2027

Across the 2025 and 2026 summits, in conversation with owners, toji and kurabito, we have asked from many angles what it is that sake as a culture, and as a tradition, should protect. Protecting the tradition, protecting the region, raising a successor, holding to one's own conviction: those doing the work carry all of it at once. Meanwhile the world we live in has seen ways of working multiply, through the internet and everything that followed it. That same widening of how production can be organised is what gives us the occasion to think about what has been and what comes next.

This theme looks at the social norms carried by sake as a traditional industry and as an instrument of culture, and asks how those norms widen or narrow the choices available to the people working inside them. People do not come to a place that is not worth working in. We intend to face that apparently obvious fact squarely.

Across the 2025 and 2026 summits we have worked through overseas markets from several directions: case studies from North America, transparency in export contracts, and the question of who gets to define sake's backbone. With the domestic market contracting, more and more producers are looking abroad. What has accumulated so far, though, is a count of measures rather than any account of what those measures produced. How many companies attended the trade fair, how many meetings were held: what is easy to count gets reported as the result, while whether any of it turned into continuing business, or into a presence that stayed, goes unshared. And the same remark keeps surfacing, that staff rotate every few years and nothing long-term carries over.

This theme takes up not individual effort but the structure that keeps producing the same outcome. Successes and failures are brought in as cases, what the state should carry is separated from what business should carry, and the discussion is taken as far as a proposal for where the budget and the time should go.

At the 2026 summit, a survey of 116 brewery owners and successors was used to establish the institutional facts around the sake production licence, and the discussion went on to how new licences could in principle be issued. The reality of business succession was taken up as well, with the people who had lived it. And there the discussion has stayed. One position holds that dormant existing licences should be put to use first; the other holds that fairness requires issuing new ones. Both have reason on their side. Neither has yet shown the grounds for saying that its route is what grows the market.

This theme does not put that to the vote again. Every position is asked to bring the evidence its proposal rests on: why this measure leads to a larger market, and on what grounds that can be claimed. Dormant licences, succession and new licences all go on the same table to be compared. The point is to get past hunches and personal conviction.