Confucius nailed that one. The only way to truly understand how Sake is made. Is to make it. Luckily that’s what we’ve been doing for the last week. Here are some snapshots.

RICE A RONI IT AIN’T:
The Kura is  a spa for rice. It incredible how pampered Japanese sake rice is. The richest women in the most expensive spa does not get this much attention.It is Milled (liposuction). Then washed in a machine( Jacuzzi?). Then washed by hand(Body Scrub?). Then steamed (steam room?). Cooled on a conveyer belt and declumped (massage). Then off to the moromi(cold pool) and on and on and on. Additional treatment include koji rice declumping ( massage in a sauna). But the treatments work. A simple grain of rice becomes sake, that elegant beautiful lady.

MOTTAINAI
Such a beautiful concept. Not wasting anything. Like water,rice,energy. But not in a bottom line  way. It is about respect for everything. Everything is part of the chain. We’re all in it together.

HOW MANY JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE THERE?
I sit by Daimon front gate , have lunch and watch sunsets. It is a great view over a farmers fields with a train that runs through it. The city is in the distance and the mountains beyond. It’s a very pleasant place to sit and think. But a very peculiar think happens every day. A steady stream of schoolchildren ,dressed in uniforms with beautifully polished shoes, march by from 7am to 9pm. Any time of day.7 days a week. I talk to them in English. The boys shy away but the girls seem more interested in learning English. Most speak some English and seem happy to use it with an actual gaijin. They laugh,giggle and smile as they reenter the relentless stream of student. On there way to where ever.

A GIANT TREE WILL LEAD THE WAY
Above the office there stands a giant double trunked Meta Sequia. It was planted after world war 2 in an effort to regreen Japan. Daimon father planted it. When we arrived it seemed dead. Just a black shape against the sky. But the weather has been picture perfect. And now it has beautiful fine green needles.We use the tree as a landmark to lead us back to the Kura. Like this session intern ,the tree is from united states, and we both started the week in the dark. But now after a week of making sake we too have bloomed.

Old School

This Kura is 185 years old and it’s beautiful. 185 year old timber soar to hold the wooden ceiling. Walls of windows and open cantilever roofs let in a beautiful light. It is a place of shadows and light. Old and new.
It is also a place of contradictions. Rooms of intense heat and chilling cold. Old Edo looking tools, unusual modern machines and futuristic computers sit side by side. Tradition and technology waltzing together to make Sake.

Is that forklift fuschia ?

But there is more going on. If you look closely. The pressing machine is periwinkle blue. The brush’s are  day glow green. Christ ,the fork lift is Fuschia. The colors have been chosen as carefully as a painter would put paint to canvas. An artist has been here.

That artist is  Yasutaka Daimon, Toji and owner Daimon Shuzo. Clearly his wonderful sake is a work of art. But why these details of color, like wildflowers,  in this traditional Kura? The more you get to know him. The more it all makes sense.

Born the first son of the brewer, he fled Japan to see the world. Opening up to the possibilities beyond Japan and sake. He lived in a floating world of Travel and spirituality until he decided it was time to return.Bringing back with him, souvenirs of the world: love of Art, Food , spirituality. Which he applies daily to the life in the kura.

There are surprising touches everywhere. Who would expect to see Matisse,  Rothko and Klee prints in this almost 200 year old  Japanese Kura. Or a Buddhist prayer affixed to a state of the art Koji computer. These touches humanize this building.Clearly he respect tradition, like hand washing the rice ( Ouch,my back!) instead of using a rice washing machine ,which he already owns. But he also believes in the modern. Using traditional methods combined with  a desire to shepard sake into the  future.

Like the modern artist’s he loves so much. They had a reverence for the past but were looking for a new way of expression. So too is Daimon-san.

Matisse,Rothko,Klee...Daimon.

Where am I? I awake to a vague chill in the darkened Kura.In this shadowy, exotic, mysterious building I wonder for a second if the chill is real. Or is it the ghosts of the migrant Kurabitos that have lived in these rooms ? If so, what are they trying to tell me? Are they welcoming me or warning me? I guess I’ll find out? Then it dawns on me. It’s probably the weather. And I put a fleece on and head down for 8 am meeting with our ever gracious host Daimon-san and my fellow interns.
Having met my fellow interns yesterday. It’s amazing how quickly we have bonded. There’s Zennet, a Papuan gold merchant( by way of Austin Texas). whose home brewed sake, he describes,as tasting like cough syrup. Frank, an intense solo traveler, who wears a dogtag, in case he dies on the road. Liloa. A Hawaiian sake salesmen, who out ran a swarm of angry wasps in a football uniform. Chris, a San Francisco native, recently forced to move because of too many dead bodies piling up near his doorstep. Cathy,  a Las Vegas wine sommelier, with a pathological fear of getting “Nekkid” in front of foreigners. And me. My life is a half finished novel that needs a better plot line. All of us have arrived at this special place. To find something. At the very least a rare glimpse into the world of sake making. But I think we’re in for a lot more. And I may not need any help from the kurabito’s ghost.

i ain't afraid of no mr coffee

I mean you some harm. Beep!

Woke up in this beautiful kura and it really sank in. Tomorrow we will be making sake. It’s not a dream anymore.But first i’m off to the kitchen  for breakfast. In the kitchen were a few of my fellow kurabitos trying in vain to make coffee. The baffling coffee machine was flashing and beeping like an angry robot. It did not seem to want to make coffee .We all tried but  we could not get it to work. Defeated by the clever coffee machine, we made coffee the old fashioned way .  Then we tried to find sugar.What was in the many jars filled with white powder. Is this sugar?…some kind of desiccant?….dried cod eggs? I think we ended up putting  Japanese candy in our coffee. The ordinary had become an adventure.. I won’t even mention the humiliation dealt to me by the  disinterested washing machine . I really must learn to read and speak Japanese.

Why can't we all just get along. Bleep!!