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Future In Traditions

A worker controls production in the factory Kirishima Shuzo manufacturer of shochu made from sweet potatoes in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan. Kirishima Shuzo, with its head office in Miyazaki and known for its shochu made using sweet potatoes (satsuma-imo), is the top shochu maker in Japan, with the highest sales in the country. Kirishima Shuzo makes 160,000 bottles (each bottle being 1.8 liters) of shochu every day, using 425 tons of sweet potatoes. The potato scraps and shochu lees left over from that process are not discarded, and are instead used to produce biogas through methane fermentation. As a whole, the company produces approximately 34,000 square meters of biogas per day (enough to cover the electricity consumption of 22,000 average households). This biogas is then used to heat the boilers used in the process of making shochu. The company also uses the biogas to generate electricity, producing enough for the consumption costs of about 2,400 households per day, and provides that electricity to a power company. The dregs left over after biogas production are made into fertilizer for the fields where the sweet potatoes used to make the shochu are grown. In this way, Kirishima Shuzo has incorporated a resource cycle into their shochu production. They also take in the leftovers from shochu production of other producers in the area to convert into biogas. With the value of sake exports in 2018 rising to 22.2 billion yen, triple what it was ten years ago and its highest level yet, sake continues to be popular overseas. However, shochu (“distilled liquor”) is actually drunk more often in Japan than sake (“brewed liquor”). For the fiscal year of 2017, the domestic consumption of sake was 556,000 kiloliters, while the consumption of shochu was nearly 50% more, at 816,000 kiloliters. The government and businesses have been working together to promote exports of shochu in order to follow up on the popularity of sake. (Photo by Alessandro Di Ciommo/NurPhoto)

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