Sho-chu Time / Woman Feeling Sense of Accomplishment with Hard Work at Shochu Distillery; ‘She Works More Than the Usual New Employee’

By Riichiro Seki / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

2:00 JST, January 18, 2025

Kagoshima Prefecture is one of the nation’s major production areas of shochu. This is the sixth in a series introducing the charm of the distilled spirit and the people involved in its creation.

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MAKURAZAKI, Kagoshima — Inserting a stick with a scale into tanks and jars to check the quantity of the shochu inside is just one of the duties Moe Nagatomo is entrusted with at a Satsuma Shuzo Co. distillery in Makurazaki, Kagoshima Prefecture, a distillery known for its Satsuma Shiranami sweet potato shochu brand.

The 25-year-old new employee spends a week every month checking whether leaks or evaporation have altered the quantity of the shochu in about 120 tanks and jars at Kedogawa distillery, where shochu is made using traditional methods based on documents from the Edo period (1603-1867) and Meiji era (1868-1912).

While 10,000 kiloliters of shochu is produced a year at Satsuma Shuzo’s main distillery in the town of Ei in Minamikyushu in the prefecture, where machines are used to crush sweet potatoes and stir them with water, only about 100 kiloliters of the liquor is made annually at the Kedogawa distillery, where everything is done by hand. But the handcrafted shochu is popular because of its unique, enriched flavor.

Born in Kitakyushu in Fukuoka Prefecture, Nagatomo has always loved steamed sweet potatoes. That love led her to Shimane University’s life and environmental sciences faculty, where she conducted research into predicting sweet potatoes yields based on the way their leaves grow.

She continued her research at the university’s graduate school and was able to roughly estimate yields based on the crop’s leaves one month after planting.

She joined Satsuma Shuzo in April last year after she happened to taste Satsuma Shiranami and learned about the company. Although she only had a few opportunities to enjoy sweet potato shochu before then, she knew she wanted to work in some way with sweet potatoes.

Nagatomo is the only woman among five employees at the Kedogawa distillery. She helped produce the shochu for this season, which started in August last year. She also took part in sorting sweet potatoes and checking the shochu’s volume and alcohol content.

Nagatomo does all the physical work that her male coworkers do.

She said one of the harder processes during the production was kai ire, in which she stirred more than a ton of crushed sweet potatoes, water and koji malt with a wooden stick.

She said that she had been confident in her physical strength but that it was hard work and that she had ended up with blisters on her hands and sore arm muscles.

To make koji malt, 120 kilograms of rice has to be kneaded for about 10 minutes to ensure it is mixed well with the koji mold in a room with a temperature of more than 30 C and a humidity of about 90%.

“It was like working in a sauna,” said Nagatomo, who contributed to that work, too. “It was difficult to do the work quickly and accurately since changes in the temperature affect the production of enzymes.”

Nagatomo gets up at 5 a.m. and spends about 1 hour and 15 minutes commuting to the distillery from her home in Kagoshima City.

In late October last year, the first shochu she helped to make was completed.

“I enjoyed the process of watching the sweet potatoes turn into shochu and felt a sense of accomplishment when the product was completed,” she said with a smile. “It was particularly delicious shochu for me.”

“Not only does she work hard at making shochu, but she also takes it upon herself to clean and complete other tasks,” said Masamune Moriyama, 57, head of the distillery. “She works more than the usual new employee.”

“I want to contribute to the production of sweet potatoes, too, making use of what I studied at university,” she said.

You can read this article in Japanese here.