Uncertainty is difficult to live with. Think about these last two years if you need any reminders. The pandemic has created a feeling of pervasive uncertainty.
When COVID first emerged, we had so many questions. How does it spread? How contagious is it? How deadly is it? Uncertainty causes fear, which causes poor decision making and stress at the very least. We at Sake Today were exposed to the fear early. Some of you may remember (though memory has been rendered hazy by these stressful two years) the cruise ship with infected passengers in early 2020 that docked in Yokohama. It was just a few blocks from our office, and people called it–half in jest, half in fear–the zombie cruise ship. It really was like something out of a dystopian story. It made headlines around the world as a symbol of impending doom not long after we got patchy reports of the outbreak in China.
I remember walking through the underground pedestrian tunnels to the station near our office at that time, coughing lightly–and only once–into my fist. The woman several feet in front of me jerked her head around to look at me and then took off running. Too many sci-fi shows or a reasonable response at the time?
Uncertainty shifted after that. What therapeutics are being developed? When will there be a vaccine? What will governments do to control the spread? Japan and other countries shut down their borders. Japan’s are still effectively closed as I write. Schools closed, thus beginning an age of “remote learning”. Stay-at-home orders became the norm. What would businesses do? In Japan, we began to face the first of several rolling “emergency declarations” whereby businesses closed or had limited hours. Many were ‘asked’ not to sell alcohol, a devastating development for small breweries. How long would that last? Would businesses have to alter their business models? The pandemic has had a crippling effect on the logistics industry, too; ask any importer or exporter trying to get sake into overseas markets.
We’re two years in, and we have many more answers now (not to mention vaccines and better therapeutics), but questions linger. Omicron is raging everywhere. Will there be new, worse variants? When will Japan’s borders open back up? More lockdowns? The uncertainty cycles like lurid images in a kaleidoscope.
Running a magazine that’s available in print makes me ponder the curious pleasures of analog life. I often think about life before the internet, especially in the context of my students at the university where I teach part-time. They can’t relate to pre-internet life. Email arrived when I was in college, though we didn’t use it much. The Internet wasn’t great back then. You still got much of your information through magazines and newspapers. Reading material took time to arrive, time to absorb. I realized that we didn’t need–or, at least, we didn’t receive–immediate answers. We lived everyday with a degree of uncertainty that we took for granted. Sure, we lacked the convenience that the internet offered, but the trade-off, I feel, is that we were floating in a kind of uncertainty that forced us not to constantly consider all kinds of information, but to focus on what was immediately surrounding us instead.
I began to meditate more on uncertainty in the context of my personal and professional interests. The example of sake brewers provided for interesting thought. What would the weather be like any given year? What would rice harvests thus yield? What would tweaks in the brewing process, necessitated by the idiosyncrasies of harvest, ultimately produce? How would consumers respond? Brewers have accumulated exquisite knowledge over the centuries, especially with the help of scientists, but still… brewing sake means charging into uncertainty. It’s a necessary ingredient of the thrill of brewing. Drinking it, you participate in that thrill.
I’m by no means suggesting that we should find any thrill in COVID disruptions–not unless you are an anarchist at heart. But perhaps we can reset our perspectives when it comes to uncertainty. I almost feel we need to, for our own mental health. There are kinds we can appreciate or embrace. We can perhaps forget our need to know everything immediately, and focus instead on what may be directly in front of us. Maybe that’s friends and family. Maybe it’s a bottle of sake sitting between us, poured into some wonderfully tactile ceramics with gorgeous color. Maybe it’s sipping the time away in this company without knowing or caring what the next hours bring.
