At first, standing in Sendai elicits experiences similar to other Japanese cities: Giant buildings of modern engineering are interwoven with old temples, concrete jungles amid patches of nature that look like real-life inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke.” You can visit the Zuihoden mausoleum enshrined in deep forest greens, the final resting place of the famous ruler and Sendai founder Date Masamune, and turn around to be greeted by towers reaching toward the clouds.
But, unlike most other Japanese cities, Sendai is a city reborn from recent devastation.
Sendai and the wider Miyagi Prefecture were significantly damaged by the 2011 tsunami that ravaged much of this eastern portion of Japan. An estimated 10,800 people were killed or declared missing and another 4,100 were injured, with many of the losses caused by drowning after the tsunami struck. (Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was damaged in Fukushima, about 50 miles south of Sendai, which suffered much more loss, and parts remain uninhabitable thanks to radiation released in the disaster.)
But humanity is resilient. Sendai was rebuilt quickly. And amid the rebuild, new businesses entered the area, including a business from Wisconsin named Great Dane Brewery. Thanks to the Japanese External Trade Organization, which heard of the brewery’s plans and met with the company to entice it to the area, Great Dane now has a new location in the Akiu community in Sendai, about two hours north of Tokyo.
Though Great Dane joins the area during a time of regrowth, it still isn’t whole. In spite of 520 billion yen in aid dedicated to recovery, not every shrine could be restored. Many remain damaged or devastated, including Ishinomaki city’s Kashima Shrine, locally known as the beer shrine. To anyone’s knowledge, it’s the only one of its kind in the country.
Before the tsunami, a gray Torii gate welcomed visitors to steps leading to the bright red shrine. The modestly sized shrine (the beer shrine would fit comfortably in Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion) was a grand sight to see during the spring’s pink cherry blossom season. Now, Kashima’s splendor has been replaced with a tiny blue covering, like an open shed, with just a table set forth for offerings.
Two annual festivals once held at the shrine are no more. Last February, residents offered beer as a dedication to the year’s bountiful catches, good harvest, safety, and health, and prayed for peace in the coming year.
In the fall, residents partook in a lion dance while Japanese flutes and drums created a cacophony of jubilation that marched from house to house before returning to the shrine.
Phil Dawson, Great Dane Japan's chief information officer, co-founder, and assistant brewer, says it is guzen—a Japanese word meaning coincidence and fortuity—to restore the beer shrine. It feels like something they should do and were meant to do, Dawson says. Dawson grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and married a woman from Japan. As a sports radio and TV personality, he conducted a beer bracket that introduced him to a lot of beer and homebrewing.
During a visit to Niigata with his wife in 2012, Dawson looked over a menu full of cocktails, wine, sake, and shochu. He saw only one beer: Sapporo. He asked for more options. The server was confused. He visited an import bar full of international brands, read an early issue of the Japan Beer Times, and had a realization: There wasn’t a big beer scene in Japan.
It set him on a path. He connected with Japanese brewers and learned about the country’s beer culture. He attended Madison Area Technical College for craft brewing and began to dream of owning a brewery. He pursued a certificate to teach English in Japan. By happenstance, Dawson was doing radio shows with local coaches twice a week at Great Dane’s original Wisconsin brewery. He figured, why not ask the Great Dane team about scaling up from homebrewing to operating a brew pub … and in Japan?
“And that's when I met Rob LoBreglio, the brewmaster for Great Dane [and a co-founder], and get to talking and telling him about this idea that I want to do,” Dawson says. “And he's like, ‘I've had this idea for 30 years. I want to do it. I'm happy to help you. Let's work together.’”
LoBreglio introduced Dawson to Tetsuya Kiyosawa, whom LoBreglio had taught to brew as his apprentice two decades earlier. Kiyosawa had moved back to Japan and worked at Yoho Brewing Co. Dawson and LoBreglio visited Kiyosawa in 2015 to see what they could accomplish in beer there. (They even made a documentary called “Craft Beer in Japan” that’s available on YouTube.)
After the trip, Dawson returned to Great Dane to learn more about the brewing trade. He moved to Japan in 2019 and started getting the business underway, even while COVID-19 slowed down the project. Kiyosawa joined as co-founder and director of brewery operations for Great Dane in Japan.
Dawson is focused on guzen, or the fortuity of the last decade. Of getting to live his dream as a brewer and business owner in Japan. Of living in Sendai near Japan’s only beer shrine. And of being the catalyst for restoring it to its former glory.
Japan’s beer scene didn't have an opportunity to take off until 1994, when the Japanese government deregulated the industry.
But Dr. Jeffrey Alexander says people should look further back for a full understanding of beer in Japan. Alexander lectures on Japan’s beer history, having lived and worked there on and off since the mid-1990s. He published “Brewed in Japan: The Evolution of the Japanese Beer Industry” in 2013, following it up five years later with a book on beer, whisky, hangover pills, and methamphetamine.
Japan slowly adopted beer starting in the late 19th century, Alexander says. For many years, it was too expensive for Japanese consumers. Foreign help was needed to make it, and foreigners mostly consumed it. Barley was considered a lesser-grade crop than rice.
But slowly, in the latter part of the century, beer made gains. Japanese brewers were learning from the West and proving themselves on brew decks, where they began to ingratiate themselves and demonstrate their talent. Japan was opening itself up more to the rest of the world, and perfecting products and ways of doing things that put them on equal footing with the rest of the world.
“Beer was one of those things adopted and perfected,” Alexander says. The Dutch, and a Wisconsin native and maltster named August Goeschel, helped propel Japan’s brewing prowess. Over the 20th century, Alexander says, beer became a “more established food that was costly.” But in the ’20s and ’30s it “fell a little in price, battling the dominant beverage, sake.”
And then World War II came. Rice became food instead of sake. But barley remained readily available, and the Japanese government gobbled up breweries that had been shipping beer to other parts of Asia.
“Beer became a way to feed the populace,” Alexander says. “Every family could get two 750ml bottles of beer per month. Food rations became so severe by the end of the war.”
Once the war ended, beer became industrialized and generic in Japan.
“There was a lot of European influence and different ales before the war, and that went away and happened in a lot of parts of the world,” Alexander says. “Not a lot of time, money, malts, orange peels. Beer became a Light Lager for many countries, including the United States. In the U.K. and Europe, they returned more quickly to old recipes. Japan stayed with light lager like Kirin. They managed to almost establish it as the definitive brew. People came to enjoy it and it was popular with younger people and students, and popular with women, who had not cared for other things like Dunkel before the war.”
In the late ’30s, beer was popular, but by the ’60s it was Japan's dominant alcoholic beverage.
But major changes were coming. The first came in the ’90s, when the government changed how much beer companies needed to make to qualify for a brewing license. That opened the door for microbrewing, and Japan had a craft beer boom. More than 100 breweries opened in a few short years.
But by the early 2000s, only a few dozen remained. Alexander says expertise was not widely available, nor was technical literature in Japan. Profit margins were too small, and most brewers had trouble managing their brew pub or restaurant.
Alexander says Kirin and Asahi remain the dominant breweries in Japan. It comes down to popularity, literally owning shelf space in stores or supermarkets, and a not-so-mysterious trend where beer prices of competitors go up a certain number of yen in the summer as beer gardens flourish and then down again in the winter, when beer-associated outdoor activities are fewer.
“Every beer costs the same. It’s not a surprise that they really own this market and craft brewers have a tough time,” says Alexander. Sure, you may not be able to compete on the shelves, but you can still own a brewery or brew pub, and “win” with a taproom.
And with Sendai being hit so hard, Alexander sees Great Dane’s expansion to the area as a win for both locals and the company.
“It’s not easy to break into the market, but having local partners and making contributions to a local shrine is tremendous,” Alexander says.
“When you visit some of these shrines and temples, you sometimes see when it was destroyed in an earthquake … and the locals all pitched in to restore it. And it’s a popular story. For [Great Dane] to do that is wonderful and will give them a local tradition to offer beer for the rice harvest.”
In all of his time studying beer in Japan, Alexander hasn’t come across anything like Kashima Shrine. Usually people leave mandarin oranges, persimmons, rice, or sake at shrines.
“I haven’t seen beer offered at a shrine before. That’s very interesting. That’s a good story,” he says.
Dawson first wanted to open a brewery in Niigata, where his wife is from. The government changed his and LoBreglio’s minds when the Japanese External Trade Organization heard of Great Dane’s plans and met with the company to entice it to the Sendai area.
“When we heard about this miraculous news that an American company would help us rebuild the shrine, some residents even cried with gratitude because no one could imagine this would happen to such a small town.”
Being courted by an arm of Japanese tourism is a far cry from where LoBreglio was when he moved to Madison in 1992. He first opened his brewery that year, then opened Great Dane’s first brew pub in 1994. He worked to get the brew deck going and beer made while the paint was still wet on the walls.
While he didn’t plan to become a brewer, LoBreglio always had beer in his life. Growing up in an Irish neighborhood in the Bronx, he drank Guinness. He remembers having an appreciation for it but, as a young man, also drinking the cheapest beers he could find. LoBreglio’s brother went to Germany in college and, when LoBreglio was visiting once, he remembers the “clouds parted” when he first tried German beer.
From here the story is familiar: LoBreglio took a liking to good beer and began homebrewing. He wasn’t finding a way to use his religious studies degree, so he and his girlfriend left New York after his graduation from Vassar College and drove to an American brewery hotbed: California.
“No idea what we’re doing, but I did know that craft brewing was on the rise, particularly on the West Coast,” LoBreglio says.
He kept homebrewing and knocking on doors for an opportunity until finally being hired as an assistant brewer at Triple Rock in Berkeley. Shortly afterward, the brewer who hired him left to go to beer school at the Siebel Institute of Technology in Chicago. LoBreglio followed, surmising it would help him become a better brewer much more quickly.
“When we get going to Japan, we’re branding ourselves as a distinctly Wisconsin company.”
LoBreglio bounced around for a while after that but got to talking with his college friend, Eliot Butler, over beers, and the two pontificated about brew pubs. Thus began a three-year process of deciding where to open one.
“And so we had a few things that echo what I was saying about Sendai,” LoBreglio says. “We wanted to be the first in; the city had to be more than 100,000; it had to not have any brew pubs. If it had a large university or state capitol, those were shown to do well—check, check, check, check. And then, nope, sorry, no brew pubs but craft breweries. So, Madison already had Capital here. Sprecher. The Great Taste of the Midwest beer festival. So, craft beer was, very, well, you know—Wisconsin.”
They made the official decision to open the brew pub in 1989, moved in 1992 and, in 1994, started what became a very successful local chain.
Great Dane’s downtown Madison location, about a five-minute walk east of the Wisconsin State Capitol, is the original. It sits in what once was the Fess Hotel building, originally erected in 1858. A pool hall gives the taproom a bit more character than average, and the patio behind the building feels hidden, with colorful flags hanging overhead. It exudes historic charm, while also being a part of the bustling Madison downtown area that surrounds the capitol.
Great Dane’s second location, in nearby Fitchburg, opened in 2002. Hilldale and East Madison, added in 2006 and 2010, respectively, round out the Madison locations. Further north—though not quite “up north”—LoBreglio added a location at Wausau, the gateway to northern Wisconsin, in 2009.
Wausau seemed like the furthest a Great Dane would open before Japan entered the picture.
“When we get going to Japan, we're branding ourselves as a distinctly Wisconsin company,” LoBreglio says. He thinks the story of Wisconsin beer entering the Japanese market—bringing a lot of Wisconsin malts, and cheese curds on the brew pub menu—is interesting, mostly because he trained Kiyosawa years ago as a brewer. It’s almost like the senpai and pupil have joined forces.
LoBreglio thinks Great Dane is the first true union of Japanese and American craft brewers. To date, no foreign brewery has actually brewed and packaged its beer on Japanese soil. The brew pub will be over 9,000 square feet and act as a production facility in addition to a two-story tasting room and restaurant.
“This was Japan’s only beer shrine, and it’s in our prefecture, and it was destroyed by the tsunami. And you have this whole group of people who lost loved ones in the tsunami trying to rebuild it. Yeah. To me, it was like that’s us, that’s what we are.”
LoBreglio left Madison to live in Japan, where his son might soon play professional soccer. He doesn’t speak the language, but he and Dawson, who does speak some Japanese, are integrating themselves into the community. LoBreglio has known Kiyosawa for years, as well as Shinji Muramoto, the Madison chef originally from Sapporo who designed the food menu for Great Dane in Japan.
Great Dane’s plans to help the local community are seen as a way to further insert themselves into Sendai. In Wisconsin, Great Dane raised funding for initiatives like Big Brothers Big Sisters of Dane County and donated 10% of sales to EmBark, a service for survivors of domestic violence that helps fund the adoption of rescue animals.
When they heard about the Kashima beer shrine’s sad state, they knew they had to help rebuild it.
“I was just looking for something to help around us over there,” LoBreglio says. “You know, it's just the way that we operate, you need to connect to your community. You need to give back. It's just a win-win forever. That business has to have some kind of heart, soul, and connection to the people around it. And it's the fact that this was Japan's only beer shrine, and it's in our prefecture, and it was destroyed by the tsunami. And you have this whole group of people who lost loved ones in the tsunami trying to rebuild it. Yeah. To me, it was like that's us, that's what we are.”
An American audience might not understand the importance of a shrine compared to a youth center or place where locals can buy groceries. But many villages have small shrines where locals wish for good fortune with harvests, fishing, and health. These shrines have existed for generations.
In Japanese culture, these gods—or kami in the Shinto religion—exist in nature and as a part of everyday life. The kami exist within the land, fill the mountainsides, rest in the streams, providing fortune or ill omen, and permeating the daily lives of everyone. They don’t have a visible form, and shrines act as a place for the gods to congregate and for people to feel their presence. You visit a shrine, and you pray for different life events.
“Be damned with everything else, we have to help; we have to get this beer shrine built.”
To not have your shrine rebuilt due to lack of funding, well, it doesn’t feel good.
Naomo Sato lived in temporary housing after the natural disaster, and in 2013 helped build a market and youth center for the area with Architecture for Humanity. She is now the representative director for We Are One Kitakami, where she seeks to improve the lives of those still impacted by the tsunami, a mission she has pursued for over a decade.
“The local residents are extremely grateful” to Great Dane for its commitment to rebuilding the beer shrine, Sato says. “If this becomes a reality, the reconstruction of this town from the disaster will finally come to an end. With such feelings, we hope the shrine reconstruction will come true. When we heard about this miraculous news that an American company would help us rebuild the shrine, some residents even cried with gratitude because no one could imagine this would happen to such a small town. We are truly grateful.”
During the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, the country received material and mental support from many people in America. In the years since the devastation, people’s lives have mostly gone back to normal. That’s not to say that the area doesn’t have other problems, such as completing the Heichi no Mori Zukuri project. “This is a challenge to revive the site of a village that was devastated by the tsunami and no longer inhabitable, and turn it into a forest where people want to visit again,” says Masae Ishikawa, a translator and volunteer for We are One. “Personally, I’m so excited about this project and it is very close to where the shrine is.”
And one day, Dawson hopes he gets to brew an old recipe tied to the beer shrine.
"We really want to recreate this beer that was made and rebuild this shrine," Dawson says, explaining how he has old documents detailing a beer recipe used for the shrine offerings years ago. “Be damned with everything else, we have to help; we have to get this beer shrine built.”
Words by Louis Livingston-GarciaIllustrations by Colette Holston
