With his crisp Oxford shirt and banker's armbands, Takeshi Yamamoto strives for a modern look. A laptop sits on his office desk, and more important, computers regulate the most important processes on the factory floor nearby.
But even 15 years of persistent improvements in his business, a distinguished sake brewery that has been in his family for six generations, have done little to change one vital and depressing fact. Sake, a product as distinctively Japanese as sumo wrestling and kimonos, has fallen brutally out of fashion.
Sake is still consumed widely in this prefecture of glistening rice fields and rolling hills that fronts on the Sea of Japan. But brewers say this has little to do with the fact that Shimane prefecture produces some of Japan's finest sake. Rather, it is because the percentage of people older than 65 is the highest in the country.
"There is no point in promoting sake among young people," said Yamamoto, who is 46. "When they first begin to drink, they swig cheap sake at parties, so sake has an image of being strong and of having a bad odor."
The statistics of sake production are grim. The number of breweries in Japan has halved since 1955. In just 12 years, from 1989 to 2001, domestic consumption of sake plummeted by 30 percent.
Nowadays, as teenagers enter adulthood, their early experiments with harsh, industrial-grade sake typically lead them toward beer and wine consumption, which has more than doubled in little over 10 years.
A small twist in the situation is the fact that sake has enjoyed great success of late as a slightly exotic import in the US. Many old-line brewers here say the export market is their only hope for survival, and not simply through overseas sales. If sake develops enough cachet abroad, they hope, there could be a rebound effect on its prestige among the young here.
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