Maybe my sake eureka moment was written in the stars. It certainly feels that way. After leaving university, where I studied Japanese and spent a year studying in Japan, I joined Tazaki Foods, a Japanese food and drink distributor / importer in London. It was during my first year in the company that I discovered sake, or rather, I was wooed, and I don’t use this word lightly, into the world of sake. And who wooed me? You may ask. His name is Kosuke Kuji and he is the charismatic president of Nanbu Bijin sake brewery in Iwate Prefecture. It really was Kuji san’s charisma at work, but sake itself is quite a charismatic beverage. My earlier experiences with sake had not been. Maybe my sake eureka moment was written in the stars. It certainly feels that way. After leaving university, where I studied Japanese and spent a year studying in Japan, I joined Tazaki Foods, a Japanese food and drink distributor / importer in London. It was during my first year in the company that I discovered sake, or rather, I was wooed, and I don’t use this word lightly, into the world of sake. And who wooed me? You may ask. His name is Kosuke Kuji and he is the charismatic president of Nanbu Bijin sake brewery in Iwate Prefecture. It really was Kuji san’s charisma at work, but sake itself is quite a charismatic beverage. My earlier experiences with sake had not been particularly positive ones.
I don’t quite remember them, but I had probably had something labelled as sake, but I know it definitely wasn’t sake, at cheap Japanese restaurant-knock offs or Chinese restaurants in London—I don’t have any axe to grind against Chinese restaurants mind, they just tended to be the worst offenders. Over the next four years, I tried to learn as much about sake as I could. In the latter half of my tenure at Tazaki Foods, I was lucky enough to be appointed specialist sake salesman, and became the guy who would show visiting sake breweries around the London restaurant scene. The visiting reps were always super generous with their knowledge sharing and slowly but surely, the mysterious world of sake began to reveal its secrets. And as I discovered its secrets, I found myself falling deeper into it. In 2014, I decided to come to Japan to learn more.
I mean there is only so much you can learn being in the UK. What was only intended to be a year’s sabbatical turned into ten years, mainly thanks to a number of opportunities that came my way. During the last ten years, I have worked for two sake breweries as their Tokyo sales rep: Tatenokawa and Kojima Sohonten (maker’s of Toko) in Yamagata, worked for an all-you-can-drink chain of bars called KURAND, written for various media including the SAKE TIMES, Emceed countless amazing sake events, helped translate official sake materials for the NRIB and JETRO, and overseen lots of interesting and exciting projects. In 2017, I became an educator of the WSET’s sake course in Japan.
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