(Kazuhiro Sakurai, holding a bottle of Dassai 23)
(Kazuhiro Sakurai, holding a bottle of Dassai 23)Successful companies rise to greatness through leadership. Without it, talent too readily loses focus. Company culture struggles to find identity. Work becomes mere motion, not a source of inspiration that fuels itself in a virtuous circle, leading to meaningful products and services.
Dassai is quite possibly the most enigmatically successful sake brand in the world at this particular moment, which should tell you much about leadership at the company behind it, Asahi Shuzô. While the company and its production are hardly massive, its volume has consistently grown an average of 30% per year across the last 15 years. It is easily one of the most prolific and visible sake producers in the industry today. Its popularity is soaring; its reputation, sterling. Sure, there have been bumps along the way. Some have attempted to smear the company. But the Dassai phenomenon is real. All this from a brand that literally did not exist until around 1990.
In Asahi Shuzô’s case, the leadership that sparked and continues to propel this success is the Sakurai family–more specifically, Hiroshi Sakurai and his son Kazuhiro. Until last year, Hiroshi was the president, and Kazuhiro was vice president. The torch has been passed in a remarkably seamless transition, and Hiroshi now goes by the title “director”, while Kazuhiro has taken over the formidable day-to-day operations as “president”. They are both quite actively involved in the business.
I first met Hiroshi in 2003 on a trip to Vancouver with a handful of sake brewers. The newly-created Dassai brand was not so old, but already making waves. Soon thereafter he asked me to create the company’s first English product marketing pamphlet.
“But to do that, you need to visit us here,” Hiroshi said. “You really need to know us and our kura (brewery) well before creating something like that.” And so I headed down to Yamaguchi Prefecture for a day, taking in as much about Dassai as I could. That included taking in plenty of Dassai itself.
After spending the day at the kura, we ended up enjoying dinner in the back room of a fugu (blowfish) wholesaler. Yamaguchi Prefecture is famous for its fugu, though it might be even more famous for Dassai these days. The evening was as low key as it gets: just Hiroshi, his wife and myself. That low-key vibe is consistent with Hiroshi’s personality, if not his sake as well. A thread of consistency runs though the culture of Dassai–through both the people making it and the product itself. It is unpretentious, approachable, and extremely likeable. It is refined, well-crafted, and balanced.
Asahi Shuzô has been around in its current manifestation since 1948. In the early 1990s, its original sake brand, Asahifuji, was languishing and bound to fade into oblivion along with other locally produced futsû-shu (non-premium sake) all across Japan. The larger brewers in the industry had long since won the battle for cheap sake, even in countryside markets.
(Hiroshi Sakurai)
Long imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit, Hiroshi tried a couple of offshoot ventures, including a local restaurant and a beer microbrewery, neither of which took off. He eventually saw that the only potential area of growth for his sake was outside of Yamaguchi Prefecture–in his mind, Tokyo and overseas markets. To sell in Tokyo he would first need to brew tasty premium sake. He would also need to develop new, direct routes of distribution, and that meant a lot of hand-selling at first. At least the path was clear.
Hiroshi also knew he had to streamline. He took over for a spell as toji while continuing on as president. He also led in sales. In fact, for several years, he was almost constantly on the road both domestically and internationally, calling on clients.
With his goals clear, a whole new brand seemed justified. He came up with “Dassai”, a name with plenty of significance behind it. It was, from the start, created with marketability in mind. It’s pithy, easy to say, and easy to remember. The name translates as “Otter Festival”, which is a reference to the ancient name for a nearby region where countless otters could once be seen frolicking in the local river. Otters will lay out on the shore the fish that they catch, as if they are showing them off for sale in a festival. This led to references in ancient local poems and stories to “otter festivals” from which Sakurai drew his inspiration.
Also, the famous haiku poet Shiki Masaoka (1867-1902) referred to himself as Dassai because of his propensity to scatter his reading material all over the floor of his room in much the same way those otters spread out their fish, so much so that there was no room to walk around. More importantly to Hiroshi, Masaoka was instrumental in creating a revolution in Japanese poetry during his time.
“I wanted to convey the sense that Dassai was at least revolutionary in some regards. We use traditional, hand-crafted brewing techniques, but at the same time, we employ some new methods and ways of thinking. The name conveys those nuances as well.”
When asked if the current scale of operations was part of his original grand plan, Hiroshi responds, “Not at all! I never, ever thought we would grow this big. In fact, I never had a clear objective in that context. We just kept trying new things everyday, tweaking as we went along, and basically winging it. And that got us to where we are today.”
Of course, few are privy to the challenges, efforts, and struggles that have taken place in the background. There have been more than a few, but therein lies part of Sakurai’s strength of character. He takes care of business behind the scenes, and displays only a mellow, positive demeanor to the public.
I met Kazuhiro Sakurai, the director’s son and the current president, in 2004, about a year after my first visit to the brewery. I was in Yamaguchi giving a presentation to the region’s brewers and he was in attendance. My first impression was that he was quiet and even more humble than his father. He struck a great balance between being light-hearted and reserved. During my last visit, he was finishing up college, after which he spent time working in a different industry to gain some peripheral experience. Once he returned to the company, he began gearing up for his eventual role as president. That day came eventually came.
Almost immediately, he began to travel domestically and overseas, sometimes for fairly extended periods of time for work. Over the next few years the active external work continued to shift from father to son, but surely the chairman remained both active and involved in the background, especially when Dassai began to make major inroads to the US market, in particular, New York. Kazuhiro was still new to the sake scene, and went about his work with a blend of deference and enthusiasm.
Kazuhiro’s latent charisma and leadership qualities soon came to the surface. He showed a remarkable grip of every fact, project and product. With all that must be happening in one day at the brewery–both daily grind activities and projects under development–keeping track of all the details just under the surface must be daunting. And like his father, he always exudes calm, control and a pleasant demeanor.
There is another quality that father and son seem to share: the ability to focus on the present. Whomever they are talking to gets their full attention. They are never distracted, or glancing over your shoulder to see if there is someone more important that needs to be coddled. Never rushed, never flustered. No glancing at watches or smartphones. Their daily challenges, both big and small, are intimidating no doubt and would stress out most of us. But it just doesn’t show. The present moment is everything.
This focus is consciously cultivated. When asked, father and son both gave a remarkably similar answer.
“Our main job is to make delicious sake. That means nothing if people do not enjoy the Dassai experience. It’s both fun and encouraging to meet and talk to Dassai-loving customers,” says Kazuhiro.
His father adds, “PR companies, advertising companies and distributors all have ideas about the market and what we should be doing. But I do not listen to any of them. Speaking directly with fans of our sake is far more important.”
I feel like this philosophy comes through in their sake. While their product line has expanded and includes some attention-getters, its core is still simple: three main products, all junmai daiginjô. They are differentiated most significantly by the seimai buai (milling rate of the rice): 50, 39 and 23. Dassai: One name. One grade. Three numbers. That’s it. That’s all you need.
In December of 2017, Asahi Shuzô made an announcement in both the US and Japanese media. It would be opening a US-based brewery in 2019. That would bring the current number of breweries in the US opened by Japanese companies to five, but the other four are some of the largest brewing companies in Japan. The brewery will be built in New York, in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America. The eventual capacity goal is 1.8 million liters. The sake will not be called Dassai, but will be mostly junmai daiginjô (note that class of sake is not currently legally defined in the US). The goal is to bring premium sake to the US market at a reasonable price.
The company also runs a high-profile retail shop as well as a Dassai Bar in the Ginza area of Tokyo. Back in September, it announced plans to open a retail outlet in Paris in conjunction with chef Joel Robuchon.
“Of course, it is important to be at least somewhat profitable in those ventures, but the main objective is to make the sake brand Dassai resonate across the entire globe,” explains Kazuhiro.
They remain committed to doing things their own way and sticking to their principles. On December 10th, the company took out a full-page advertisement in the national Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun that said, “A request: Please do not overpay for our sake.” The text then went on to explain that Asahi Shuzô wants people to enjoy their sake at a reasonable price, not artificially inflated prices. The article also displayed in large characters the suggested retail prices for their main three products, clearly suggesting that no one should pay more than that.
This is not likely to sit too well with retailers that were profiting from inflated Dassai pricing. It should also have a damping effect on unlicensed internet reselling of the product, which is illegal in any event. Either way, the move called for confidence and courage.
Company culture like this is top-down. It can only work if it starts with, and is cultivated by, the leadership. At Asahi Shuzô, that is the Sakurai family. They have nurtured a unique ethos that trickles down through the whole enterprise and ends up, to great effect, in Dassai sake.
