Did Korean and Japanese Drinking Cultures Meet Over a Thousand Years Ago?

The other day, I came across a fascinating piece of history while reading.

Did you know that the Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving historical chronicle, records a brewer connected to the Korean Peninsula—and even preserves a poem composed by an emperor delighted by his drink?

The brewer was named Inbeon (인번, 仁番) and was also known as Susukori (ススコリ).

According to the Kojiki, Susukori brewed a drink and presented it to Emperor Ōjin. The emperor was so pleased after drinking it that he composed a poem:

“The drink brewed by Susukori has made me drunk; the drink that frees me from care and fills me with laughter has made me drunk.”

What kind of drink could have made the emperor so happy? We can no longer know what it tasted like, but this delightful story has survived through the Kojiki for more than a thousand years.

Completed in 712 CE, the Kojiki is Japan's oldest surviving historical chronicle. It describes Susukori as a torai person—someone who crossed the sea to Japan. In Japanese historical records of the period, the term was often used for people who migrated from the Korean Peninsula or mainland China.

The Kojiki does not explicitly say where Susukori came from. Because his story appears among a series of accounts from Emperor Ōjin's reign involving Baekje and other arrivals from overseas, however, later generations have often associated him with the brewing culture of the Korean Peninsula, particularly Baekje.

Interestingly, the same passage that mentions Susukori also introduces another group of arrivals as “the ancestors of the Hata no Miyatsuko” (秦造之祖), the forebears of Japan's Hata clan.

The Hata clan was active around Kyoto and worked in agriculture, water management, textiles, and other industries. Brewing is also considered one of the skills for which the clan was known.

In 701 CE, a clan member named Hata no Imiki Tori (秦忌寸都理) established a sanctuary at the foot of Mount Matsuo. It became the origin of today's Matsunoo Taisha (松尾大社). Matsuo Ōkami, the deity worshipped there, later came to be revered as an ancestral deity of brewing. Even today, Matsunoo Taisha is an important shrine where Japanese brewers pray for success. Visitors can also see sake barrels offered by breweries from across Japan.

These stories come from a book I have been reading recently, Young Werther's Drinking Sorrows—an editorial rendering of the Korean title 젊은 베르테르의 술품—by Myung Wook (명욱).

I found this history fascinating. We tend to think of Japanese sake and Korean sool as two separate drinking cultures, yet people and technologies were already moving between the Korean Peninsula and Japan more than a thousand years ago.

It reminded me that what makes a drink interesting is not only its ingredients, flavors, and production methods, but also the history and culture behind it.