問題提起 (日本における酒造業の展開 : 近世から近代へ)

抄録

With its long history and tradition, sake has become the national drink: It has an inseparable relationship with the Japanese life and is a popular drink for us. This popularization is partly explartly explained by the fact that the rice, from which sake is brewed, is cultivated everywhere, so that sake is produced almost everywhere. But some famous brewing areas take pride of the highest quality and the largest quantity in the country. Sake brewing in Nada(Hyogo Prefecture) developed since the middle of the Tokugawa era, and became a synonym for the high-quality sake. At the end of the Tokugawa era, Chita(Aichi Prefecture) roso to produce the sake for the Edo market in competition with Nada. In the 1980's Chita was accepted as a substitute for Nada's on the Tokyo market. Despite its cheap prices, however, the Chita brewing industry began to decline gradually. Fushimi(Kyoto Prefecture) started to develop rapidly in the 1890's and shaped its fairly wellknown brewing area, comparable to Nada, by the 1910's. Although these are examples of a psontaneous growth, we can point out that the sake brewing industry was regulated and controlled by the Shogunate and then by the Meiji government. In the Tokugawa era, the Shogunate controlled the industry by means of the brewing license system to adjust rice prices to a certain standard, because rice was a principal source of the government revenue. In the Meiji era, the sake tax had an important place in the Meiji government's revenue, next to the land tax. We may conclude from all the papers in this issue that the sake brewing industry played an essntial part in the rapid development of the traditional industry and hence in the process of modernization of Japan.