What Does It Mean to Be a ‘Guardian’ Rather Than an Owner?

Some businesses are inherited, while others are entrusted to us. The fifth-generation head of Yamaroku Shoyu speaks about why preserving the wooden barrels, the microorganisms, and the living spirit of the brewery has become a mission greater than simply making soy sauce.

YASUO YAMAMOTO

Yamaroku Shoyu

I sometimes think that when people hear the word owner, they imagine something that belongs to them.

A building.
A business.
A name passed down through a family.

But when I look at Yamaroku Shoyu, I do not feel that I own these things.

I feel that they have been entrusted to me.

Our family has been making soy sauce on Shodoshima for generations. The history of the brewery is not recorded perfectly, but my grandmother told us that it goes back at least 150 years. I am the fifth generation to carry it forward.

But what I inherited was not simply a recipe.

I inherited a place that was already alive.

Our brewery is more than one hundred years old. The wooden beams, earthen walls and floors are home to microorganisms that have lived there for generations. More than one hundred varieties of yeast and lactic acid bacteria live within this environment. Even the walls are part of the brewing process. When the mud begins to crumble, we repair it with new mud and return it to the same place.

To someone unfamiliar with fermentation, this may look like an old building that needs replacing.

To me, it is part of the brewery.

It is part of the flavour.

It is part of what we have been given.

The Barrel Is Not a Container

This is perhaps the most difficult thing to explain about traditional soy sauce.

A kioke is not simply a large wooden vessel in which we put soybeans, wheat and salt.

It is a living environment.

The wood carries microorganisms. The brewery carries microorganisms. The seasons change the temperature and humidity. The wind of Shodoshima enters this world. The moromi changes with the weather, with time, with the activity of the organisms inside it.

Our task is not to control everything.

Our task is to create the conditions in which these microorganisms can do their work.

That is why I believe the brewer is not the creator of the flavour in the way people sometimes imagine. We are caretakers of an environment. Nature does much of the work.

And that requires humility.

Yamaroku produces its soy sauce in cedar kioke holding thousands of liters. Some of the barrels may appear almost ready to fall apart, yet they continue to contain the bacteria and fungi that are essential to fermentation. They are old, but they are not dead.

This is why replacing them with something cleaner, newer or more efficient is not necessarily an improvement.

Sometimes, what looks old is precisely what must be protected.

When Protecting Soy Sauce Was No Longer Enough

At some point, I realised that protecting the soy sauce was not enough.

There was a time when traditional kioke fermentation was disappearing because it was expensive, difficult and slow.

Modern tanks were easier.

They were easier to clean.
Easier to control.
Easier to scale.

The economics were obvious.

But if everyone chose only what was efficient, something else would disappear.

The amount of soy sauce and miso naturally fermented in kioke had fallen to less than one percent of the market. More seriously, the people who knew how to make these enormous wooden barrels were disappearing.

In 2009, we ordered nine new kioke.

The barrel maker told us it was the first order for new soy sauce barrels he had received since the Second World War.

That sentence stayed with me.

Because it meant that the problem was larger than Yamaroku.

If that craftsman's knowledge disappeared, it would not matter how strongly we wished to continue. We would eventually have the soy sauce brewery, but no one left who could make the vessels that allowed it to live.

So in 2011, we began the Kioke Craftsmen Revival Project.

In 2012, we apprenticed under the barrel maker with carpenters from Shodoshima. We learned to select and harvest bamboo, prepare the wood, join the staves, weave the hoops and understand how a barrel must be constructed so that it can still function decades into the future.

After nearly two years of trial and error, we completed our own barrels in 2013.

This was not simply another part of the business.

It was a way of making sure that the next generation would still have the choice to continue.

What Does It Mean to Be a Guardian?

That is what being a guardian means to me.

A guardian does not ask:

“How can I make this mine?”

A guardian asks:

“How can I make sure this is still here when I am gone?”

There is a very different responsibility in that question.

If I were only trying to make soy sauce, there would be many easier ways.

But I want to make the kind of soy sauce that could not exist without this place, these barrels, these microorganisms and this accumulated knowledge.

Our Tsuru-bishio, for example, is aged for four years using the saishikomi method. The time is not something we can simply remove from the process and replace with technology.

Time is part of the ingredient.

The microorganisms are part of the ingredient.

The brewery itself is part of the ingredient.

And perhaps Shodoshima is part of it too.

The warm, relatively dry climate of the island and the winds around Kankakei Gorge create an environment particularly suited to microbial fermentation.

So when I protect the brewery, I am not protecting a museum.

I am protecting a relationship between wood, water, salt, grain, microorganisms, climate, people and time.

Preserving What Is Still Alive

We are not preserving the past for the sake of the past.

This distinction is important to me.

Tradition should not become something we simply put behind glass.

If a tradition cannot live, it becomes a memory.

What we are trying to preserve is not an old method because it is old.

We preserve it because there is something within it that still has value.

There is a flavour that comes from time.

There is knowledge that cannot be written completely in a manual.

There is a microbial environment that cannot simply be purchased.

And there is a connection between generations that becomes possible when we continue making something in the same spirit as the people who came before us.

The Yamaroku brewery calls this idea a “memory of taste”: preserving a tradition so that future generations can still experience what previous generations knew.

That may be the most important thing we are trying to protect.

Not soy sauce.

Memory.

What Remains After Us

One day, I will no longer be here.

The barrels will continue.

The brewery will continue, if we have done our work properly.

The microorganisms will continue their quiet work in the wood and walls.

Another person will walk between the barrels and listen to the moromi.

Another generation will taste the soy sauce.

And perhaps that is the greatest measure of whether we succeeded.

Not how much we produced.

Not how famous the brewery became.

Not even how many people knew the name Yamaroku.

But whether, many years from now, someone can still enter this brewery, place their hand on an old wooden barrel and understand that they are standing inside something that began long before them.

Something they did not create.

Something they do not own.

Something that, for a short time, was placed in their care.

That is what I believe it means to be a guardian.

To receive something from the past, care for it in the present, and leave enough of it alive for someone in the future.

Perhaps that is the real purpose of Yamaroku Shoyu.

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We make soy sauce.

But that is not all we are trying to preserve.

We are trying to make sure that the culture that taught us how to make it does not disappear with us.