“At the beginning, people said it was a man’s job, forbidden to women. “ The very conservative path of sake was not easy for Hanako Kudo, who in 2002 became the first woman toji (production manager) from Akita Prefecture in northern Japan.
The smiling 40-year-old works in the Maizuru family home, created in 1918 by her grandfather. Behind the white walls of her kura (literally “granary”, nickname given to the houses producing alcohol) – part of which collapsed in 2008 under the weight of the snow -, each year 9,000 liters of sake come out of locally produced rice and water from the melting snow of the Ôu mountains which dominate, to the east, the Yokote valley.
Throughout his career, Mme Kudo reformed the production to adapt it to the tastes of the time – more complex alcohols, with controlled acidity. “This job is extremely hard. You have to have passion ”, she says. She imposed herself “By work” and with the support of her father: Mikio Kudo pushed this microbiology enthusiast who, young, did not think of doing this job, to study the production of sake at the University of Agriculture in Tokyo. “It was natural, because she’s my daughter. Today, more and more women are involved in sake production. Their number will increase. “
The doors of kura yet do nothing but open up to the fairer sex. Only 16 of the 694 toji of the Federation of Sake House Associations were women in 2018. “It’s incredible, when you think that in the past, it was the women who made the sake”, ironically Mme Kudo. It seems indeed that during the Yayoi era (from – 300 to 300), the young women of the Shinto shrines of the province of Osumi (South-West) chewed the cooked rice balls, impregnating them with enzymes, before spit them out to let them ferment.
“The problem is far from being resolved”
The world of sake is by no means an exception in Japan: the third largest economy on the planet is ranked 120e out of 156 by the World Economic Forum on gender equality. A shocking situation at the time when the Olympic Games are held in Tokyo, which aims to be a model in this regard – nearly 49% of the athletes who participate are women, a proportion that is constantly increasing.
“Japanese women are still subject to an extremely low glass ceiling: few managerial positions for women in companies; few women parliamentarians; too much silence on sex crimes. The problem is far from being solved ”, deplores the dynamic Yuka Okamoto, editor and director of the “Non-freedom of expression” exhibitions, which attack the taboos of Japanese history.
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