Yasuna
The Story
The Hitoyoshi Kuma region of Kyushu is a rice shochu production area, where Kuma shochu has been made for 500 years. Although there is no sightseeing of note, the area is rich in nature and still retains something close to an old-fashioned rural landscape.
Since Takata Yasuna was very young, the inside of the Shochu warehouse was her playground, where she spent a lot of time with her parents. By the time she was three or four years old, Yasuna already had her own bucket and would go into the koji room and play with the rice, imitating what her parents did. When they were mixing the koji on the shelves in the koji room and controlling the temperature, Yasuna used to lie on the first day’s koji, covered with a blanket to feel warm. For her it was an ordinary daily event, and it was a time to be with her parents who also worked at night. In thinking about it now, she feels it was a special time.
After graduating from the Department of Brewing Science at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, Yasuna joined the Takada Brewery. She has loved gin since her university days and after it was commercialized in April 2018, Yasuna thought it would be fun to make craft gin based on the family’s own shochu. Through gin, she hoped to get drinkers interested in shochu, even if it was something they were not normally familiar with. But her primary reason was that she wanted to make a gin that she thought was delicious, a gin filled with her own shochu and the taste of Kumamoto.
An only child, Yasuna wants to pass on what her grandfather and ancestors have built up. She wants to impart to her children the good qualities of Kuma shochu and the Hitoyoshi Kuma region, plus the importance and satisfaction of preserving traditions throughout their lives.
The Craft
Although it has lost out to potato shochu in terms of name recognition, Kuma shochu has a tradition and quality that can compete on a global scale. Though the flavor may be more stable if made it by machine like the big companies, Takata Shuzo is unable to produce in large quantities. However, they believe that their quality is in being handmade. The koji they make is through the sensation of their own hands, and the mash that ferments are living creatures, like their own children. In doing so, little by little, one by one, the shochu will be passed on to those who will drink it with care and enjoy its delicious taste.
Tradition is only tradition when there are reforms and innovations. Even if we say that we have inherited the tradition from the past, things were gradually changing so as to make something stable and tasty. Much changed with the introduction of vacuum distillation, which has since become the mainstream. It has been more than 20 years since Takata Shuzo started using yeast from wild flowers. The koji room and jars have been used since the company was founded, yet they have tried various things such as reduced-pressure distillation and barrel storage. It is necessary to continue taking on challenges and introducing new things in line with the times.
