Portrait of a Sake Lady: Tsuki no Wa's Hiroko Yokosawa

Hiroko Yokosawa is a petite woman in her mid-30s, with large, inquisitive eyes, soft features, and cropped brown hair that falls in waves around her ears. With her demure bearing and erect posture, she could easily be mistaken for a librarian or a schoolteacher, but Yokosawa-san is one of Iwate’s leading master brewers, and one of only about 30 female toji in all of Japan.

I’d encountered Yokosawa-san once, very briefly, about two years ago at a tasting in Tokyo. John Gauntner had pointed her out to me from across the room.

“That’s the Tsuki no Wa toji,” he told me, “one of the best female brewers in the country.”

“For real?” I asked in disbelief. “That little lady?”

I’d been a fan of Tsuki no Wa Honjozo for years before I learned that it was made by a woman. It’s definitely not a girly brew. Like all of the Tsuki no Wa sakes I’ve tried, it has fantastic depth of flavor and satisfying ricey heft. I love the Honjozo because it works well with a variety of rich foods, and, at Y1080 per bottle, it’s a real bargain.

Last month, I interviewed Yokosawa-san for an article about lady brewers I wrote for the Japan Times. She’d recently been in Osaka to participate in a fundraising event for Tohoku disaster victims that featured a number of female kurabito, so I knew she’d have a lot to say about being a woman in the industry. I was nervous about calling her, though. We’d never spoken before, and it’s always painful for me (and, usually, the person I’m speaking with) to conduct an interview in Japanese, but she was very gracious. Her voice was deeper than I’d expected, her speech even and straightforward. She was refreshingly opinionated and spoke candidly about the difficulties women face as brewery workers.

One thing that struck me was that, unlike most of the other brewers I’d talked to in the past, she hadn’t decided to go into the sake industry purely out of family obligation. Many have said that, although they’d never especially wanted to pursue a career in sake, they did it because the brewery was without a successor. Generally speaking, the children of sake brewery owners view taking over the business less as a choice, than a natural consequence of their birth. It’s hard, stressful work, particularly if you decide to take on the dual role -- as many brewers these days are -- of owner and toji.

From talking to Yokosawa-san, I got the sense that her decision to take up brewing was prompted in part by the search for deeper meaning. Before moving back to Iwate, she’d been living in Tokyo, working at an office job. After a while, she got fed up with the monoculture of modernity she found there.

“You couldn’t find any traditional culture,” she said. “It seemed like things were getting to be the same everywhere, and I wanted to bring back crafts that were uniquely Japanese.”

Her philosophy of sake making -- the quest for authenticity -- reminded me a lot of a conversation I had with Aoshima-san of Aoshima Shuzo, whose dedication to the traditional methods of sake production and single-mindedness of purpose border on the religious.


Yokosawa-san prides herself on making old-school sake, full-bodied brews that let the flavors of the rice shine. And shine they do. After our talk, I went out and bought a bottle of Tsuki no Wa Junmai-shu, which I paired with a dish of iwashi no ume ni, sardines simmered with ginger and umeboshi.

Although I’d never made it before, the fat sardines I found in the basement of the Isetan inspired me to give it a try (tip: get your husband to gut the fish, and the rest is a snap). Sardines are in season at several times during the year, and high summer is presumably one of them. Like a cat, I’m attracted to shiny things, and I found the silver gleam of their skin irresistible. Iwashi no ume ni combines the smokiness of the fish with the pert, zesty flavors of fresh ginger and pickled plums, and it’s terrific served cold or at room temperature in the summer. That zap of acidity is just the thing to stimulate appetites made sluggish by the Tokyo heat and humidity.


The Tsuki no Wa Junmai-shu worked remarkably well with this dish. The sake’s lively, fruity acidity highlighted the tart and spicy notes of the umeboshi and ginger and cut some of the richness of the oily fish, while the round, ricey back notes complemented the soy-based sauce. It’s fruitier and a little more flash than the Honjozo, with less of a toasty edge. In a phrase, it’s poised and substantial -- a little like Yokosawa-san herself.

In other news, it's been a crazy, crazy summer here. We've had an insane heat wave, a series of pretty sizable earthquakes, and a visit from Vice President Biden. The Gochiso team and I have been coming up with some very exciting ideas and gearing up for our next event, which, if all goes well, will happen in the late fall.

Food Is Art, Gochiso #2

The premise was tinged with the absurdity of a Dadaist riddle and the impossibility of a Zen koan: How can a chef cook without a kitchen?

We found ourselves in the unenviable position of having to confront this and other head-scratching conundrums as the days evaporated, leaving us no closer to securing a kitchen one week before our second Gochiso event. When we first conceived of Food Is Art, we’d imagined staging it at a gallery that doubled as a café. In our minds, this magical place would have everything we needed to throw a fabulous pop-up dinner -- tables, chairs, stylish glasses and sleek dishware, a well-equipped kitchen, a friendly team of servers, and of, course, walls covered with fabulous art. No more shipping tables, fretting over cutlery, or lugging plates and ramekins from home. Hurrah!

In the real world, however, places that perfect don’t really exist. After considering several possible venues, we realized that we’d have to compromise on something, and that something would either be the kitchen or the art. Kitchen or art? It was a hard choice, one that involved weighing the relative merits of logistical ease against conceptual integrity. We chose conceptual integrity, and everyone questioned our sanity.


Apart from its lack of a kitchen -- and refrigerator – Art Statements Gallery in Ebisu was exactly what we were looking for. The exhibition at the time, a group show of large-scale, edgy contemporary works by artists like Yoshitaka Amano and Erwin Olaf, reflected the irreverent spirit of our project. The moment Eriko and I stepped into the space, we could already envision the set up for our dinner. We’d play with the idea of a modern feast and seat everyone at one long table. The gallery’s high ceilings and minimal layout would highlight the drama of the dinner itself.

We’d thought we could get around the kitchen issue by renting a cooking studio, but there was no place close by that was even remotely within our price range. As the event drew nearer, we started to ponder the possibility of knocking on the doors of homes around the gallery. But the likelihood that anyone would allow perfect strangers to commandeer their kitchen for a weekend was laughably low. The whole thing seemed impossible.

As it turns out, the solution to the problem was Chef Maria Suzuki herself. Chef Maria, who had wowed all of our diners at the last Gochiso event, Make Yourself at Home. Chef Maria, who handled every glitch with graceful aplomb. Chef Maria, who had worked at internationally renowned restaurants and also happened to be a trained Raw Food specialist.


To be completely honest, though, I was skeptical of going with a full Raw Food dinner menu. My own experience with Raw Food had been limited to the smoothies one of my colleagues used to bring to work, frothy greenish-grey drinks, which, after a year of watching him imbibe variations on that theme daily, I’d assumed formed the basis of a Raw Food diet. These were thick, gloopey (but not entirely unappetizing) blended concoctions that always seemed to incorporate bananas and wheatgrass and reminded me a lot of the healthy shakes my mom used to make when I was a child. The only thing missing was the cod liver oil.

But Chef Maria changed my mind. I’ll never look at Raw Food in the same way again; the food was that good. Here are a few of the highlights.


In keeping with the artistic theme of the event, we chose titles for each of the dishes and listed them on the menu without other descriptions. The amuse bouche, called Seed, was a fresh corn and nut croquette, rolled in flaxseed and placed, rather sneakily, amidst the decorative garden-boxes set in the middle of the table. The idea was for each diner to nibble on the edible stones while unearthing the sweet baby carrots also nestled in the boxes. This was served alongside a refreshing mint granita, topped with lemon espuma.

In choosing a sake for the first two courses, I had to look for one that had both flexibility and finesse. The second dish was a tomato assemblage of semi-dried tomatoes, marinated tomatoes, and tomato mousse (which we entitled Rothko Red), and the third dish would be paired with Argyle Brut, delicious a full-bodied sparkling wine from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, so I needed something light, crisp, and smooth, but with enough umami to stand up to the creaminess of the croquette and the depth of the tomatoes. I went with Hidematsu Aka Honjozo from the esteemed Ichishima Shuzo in Niigata. It has all the characteristics you’d expect in a Niigata brew, coupled with a fine acidic structure and a generous umami base. It’s also immensely drinkable -- I knew that it had won a gold medal at this year’s International Wine Challenge, but I was surprised at how quickly everyone finished off the bottle.


Earth and Sky consisted of minced baby shiitake mushrooms and walnut paste, rolled into cigars and encased in a thin skin of dehydrated mushroom flavored with soy sauce, perched on a fluffy cloud of whipped avocado and minted edamame soybeans.


We decided to pair this dish with two different but equally fantastic Chardonnays, just for fun. The sweet honey notes and oaky richness of the Crossbarn Chardonnay from Sonoma spoke to the dish’s savory side, while the lemony acidity and silky texture of the Girard Russian River Chardonnay highlighted the fresh, ethereal notes of the edamame and mint.


Blanket was a stunning dish of thinly sliced daikon wrapped around a rich filling of nut cream and avocado, finished with white truffle oil and thyme, black truffles, and a vibrant splash of raspberry vinaigrette. Blanket impressed me so much that I made a version (albeit an unsophisticated, considerably less photogenic version) of the dish at home last week.


We served this with a luscious, floral Gewurztraminer from Thomas Fogarty winery in Monterey. It was an unconventional pairing but the lychee and tropical fruit notes worked with the spiciness of the daikon and the tartness of the raspberry sauce.

What an amazing experience. We made some mistakes but finished on a seriously high note. A huge thanks to Chefs Maria Suzuki and Tsutomu Otsuka, the incredibly trusting Dominique Perregeaux of Art Statements, the good people at iwine.jp (in particular Yoshi Takemura, for helping us choose the wines), Ichishima-san of Ichishima Shuzo, and all of the lovely people who dined with us on July 23rd and 24th!

I am aware that I still haven't posted the details from our last event yet, but you can read all about the shambolic birth of Gochiso on Umamimart and Time Out.