When a civilization develops on a volcanic archipelago in the path of multiple seasonal typhoons, it’s going to see its fair share of devastating natural disasters: eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami, violent storms, floods, and mudslides, all of which have a history of triggering further suffering through pestilence, pandemics, and starvation. Throw in a few hundred years of strife and civil war that feudal societies never fail to serve up and you have a country uniquely suited for Buddhism’s acceptance of suffering and impermanence as a part of life.
In Japan, that acceptance is symbolized by the word “gaman,” meaning “endure,” a concept which has become part of the country’s cultural DNA. Drinking alcohol, extant literature tells us, is no small strand either. I’ve been working in journalism and writing about beer in Japan since 1997. For more than a decade, I’ve also been publishing Japan Beer Times and if I’ve understood anything, it’s this: Japan has a knack for “enduring” disasters and drinking through them, as it has been doing for about a millennium and a half. Experts tell us that drinking is not a wise way to cope with adversity, but can you really blame the Japanese if they’ve needed a tipple through the centuries—or today, for that matter?
“We remain open for now at our taproom for regular service,” says Joe Soreiro, the Asia Pacific brand manager at Brooklyn Brewery, which recently opened an extensive new taproom in Tokyo. “Weekday traffic remains steady, but we have seen smaller crowds in the evenings and weekends.”
That might sound remarkable, considering the complete lockdowns on pubs, breweries and restaurants mandated by governments around the world. Maybe Japan is heading in that direction, too, but for now the beer is still flowing. Alcohol has been a part of Japan’s culture since it started developing consciousness as a nation, at least as early as the seventh century. A century or so earlier, Buddhism arrived from the Asian mainland, along with exciting developments like how to brew (albeit with rice). Alcohol features prominently in canonical Japanese literature dating all the way back to the eighth century, especially in the description of religion, rituals, and politics. I have trouble thinking of a country that is more prone to disaster, or where alcohol has been more closely intermeshed with its cultural identity.
With beer having surpassed sake as the de facto national beverage in the 20th century, the situation at Brooklyn Brewery’s new taproom is hardly unique: around the country, breweries and taprooms are “enduring” their way through the current crisis. Japan ranks as the world’s seventh-largest consumer of beer. What’s a virus going to do to change that?
By the time Brooklyn Brewery’s taproom was ready to open in late January, Japan was already seeing a precipitous decline in travelers from China, a main driver of its tourist industry, as the Chinese government began seeking ways to control the spread of the virus by limiting movement. The Diamond Princess cruise ship that made international headlines was quarantined in Yokohama on February 3. After that 14-day period, passengers without symptoms began disembarking and returning home. Many of them were Japanese. Others were transported to local hospitals. Dozens of bureaucrats who boarded the ship were never tested and went home, like the apparently non-infected, by public transportation.
By the end of February, sporadic cases were popping up in Japan. The government, cognizant of what was unfolding in China, decided to take action. Prime Minister Abe called on schools to voluntarily close down starting March 2 and the vast majority did, many of them reluctantly. Some stayed “open” as a place where working parents could send their kids to play. Either way, teachers were still required to commute. Meanwhile, large gatherings and events across Japan were largely canceled, and many international corporations in Tokyo began asking their employees to work from home. Most shockingly, decision-makers prohibited spectators from spring baseball games and (gasp) the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament.
“I have trouble thinking of a country that is more prone to disaster, or where alcohol has been more closely intermeshed with its cultural identity.”
Still, hundreds of thousands of people in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area continued to commute daily on public transportation systems as the majority of smaller businesses stayed open. Many restaurants, bars, and brewpubs saw little to no reason to alter their business hours. Those that cater to salaried workers in Tokyo’s business districts were eager to see customers walk through their doors. Even a drop of a few percentage points can put an outsized strain on their businesses.
Toru Tanaka runs Craft Beer Market, a chain of craft-beer-centric-bars in Tokyo and Osaka. “I’m having a very difficult time,” he says. Metropolitan retail space like his is expensive to rent, but to attract reliably thirsty salaried employees to your establishment, you have to keep your prices affordable. Such employees are frequently men, who are often limited by strict household budgets. Tanaka thus runs low-margin, high-volume businesses; just as Japanese business runs like clockwork, so too did his bars. Then came the virus and customers dwindled. Still, he also owns a brewpub with a small live concert space. It produces beer for his dozen or so locations and it is still brewing. Small live shows are still being held.
Bars that are less reliant on commuters and more on neighborhood patrons are faring much better. Doors are open, beer is pouring, and a few venues are enjoying the benefits of sakura (cherry blossom) season and more foot traffic. With so many places trying to operate business as usual, are we seeing evidence of denial? Is Japan simply “enduring” the beginnings of a cascading health disaster, or is this rational behavior in light of no reports of catastrophic outbreaks and overwhelmed health services?
It’s possible that another cultural proclivity is also at play. In contrast to the rugged industriousness of these small businesses, the cancellation of sporting events and large concerts, as other countries have done, would seem on the surface like the kind of prudence exhorted by epidemiologists and public health experts. This behavior, however, intersects with the concept of “jishuku,” which means “self-restraint” or “self-discipline.” Etymologically, the word has religious meanings, but in more recent times it describes the act of refraining from certain types of consumer-oriented behavior that might be considered callous in times of sensitivity.
Japan’s most recent prior encounter with this national call for restraint followed shortly after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This natural disaster crippled the entire northeast region of Japan, and caused some damage and disruption in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area as well. The rest of the country felt little if any of the effects. Tokyo was quick to rebound from a functional standpoint, but as the death toll from the tsunami began to pile up, the collective mood of Japan’s residents turned somber. Restraint was called for.
In some cases, this meant not hoarding precious resources, like toilet paper. It could also mean refraining from expressions of mirth. I distinctly remember a brewery in Yokohama canceling an all-you-can-drink neighborhood event the following week “in light of what transpired in Tohoku.” The word “restraint” appeared regularly in newspapers and social media, but soon people questioned its scope and specific application. Restraint? How much and for how long?
Restraint felt like the flip side for those poor souls who had to endure wretched conditions in evacuation shelters up north. If they have little, then we, too, shall have little. A month later, though, brewers from the rest of Japan donated kegs for a large festival in Tokyo called “Re-Fermenting Japan,” whose proceeds were donated to relief efforts in Tohoku. There was little restraint shown at the festival.
Now bureaucrats have invoked the word again, but are wielding it differently. The times are somber for different reasons. Instead of hundreds of miles of coastline and infrastructure being wiped out along with thousands of people, the fate of Japan Inc—the nickname for Japan’s humming socioeconomic matrix—is at stake. Of course public welfare is at stake, too. Of course leaders want to mitigate the effects of the virus to limit suffering and death. What we need—they are suggesting—is simply restraint.
A wholesale shutdown of Japan on a scale commensurate with some other countries—like the "shelter at home" directives issued in metropolitan areas of the U.S.—would seem like a capitulation. Japan has always thrived on ambiguity: Kenzaburo Oe’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture was entitled “Japan, The Ambiguous, and Myself.” In America, for example, social distancing has come with clear directives, like “stay at least six feet apart.” But in Japan restraint is largely left to the imaginations of its collectively minded citizens, not to mention a strong sense of social responsibility. Some pundits suggest that, after the Diamond Princess debacle, where the sick languished and infections spread, Japan’s bureaucracy is simply being incompetent again. I think people are too easily forgetting the prevailing sense in disaster-prone Japan that “this too shall pass,” that whatever nature throws at us, we shall “endure.”
How has this affected the beer industry specifically, especially Japan’s 400-plus craft breweries? Restraint, ambiguous as it may be, certainly calls for the shutdown of large-scale events and gatherings. Viruses can’t have an easy vector, nor can we afford to express mirth and abandon. This has resulted in the cancellation of several major craft beer festivals in Japan that draw thousands, including the annual Snow Monkey Beer Live that Shiga Kogen Beer in Nagano hosts every March. Festivals that haven’t been called off are certainly imperiled, and their organizers are nervous.
The cancellation of sporting events has had more of an impact on both big beer and a handful of craft breweries alike. Beer sales in stadiums are usually brisk. In the last few years, many stadiums have also contracted beer from local craft breweries as an alternative to the big four industrial brewers (Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo, and Suntory), and as a show of local pride. Brimmer Brewing in Kawasaki, an industrial city wedged between Tokyo to the north and Yokohama to the south, is one such brewery. It had been producing beer for a local basketball team.
Brimmer Brewing is run by husband-and-wife team Scott and Yoshiko Brimmer. Scott worked at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company for over a decade before setting up shop in Japan, when his wife had to return for family reasons. His brewery has been a success story since he launched it in 2012, but it has hit a considerable speed bump with this development.
“The cancellation of games this month alone will cut about 4,000 liters [about 25 barrels] from sales,” Scott notes. “All other sales accounts are down anywhere from 20 to 40 percent.”
He also mentions that he’ll likely hold off on the purchase of a bottle-labeling machine until sales pick up again. He says it would be safer to have the money in reserve if conditions like this continue.
Brimmer is not alone in his situation. Be Easy Brewing in Hirosaki, Aomori, in Japan’s deep north, is not brewing beer for the local Rakuten Eagles baseball team right now. Founder and brewer Gareth Burns says that orders in Japan’s metropolitan areas, which he relies heavily on as a provincial brewery, are down.
“Afternoons are a bit slow without the holiday makers, but weekends and nights are doing better than I thought they would.”
“My new brewpub construction is enough to keep one foot in the grave for me,” Burns says. “And this coronavirus is jamming up everything pretty good right now.”
Nevertheless, Burns is pushing ahead with the construction of a second brewpub in another city nearby. It seems that the drop in keg sales, which has convinced him not to brew for two weeks, has only strengthened his resolve to open another direct sales route beyond his first brewpub in Hirosaki.
At Coedo Brewery in Saitama, president and CEO Shigeharu Asagiri says that business has been affected by slow sales at restaurants and bars. “However, we have both on- and off-premise accounts,” Asagiri says, “and our off-premise business has been okay.”
With fewer people going out, naturally most retailers are going to see a dip in sales. Local breweries with their own taprooms, like Brimmer Brewing and Be Easy, can still attract loyal consumers from the neighborhood, but widely distributed national brands can’t benefit from this. Coedo additionally exports to many countries, including China and the U.S.
Luckily, Coedo has long benefited from strong bottle sales. While most craft breweries in Japan have limited access to market, Coedo pushed its bottles into supermarkets years ago, across multiple regions. With Japan’s corporate employees going out to bars less and eating and drinking at home more, it’s not hard to envision more than a few of them splurging at their local supermarkets on a selection of craft beers.
It’s important to note, too, that Japan doesn’t have a three-tiered system, and that breweries are free to ship directly to consumers anywhere in Japan. Bottle shops have that same luxury, and the best, which stock an extensive selection of craft and Belgian beer, all ship. Most breweries that are larger than a brewpub engage in online retail to some extent, and some do well by it. Rakuten is Japan’s largest online retailer, and beer sales on the site have been increasing steadily. Multiple breweries told me that online sales of beer have surged since the coronavirus outbreak.
This is the broad national picture, which is colored in large part by what happens in the greater Tokyo metropolitan region. Over 30 million people reside and commute here, after all. For a more nuanced and idiosyncratic perspective of the situation, I looked more closely at Kyoto and Yokohama.
Kyoto is heavily dependent on tourism, especially from Asia. Streets around popular destinations in the ancient capital are often crowded with tourists from the mainland, as well as the rest of the world. Restrict travel from China and what happens? In early February some were joking that now would be a good time to visit Kyoto, as it would be relatively quiet without the large tour groups. Then travel from the rest of the world slowed to a trickle as well.
How would Kyoto fare now? Obviously businesses that cater to travel are getting crushed, especially the hotel industry. But if the typical Japanese citizen “endures,” then Kyoto residents are as resilient to change and weather as the bronze statues that populate the many temples throughout the ancient city. You have to hail from a multi-generation Kyoto family to be considered a true Kyoto-ite, and I would hazard that there is no other city in the world with more businesses owned by families going back several generations. Some of the sake breweries have been run by the same families for hundreds of years. Tokubee Masuda, for example, is the 14th-generation owner of Masuda Tokubee Shoten, which produces the Tsukino Katsura brand of sake.
Many in Kyoto have a deep sense of history and seem relatively impervious to outside influences or dramatic change. They go about their business with a kind of aloofness that is unique to their city and famous throughout Japan. The conviction that life will somehow go on, however miserably at times (and therefore business, too, should go on) seems unshakeable in much of Kyoto.
“The cancellation of games this month alone will cut about 4,000 liters [about 25 barrels] from sales. All other sales accounts are down anywhere from 20 to 40 percent.”
Unsurprisingly, in the small, independent bars and restaurants, business is much the same as it ever was, patronized by locals and domestic visitors taking advantage of the unprecedented lack of crowds. I’ve communicated multiple times over the last few weeks with Mark Meli, a professor of aesthetics at a regional university and a long-time beer writer who gets around to most of the city’s drinking spots regularly. He has described the local scene as bustling. In late February, he visited three tap takeover events and told me that they were packed. Others who visited the city reported the same: the mood at small retailers was festive.
Other business owners shared similar stories with me. Australian national Tom Ainsworth, a brewer and co-founder of the popular brewpub Kyoto Beer Lab, operates his business down a quiet back street just a few minutes on foot from Kyoto’s main station.
“Afternoons are a bit slow without the holiday makers, but weekends and nights are doing better than I thought they would,” he says. As planned, he went ahead with Kyoto Beer Lab’s two-year-anniversary party in mid-March and plenty showed up to celebrate.
Yokohama provides an altogether different perspective on the situation, as the port where the ill-fated cruise ship was docked is very close to the center of the city. The professional baseball stadium, prefectural government building, prefectural police headquarters, city hall, and hundreds of retailers are just minutes away on foot. With cruise ships totally barred from docking during and after the Diamond Princess’ arrival, Yokohama’s normally bustling Chinatown is like a ghost town.
Local bars and restaurants serving craft beer have seen some downturn in the last few weeks, but most not to a devastating extent. Yosuke Katsuchi owns two popular restaurants called Charcoal Grill Green about a mile or so from the port. Both restaurants feature open kitchens and grills, and serve up meat, fish, and vegetable dishes inspired by cuisines from around the world. The warm, wood-themed spots are popular among Japanese and international residents alike.
“Sales aren’t good enough for me to say there’s no problem, but I hope everything will be alright soon,” Katsuchi says. It’s a different way of saying he’s enduring, I guess.
In nearby Noge-cho, a district with labyrinthine streets and hundreds of small bars and restaurants, thirsty crowds stream through as usual. Sakura Taps, one of a handful of bars specializing in craft beer there, reports that they’ve seen no effect on their business. The others are much the same. Most of these joints can comfortably accommodate about a dozen people, if that. Perhaps the small spaces give people a sense of security. Perhaps people just aren’t worried.
In the Yoshidamachi district, which abuts Noge-cho, a tasting room and bottle shop called Antenna America announced that for the month of March, it would offer all-you-can-drink draft beer on Friday nights for 2,000 yen (about $18). The establishment is owned and operated by Nagano Trading, which is the largest importer of American craft beer in Japan. It ships its beer nationwide and operates two other similar tasting rooms in the region. An all-you-can-drink deal for $18 is ridiculous. That’s less than the normal price for two pints of imported craft beer in Japan.
When I ask president Andrew Balmuth if this is simply a way to dump excess inventory, he deflects my question. “This is a way to get people into the establishment,” he says. “We sell plenty of food and make money on that. People will take home a few bottles maybe, and they’ll remember the good time they had.”
If they remember it at all. I’ve spoken with Balmuth twice since he initiated this offer, as well as several people who gleefully attended, and all describe the Friday nights as bereft of worry. Balmuth seems upbeat on the future and unperturbed about any decrease in volume he may be seeing.
“People won’t stay cooped up for long. When the warm weather comes and the cherry blossoms are in bloom, I think we’re just going to see this explosion of drinking. I see a rebound coming and we’re prepared for it.”
Let’s hope it’s a rebound in sales and not a spike in infections. Most consumers in Japan seem to share his outlook, drinking as they can while they only begrudgingly practice restraint, if they do at all.
Words, Ry BevilleIllustrations, Colette Holston
