[2] Imada Shuzō is a small brewery in rural Hiroshima and produces internationally acclaimed ginjo-style sakes.
[1] In addition to being a master brewer at a fifth-generation sake brewery, Imada is known for exploring heirloom rice varieties to use in her brewing.
She’s worked with local farmers to cultivate a seed they haven’t sowed in a century, and used trial and error to rediscover the perfect brewing process for a once-common, now-forgotten rice, whose folk roots make it less predictable than standardized modern cultivars.
Shrine maidens called miko, they brewed the beverage as an offering to the gods, employing a primitive method that involved chewing and spitting rice and letting the body's own enzymes do the work of fermentation.
[2] There are around 30 female tojis in Japan, but when Imada started brewing there were only a few; her dedication has been a model for other women in the industry, though she is always clear in interviews that she did not face gender discrimination in her work.