I recently made my first trip to the area of southern Kyoto historically known for its sake production, which likely dates back thousands years. Written on the cup above is “月桂冠” (Gekkeikan), the name of a sake-brewing company founded in 1639.

Gekkeikan sake is ubiquitous in Japan. Here you see its name on barrels outside a temple in the area...

It's my understanding that the (certainly-empty) barrels of sake represent a monetary donation from the brewery, to match what in olden times was an actual gift of sake. In either case, the brewery gets advertisement and good karma.

This particular temple is quite small, with a chunk of its area given to a courtyard with a couple of fenced-in features..

The courtyard's main attraction is this fire pit with two big, ugly signs:

What struck me about this scene was the huge sign in the foreground, which reads "This is not a place to throw garbage. It's a fire pit for ceremonial burning of ceder sticks.", referring to a Buddhist ceremony likely comparable to the Shinto ceremonies shown here and here. My first thought was that such a sign was silly because even a child could instinctively know that the fenced-off area surrounded by precisely-carved stone was not a place to throw your trash. Yet, here was the big sign, so I was left wondering what transpired to cause the owner to feel the need for such a sign. I suppose it's a sad reflection on the state of humanity, even worse than the no-tripods-in-your-possession temple. Sigh.

Anyway, we continued the short distance to an old Gekkeikan factory building now used as a museum...

They had water running into a basin, with a sign saying that it was from a deep well that provides water for the sake production. I should have tried the water. Instead, I took pictures of it.

Kyoto friend Alain, who had invited me, spent considerable time composing a photo of the basin from above...

Showing no shame, I totally copycatted him and made my own attempt at his shot. I've since seen his result and it's far superior to mine (because, er, he has a better camera? 😉), but FWIW here's mine:

Next to the museum were three huge barrels, the largest of which measuring about six feet across:

Long bamboo strips were woven around the barrel in what appeared to be rings to keep the wooden slats together. I wonder whether it's cosmetic, or whether it could actually hold the slats tightly enough to form a watertight seal(?) It seems improbable, but perhaps they're installed while in some kind of expanded state (e.g. after boiling?) and so constrict as they dry?

This is, of course, the answer to the other day's A Woven(ish) “What am I?” Quiz. I'd given the hint that the location name in the image metadata might lead one to an answer, but for the record even with that hint I myself would never have figured it out because I'd never seen the “bamboo binding” thing before.

Inside the small museum (which I'll cover in a separate post) you can see a lot of history about how sake was made in former days. It was nice to see this long-history view of Gekkeikan because in my experience it's always been the ubiquitous cheap sake in convenience stores and restaurants, which has given me the feeling that it's what someone stocks when they don't want to think about quality and just need to mark “sake” off the checklist.

Once you emerge from the display rooms, you're greeted with what was certainly my favorite sign for the day:

I love that Japanese has a word (kikizake) for “sake for tasting”.

This calls to mind “A Bunch Of Blurry Pictures of Folks Pouring Wine” and to a lesser extent “A Visit to Suntory’s Kyoto Beer Brewery”.

Sadly, the subject nor the setting weren't nearly as photogenic as at “Japan’s First Whisky: Suntory’s “Yamazaki” Distillery”.

Just like there's a huge diversity of beer taste (e.g. Guinness Stout compared to Budweiser) and wine (thick sweet red dessert wine compared to a dry white wine), sake tastes cover a very wide gamut, and expanding the range farther is that the taste of many sake changes completely depending on the temperature it's served. So, “research” along these lines could take considerable time, and normally I would not hesitate to do this for my blog readers, but alas, we had to move on.

The next place we visited had some bicycles parked out front...

... and upon entering it became clear why.... for some reason you're not allowed to ride your bicycle in!

Yet another silly sign that makes me wonder what bedlam would befall the place without it.

Actually, to be precise, the sign specifically says that one may not ride a bicycle in, which seems (to me) a bit unnatural unless they explicitly wanted to differentiate riding from not riding. It seems to imply that it's okay so long as you push it. I couldn't test the theory, though, because I didn't have a bicycle on me at the time.

This place had some actual brewing going on, and it smelled wonderful. Otherwise, there wasn't much to recommend a visit.

Two more signs from the walk home...

Certain local businesses in Japan advertise incessantly via leaflets shoved in mailboxes (we get several per day), and I can imagine that this homeowner got sick of people ignoring a “no leaflets” sign and littering their doorstep, so perhaps this is a compromise that reduces flying trash.

And finally in a covered mall, notice the biggest sign hanging above the teeming crowd...

If you need to be “reminded”, reminding won't help. The “heart” with the happy smoker reminds us to follow smoking regulations. The non-heart items remind us to not litter, to not walk through the crowd with a lit cigarette, to not ride a bicycle through the crowd, and to not leave your bicycle parked in the way.

And indeed it seems that reminding does not help because none of these seem to be followed.