Chefs, Master Sake Brewers to Be Named Living Treasures; Government Aiming to Protect Japan’s Food Culture’

The Yomiuri Shimbun

20:00 JST, March 30, 2025

A policy to recognize chefs, toji master sake brewers and other skilled Japanese food artisans as living national treasures has been mapped out by the Cultural Affairs Agency, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.

The agency intends to revise in early fiscal 2025 the criteria for recognizing certain skills as cultural assets. It will also revise, based on those criteria, the standards for certifying someone as a living national treasure, a status formally known as a holder of important intangible cultural assets.

Living national treasures are currently recognized in two fields: performing arts, such as theater and music, and craft techniques including pottery and dyeing. No one holds this status in a food-related field at the present time.

To pass on valuable food-related skills and improve the social status of food-related artisans, the agency is expected to recognize them as living national treasures in the field of “life culture.”

There are established criteria for recognizing performing arts and craft techniques — the art involved must be “of particularly high artistic value” and artisans must “embody the techniques at a high level.”

Similar criteria will also be established in the field of life culture.

In order to designate more people as skilled artisans and thereby expand the system for living national treasures, a system for registering intangible cultural assets was established with the 2021 revision of the Protection of Cultural Properties Law.

Assets in the field of life culture became eligible for registration, and such areas as “traditional sake brewing” and “Kyoto cuisine” have been registered.

The agency plans to start naming leading figures in the food-related field as “treasures of food” as early as fiscal 2026, and to certify living national treasures from among the people selected as treasures.