The Japanese Sake Masters Swimming Against a Rising Tide of Whisky
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The Japanese Sake Masters Swimming Against a Rising Tide of Whisky

Squeezed out by highballs and quality Japanese malts, the country’s sake breweries are trying to innovate to win back market share.

By DON NICO FORBES
Wed, Mar 19, 2025 10:37amGrey Clock 4 min

OSAKA, Japan: The Japanese have been drinking sake since the eighth century. Back then, it was believed the rice-based liquor warded off ghosts.

Today, it has a stronger spirit to contend with: whisky.

Enter Nishiya, a bar in downtown Osaka, and you are given little choice of what to drink. You might fancy a glass of sake or a shot of the stronger, more bitter shochu. But regulars will insist you try another, less traditional Japanese delicacy, a highball.

“It was invented in the U.K.,” says the bartender, mixing a glass of whisky, which is spelled the Scottish way here, ice and soda. “But it was perfected in Japan.”

The cocktail has been gaining ground in the country since the late 2000s. It pairs well with the local cuisine, and provides momentary relief in neighborhood taverns, or izakaya, during the country’s hot and humid summers. Between 2015 and 2020, domestic whisky sales increased 50%. Japanese drinkers spent $3.5 billion on the spirit in 2023.

This has left sake producers struggling to find a way to keep the party going. By some measures consumption has fallen by more than 75% since the 1970s, and 30% in the past decade, displaced in part by invasive species—sometimes beer, but especially whisky.

The government in Tokyo has stepped in, introducing a network of brand ambassadors—or “sake samurai”—to help promote the ailing industry. Last year the beverage obtained Unesco world heritage status, like French Champagne or Belgian beer.

But resistance is also coming from the factory floor. Brewers have begun experimenting with new recipes of “craft” sake, adding unusual ingredients to hit hoppy, beer-inspired flavors and floral, gin-like notes. One brewery has developed an Italian-inspired “margherita” sake, blending the umami of sun-dried tomatoes with the amino acids produced during sake’s traditional brewing process.

All this to make the whisky-and-soda brigade look a little staid.

“We want to honor tradition but also create things no one has ever seen before,” said Shuhei Okazumi, founder of the Japan Craft Sake Brewers Association. This community of young, entrepreneurial toji want to upend sake’s image as the drink of a bygone era. Dedicated craft sake bars are now popping up around Tokyo. Festivals debuting new and unusual varieties from around the country are sold-out events.

“They’re like the young, punk-rock generation of sake brewing,” said Monica Samuels, one of roughly a hundred government-certified sake samurai. “For so long, mainstream Japanese culture has told people to blend in. You’re not supposed to be outrageous. The craft sake movement wants to change that.”

They could be in for a long, thirsty fight.

Whisky is now deeply entrenched in Japanese drinking culture. The country’s taste for the amber nectar can be traced back to Masataka Taketsuru, revered as the godfather of Japanese whisky, who traveled to Scotland in 1919 to serve an apprenticeship before returning to help found Japan’s first distilleries. The spirit has had its ups and downs since then, but consumption really took off when people began adding soda and ice.

Takeshi Niinami , chief executive of Suntory, Japan’s largest distillery, says shifting consumption patterns are partly demographic. Japan’s rapidly aging population means health considerations are to the fore of many drinkers’ minds, he says. Sake tends to have a high sugar content.

“When I go out for sushi, I’ll go for a highball. Because sake might be delicious, but I can’t afford the sugar. Sure I can have maybe just one glass, that’s fine. But sake is too good—you can rarely just have one,” Niinami says.

But it also speaks to a turn in local production. Many traditional sake brewers are now pivoting to whisky, attracted not only by strong domestic demand but the high prices premium varieties can command overseas. International awards , marketing campaigns and actor Bill Murray’s turn in “Lost in Translation” have whetted appetites for Japanese whisky to such an extent that a bottle of Suntory’s Yamazaki whisky, aged for 55 years, can set you back close to $1 million.

Yoichiro Nishi, an eighth-generation sake and shochu producer, opened Ontake Distillery in 2019.

Nestled in the foothills of Mount Ontake, Japan’s second-largest volcano after Fuji, the distillery strikes a blend between old and new. Dark timber panels, autumnal maple trees and natural springs recall the traditional tea houses of Kyoto, or the temples of Koyasan, but an angular, concrete walkway, echoing the masters of Japanese brutalism, suggests tradition might be taking a turn.

Inside, burnt-black sherry casks carry a single-malt whisky, now five years old. A first edition was released in 2023, taking gold at the San Francisco Wine & Spirits Competition.

Nishi acknowledges the jump from sake to whisky was far from straightforward. He recalls his fascination with the idea that a drink could improve over time, maturing for five, 10, or 20-plus years. “As a brewer of sake, a drink best consumed fresh, this was an intriguing concept,” he says.

But time is money, and whisky is by nature a waiting game. To get around this, Nishi sells casks before they have matured. While waiting, customers are invited to stay in the distillery, sample a few drams and sink a few holes in Ontake’s on-site golf course. The distillery is open to everyone—everyone who can shell out $50,000 for a cask, that is.

Nishi is one of many newcomers to the industry. In 2016, there were 10 whisky distilleries in Japan. Today there are nearly 130. But an increasingly vibrant market has come at a cost. From record highs in 2022, exports of Japanese whisky have now started falling. Many are worried that an explosion of distilleries is diluting authenticity, with blends of local and overseas whiskies commonly sold under the Japanese whisky brand.

Some are calling for tighter industry regulations. Others insist the rules are made to be broken.

“Creativity has always been vital to the Japanese spirit,” says Brian Ashcraft, an author who has written extensively on Japanese drinking culture. “Any regulation shouldn’t come at the expense of that.”

It is a sentiment shared by the craft sake movement, whose proponents hope new ideas will drive demand both domestically and abroad. Exports have roughly doubled since 2018, with sake breweries popping up around the world, from Taiwan to the U.S. and Mexico, each with their own take on the drink.

Okazumi, the craft brewer, said the new varieties could do for sake what the California roll did for sushi.

“Sometimes tradition needs to innovate to go global,” he said.



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In a Sea of Tech Talent, Companies Can’t Find the Workers They Want

A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.

By CALLUM BORCHERS
Thu, Oct 2, 2025 4 min

There has rarely, if ever, been so much tech talent available in the job market. Yet many tech companies say good help is hard to find.

What gives?

U.S. colleges more than doubled the number of computer-science degrees awarded from 2013 to 2022, according to federal data. Then came round after round of layoffs at Google, Meta, Amazon, and others.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts businesses will employ 6% fewer computer programmers in 2034 than they did last year.

All of this should, in theory, mean there is an ample supply of eager, capable engineers ready for hire.

But in their feverish pursuit of artificial-intelligence supremacy, employers say there aren’t enough people with the most in-demand skills. The few perceived as AI savants can command multimillion-dollar pay packages. On a second tier of AI savvy, workers can rake in close to $1 million a year .

Landing a job is tough for most everyone else.

Frustrated job seekers contend businesses could expand the AI talent pipeline with a little imagination. The argument is companies should accept that relatively few people have AI-specific experience because the technology is so new. They ought to focus on identifying candidates with transferable skills and let those people learn on the job.

Often, though, companies seem to hold out for dream candidates with deep backgrounds in machine learning. Many AI-related roles go unfilled for weeks or months—or get taken off job boards only to be reposted soon after.

Playing a different game

It is difficult to define what makes an AI all-star, but I’m sorry to report that it’s probably not whatever you’re doing.

Maybe you’re learning how to work more efficiently with the aid of ChatGPT and its robotic brethren. Perhaps you’re taking one of those innumerable AI certificate courses.

You might as well be playing pickup basketball at your local YMCA in hopes of being signed by the Los Angeles Lakers. The AI minds that companies truly covet are almost as rare as professional athletes.

“We’re talking about hundreds of people in the world, at the most,” says Cristóbal Valenzuela, chief executive of Runway, which makes AI image and video tools.

He describes it like this: Picture an AI model as a machine with 1,000 dials. The goal is to train the machine to detect patterns and predict outcomes. To do this, you have to feed it reams of data and know which dials to adjust—and by how much.

The universe of people with the right touch is confined to those with uncanny intuition, genius-level smarts or the foresight (possibly luck) to go into AI many years ago, before it was all the rage.

As a venture-backed startup with about 120 employees, Runway doesn’t necessarily vie with Silicon Valley giants for the AI job market’s version of LeBron James. But when I spoke with Valenzuela recently, his company was advertising base salaries of up to $440,000 for an engineering manager and $490,000 for a director of machine learning.

A job listing like one of these might attract 2,000 applicants in a week, Valenzuela says, and there is a decent chance he won’t pick any of them. A lot of people who claim to be AI literate merely produce “workslop”—generic, low-quality material. He spends a lot of time reading academic journals and browsing GitHub portfolios, and recruiting people whose work impresses him.

In addition to an uncommon skill set, companies trying to win in the hypercompetitive AI arena are scouting for commitment bordering on fanaticism .

Daniel Park is seeking three new members for his nine-person startup. He says he will wait a year or longer if that’s what it takes to fill roles with advertised base salaries of up to $500,000.

He’s looking for “prodigies” willing to work seven days a week. Much of the team lives together in a six-bedroom house in San Francisco.

If this sounds like a lonely existence, Park’s team members may be able to solve their own problem. His company, Pickle, aims to develop personalised AI companions akin to Tony Stark’s Jarvis in “Iron Man.”

Overlooked

James Strawn wasn’t an AI early adopter, and the father of two teenagers doesn’t want to sacrifice his personal life for a job. He is beginning to wonder whether there is still a place for people like him in the tech sector.

He was laid off over the summer after 25 years at Adobe , where he was a senior software quality-assurance engineer. Strawn, 55, started as a contractor and recalls his hiring as a leap of faith by the company.

He had been an artist and graphic designer. The managers who interviewed him figured he could use that background to help make Illustrator and other Adobe software more user-friendly.

Looking for work now, he doesn’t see the same willingness by companies to take a chance on someone whose résumé isn’t a perfect match to the job description. He’s had one interview since his layoff.

“I always thought my years of experience at a high-profile company would at least be enough to get me interviews where I could explain how I could contribute,” says Strawn, who is taking foundational AI courses. “It’s just not like that.”

The trouble for people starting out in AI—whether recent grads or job switchers like Strawn—is that companies see them as a dime a dozen.

“There’s this AI arms race, and the fact of the matter is entry-level people aren’t going to help you win it,” says Matt Massucci, CEO of the tech recruiting firm Hirewell. “There’s this concept of the 10x engineer—the one engineer who can do the work of 10. That’s what companies are really leaning into and paying for.”

He adds that companies can automate some low-level engineering tasks, which frees up more money to throw at high-end talent.

It’s a dynamic that creates a few handsomely paid haves and a lot more have-nots.

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