Sendai is a funny city. It has a concentrated downtown, comparatively sprawling pseudo-suburbs to the north and south, and ridiculous sprawling projections of land reaching to the west. It is possible to travel on a bus for nearly an hour and still be technically within the city limits, as we did last fall when we went out to visit Akiu.
Recently, we went west (by train, this time, for about 35 minutes) on another prong to reach Sakunami. We had been invited to the area's Summer Matsuri, one of the ones that mostly involves some food tents, a few plastic tables and chairs, and a stage for local performers. Two ALT friends were asked to perform, one playing the guitar and the other dancing hula.
I travelled out with my friend Lili. The area is mostly famous for its whisky distillery, so we thought the festival was actually at the distillery. It wasn't, but once we got out there (about a 10-minute shuttle bus ride from the train station) we decided to do the tour before heading back to the station to find the festival.
He decided that he liked whisky and wanted to learn how to make it. So in 1918, quite a while before people did such things on a regular basis, he headed off to Scotland. He enrolled in the University of Glasgow and apprenticed at various distilleries. He also married a Scottish girl and brought her back to Japan with him.
The tour guides stressed the cleanliness of the air and the river water as major players in the tastiness of the whisky. Masataka was travelling in the area and was struck by the confluence of the two (clean) rivers as providing a very convenient place to make whisky. He chose a location in Hokkaido for another distillery because it reminded him of Scotland.
The tour itself was largely forgettable, mostly because we had a lot of trouble understanding what we were looking at. Lili's Japanese is (much) better than mine, but her whisky-making vocabulary is somewhat rusty. So we followed the guide around but mostly looked at the pictures to try to figure things out.
But at the end of the tour was the real reason most ALTs know about the Nikka distillery: the free tasting session. They showed us a video explaining how to water and ice the whisky, then brought us into a tasting bar where they'd set out glasses of various malts and ages. You could stay for up to 20 minutes (not that, being Japanese, they'd ever actually ask you to leave) -- but mostly the Japanese people on the tour tried one or two samples and then moved on. Lili and I, perhaps needless to say, made good use of our 20 minutes.
In the attached shop, you could buy whisky of course, but also various chocolates and other sweets made with the whisky. Most of these could be sampled, and we made good use of that too. Meanwhile, in a low-lighted annex, they sold bottles of the most expensive whiskys. Twenty-year-old single-cask at $200 a bottle, that sort of thing. They also offered a sample, of a $75 ten-year-old version. I didn't really like it, but it was very interesting to taste the huge difference between that and some of the cheaper blends. It didn't even taste like the same product.
Feeling somewhat more light-headed, we eventually made our way to the festival. There were a dozen or so ALTs hanging around, and the organizers made us all get up on stage and introduce ourselves. This was much more popular with the people in the plastic chairs than it was with us. I had to run back to town; when I left, Chantel had gotten everyone out of the plastic chairs to try hula dancing.
Good times.
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