshi clan. The Toshi are said to have loved poetry, and even stopped a war with a series of poems, or so the local legend says. What we know for sure is that Sogi 宗祗 (1421-1502), the most well-known writer of 連歌 (renga, linked poetry from the Medieval era), spent many years there, sponsored by the Toshi clan.

Moving forward a few hundred years, the region became a hotspot for 念仏 (nenbutsu, a traditional Buddhist dance). Due to its proximity to the holy mountain, Hakusan, many pilgrims came through the region, bringing with them a new dance culture inflected with religious rites.

Over time the style of dance came to be known as 郡上踊り (Gujo Odori) and a version of it continues to be practiced by locals and tourists alike to this day. In fact, the region’s dances were registered as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2023.

A trainee brewer I met that day, Kazuyo Fukao, had moved to the tiny hamlet of Yamato to study sake making under Yoshihiro Hioki, the 杜氏 (toji, head sake maker). Until very recently it was taboo for women to make sake, but Fukao was determined to make her own brew after tasting a life-changing wood barrel sake brewed in the traditional manner.

Fukao had visited Gujo every August for a number of years, when the region hosts more than thirty days of dancing to honor departed ancestors. It was only once she moved there that she discovered Yamato had been home to Sogi. She started studying renga at the local museum focused on poetry history, as well as the celebration songs associated with the dance culture from elders in the region. Working with local rice farmers, she learned that there had once been another song culture that had almost disappeared—work songs that local farmers would sing during the prewar era to make the work go faster and to call on the gods for successful harvests.

Fukao decided to connect this rich song culture with sake making. “I wanted to make sake that resonated with the land, just like the songs of the region,” she reflects. So she worked with local ethnographer, Hiroto Inoue, to seek out elders who still remembered those prewar songs and record them. She folded the songs into the rice making process, teaching them to the volunteers and farmers who came to plant and harvest the sake rice. She also worked with Naohiro Goto, a Gujo odori singer in his eighties, to create a new celebration song in honor of the new sake she created three years ago.

Since becoming the trainee brewer, Fukao has taken on the kurabiraki, broadening it from a food and drink event to a community event imbued with poetic history and local culture. Sake has long been a topos in East Asian poetry—an age-old inspiration for literati writing late into the night, longing for those far away. Fukao, inspired by both that history and the history of song in Gujo, decided to create a sake for drinking while writing poetry. The sake is called 一から百 Ichi Kara Hyaku literally translating to “from one to one hundred” and means from start to finish, exemplifying Fukao’s focus on taking part on every part of the sake process. Visitors at the kurabiraki were encouraged to write some tipsy 短歌 (tanka) poems (poems with a 5/7/5/7/7 syllabic count, as opposed to haiku 俳句 which are 5/7/5) as they enjoyed the new sake. The local poetry teacher was on hand to offer assistance and every poet received a hand-calligraphed copy of their poem. Inoue, the local ethnographer, sung the poems aloud in an improvised manner inspired by the more than one thousand year old 朗詠 (roei, poetry chanting from the Heian Court). Celebration songs were also sung by Goto and other local singers, folding in a musical culture that had almost been forgotten decades ago.

Along with the festivities at the event, with the assistance of Emi Matsubara, a staff member at the local Kokin Denju Field Museum, Fukao solicited tanka about sake from poets around Japan. There were close to two hundred submissions from a wide range of poets including: a prisoner, grandparents, schoolteachers, students, office workers. Mantis has partnered with Fukao to present a bilingual section of forty-four tanka in English and Japanese with translations by Nancy Hamilton, Gabriele Kemesyte, Emily Wan, and me. The poems are about every aspect of sake, from production and enjoyment to its cultural context. The breadth speaks to both the importance of sake and the tanka poetic form in Japanese history and society.

But this project, and the poems themselves, are also about one rural community struggling to survive in the twenty-first century. Because of my interest in traditional Japanese music, I began to visit the Gujo area five years ago. I was moved by the dancing and music which has roots from the sixteenth century, as well as by the locals, transplants and dance fans who are working against odds to make the musical tradition sustainable and the local culture vibrant at a time when Japan is experiencing unprecedented depopulation in rural areas. With cultural products from around the world readily available even in the mountains of Japan, a local brewery might not, at first glance, seem very important. However, Fukao’s efforts to reintroduce traditional songs and practices into the sake making process shows us that when we lose one community center like a brewery, a whole cultural ecosystem becomes more tenuous, more frayed, and less likely to survive. In contrast, by incorporating previously lost cultural practices like songs, and making the traditions more open and accessible, those cultural events become not mere rote practices everyone has always done, but vital and necessary. Through incorporating poetic and song culture, Fukao and the poets featured here show us that sake making in Yamato, in Gujo, in Japan is a vital way of preserving, reinventing and sharing history, tradition and knowledge.

They say that breaking bread and sharing wine is the basis of all culture. I hope that our collection of poems will help connect you to a sake culture that means so much to the communities of Yamato, to Fukao, and to me.