A Life-Changing Experience, from Books to Spirits

—When I first heard that Hiroshi Eguchi, someone I had always pictured as the owner of a uniquely distinctive bookstore, had set up a distillery and started making spirits, I was surprised too, but mitosaya really is a mysterious place.

It really is, isn't it? How on earth did I end up like this? (laughs)

—(laughs). I understand that it has been eight years since you created mitosaya. Did your work as a distiller already before that?

I had gone to Germany to study distilling, and briefly engaged in introduction and sales of German products in Japan, but I was not actually making anything myself at that time. I only started making things myself after I came back to Japan.

—You moved here not long after returning to Japan, right? What was it that drew you so deeply to distillation?

Of course I like all kinds of alcohol myself, and both distilled and fermented drinks have their own appeal. But I felt that distilled spirits were extraordinary as an experience. The impression the distilled spirits make when tasted is extremely powerful. All aromas emerge at once, practically conjuring the complete scenery. With just a sip, all these different elements are sensed. In my opinion, this is the uniqueness of distilled spirits. When tasting these, I wanted to know what type of people made the spirits, and in what kind of place. In fact, I actually went there and became part of the team. I had never had an experience like that before, and I thought anyone capable of making such a thing was incredible. And, if I could make something like that myself, there could be nothing more interesting.

—It could not have been easy to bring a successful career in bookselling to a close and take on something entirely new.

Well, it is something I started myself. So, no one can tell me I have to either quit or continue.

—Well... that makes sense... Did you feel that you had taken your work at Utrecht as far as it could go?

I did not at all feel that I had done everything I wanted to. But bookselling, especially this kind of small bookstore we were running, is very personal. You stock the books you think are good, and if you don't, they simply don't sell. It was a kind of peculiar bookstore, one with nothing like commercial titles or bestsellers.

—A place where sharply defined perspective and strongly unique, individual taste were welcomed.

Exactly. When someone asked, "Why do you carry this book?", it had to be something you could give a reason for, or it would not sell at all. Also, we desired nothing but to sell such type of books. When I was running Utrecht, at first I carried the books that I personally liked, but in later years, I was no longer the only one choosing them. The staff would gather once a week and choose them together while talking things over. In that sense, I came to feel that books could be selected without me, and that could also be alright.

—You mean it was not necessarily something you had to keep doing yourself.

That is right. And also, if you ask whether a bookseller's job is only to select books and sell them, that is far from it. There was editorial work, too, like writing and creating books. Also, I was given the chance to work with various companies to introduce their products and develop their campaigns. I did all of that and considered it as a part of bookseller's work. I felt there was something very similar between finding an interesting book and introducing it, and finding what is interesting about a company and turning that into a catalog or an event.

—Hearing you talk about it that way, I am starting to feel that there is a shared sensibility running through it all.

On the other hand, if what matters, is being able to convey the things I find compelling, then it does not necessarily have to be through books. So what is it, then? And when I reached that point, I realized there was something that could express the natural world in a condensed form. And, if it was also something I could make myself, then what could be more bookseller-like than that? So rather than feeling that I changed from bookselling to making spirits, I think that everything I'm doing now lies on an extension of what I was doing before.

—I see. In fact, after seeing the distillery and the grounds at mitosaya today, I kept thinking that this is probably not what it would look like if it had been created by someone who had spent their whole life working only with alcohol.

The person who taught me distilling, Christoph Keller, who ran a distillery in southern Germany called Stählemühle until 2018, originally worked in book publishing too. He had been an art-book publisher in Frankfurt, and then he created a place of his own in the German countryside, in Eigeltingen. When he began making spirits there, this was the kind of thing that emerged. Both the place he created and the things he made were, in the end, things only he, as a publisher, could have made. A strongly designed environment with its own worldview and tightly controlled spirits-making seemed like beautiful packaging. These all came together as his mode of expression, and I thought, well, I see. Maybe I am not capable of something on that level, but part of me still feels that if I keep trying, I might at least be able to get a little closer to that path.

—Even if there is a precedent, distilling seems so deeply rooted in nature that differences in place and environment lead to something quite different each time.

Yes. There is the power of place, and there are encounters with people, things that are beyond my own control, so I try to take a fairly open and generous view of that. Today, for example, we are holding a flea market in the greenhouse, but if I were rigidly attached to the idea that something has to be done in one particular way, I don't think something like this would happen. I suppose I take a step back and look at it as, so this is the kind of thing that can happen in a place like this. If there is someone who says, "I want to do this kind of event here!", then perhaps this is simply the kind of place where that belongs, and my response is, all right, let's do it.

—So you do not resist positive energy.

It is actually very difficult to keep insisting, "This is what I want to be." In the end, even if we talk about being true to ourselves, we are so deeply shaped by the people and things around us, and most of what we call individuality is made from that, is it not? So rather than saying anything grand, when the choice is between A and B, I think that if I simply make the small decision of, maybe this way, then somehow the overall direction gradually becomes the one I had hoped for. You saw the bean sprouts at the distillery earlier, right?

—Yes. The ones you said you were fermenting experimentally, right?

Yes. Those were adzuki beans, but in fact we also have mung beans and soybeans, and then Kazuha Mikogami, our head distiller, and I talk about which one of them might be best. And as we do that, I hope it gradually becomes a way of making spirits that are representative of mitosaya.

A Team That Works by Bringing Out Each Person's Strengths

—The way your staff work also seemed completely different from a setup where each person is simply told, "This is your job for today."

That is true. Everyone has their own strengths, and what you see now is the result of various combinations of what they want to do and what I want them to do. That said, I still don't want to tell people, Do this and that, and in the end it works better because they take ownership of what they are doing. But when you work that way, there will always be things that slip through the cracks, like this has not been done or that has not been done, so somehow we keep things running by covering for one another.

—That is such a healthy way for a team to function.

There is one woman who comes in two or three times a week to work part-time, and she is incredibly responsible too, always saying things like, "Eguchi-san! This product is not selling! Don't you think the price might be a little too high?" or, "Don't you think we should be including a bit more of this or that in our social media updates?" (laughs) She is in charge of the shop and sees what is happening on the ground, so I am really grateful for that.

—She sounds passionate (laughs). It would be ideal if each person could make the most of their individuality and do work that no one else could simply replace.

It really would. Kaneko-san, for example, who was doing the bottling earlier, is incredibly meticulous in her work. That said, she is a little slow (laughs). She is particular about matching the color of the sealing wax to the design of the bottle, and she will spend half a day trying one thing and then another, thinking about how it might be better. That is when I realize that is where her aptitude lies.

—When I spoke with her earlier, Kaneko-san said, "We use crayons that Eguchi's children no longer use to create the color of the sealing wax," and I thought that was so lovely.

Yes. My children are now in their first year of high school and first year of junior high school, and so they don't really use crayons anymore, and we have them use those for developing the colors.

—When you mentioned, over in one corner of the distillery, that you were experimenting to see whether coffee grounds left after drip brewing could be fermented and turned into alcohol, I had the same thought again: do you have a strong instinct not to let things go to waste?

I think that is true in the world at large too, but even the name mitosaya (fruit and pod) was chosen with the idea that while we of course use the fruit, we should try just as hard to make use of the parts people might call the pod. So before throwing something away, we stop and think. Oh wait, maybe we could make some money off of these? (laughs)

—That suddenly got very down-to-earth (laughs). But how did you come to develop the kind of organizational view you have now?

I wonder. I have never really belonged to organizations very much, and although I was at a company for three or four years after graduating from university, I still never quite managed to fit in. After that, I drifted along, working alone at times, with a few others at times, partly belonging and partly not, but with the kind of work freelancers do, the moment you decide you hate it, you really cannot keep going. So for me, the two major negative factors are thinking I no longer want to do this, and feeling of boredom. No matter how good the pay is, if you hate something, you hate it, and once you are bored, nothing feels fresh anymore. All I really think about is how to avoid those two things.

—Even if you try to look away, once you become aware of it, it is hard to ignore.

Those feelings just rise up on their own, and they are not something you can suppress just because you want to. There is no miracle cure except to create conditions in advance that keep things from turning out that way, and that is why I work the way I do in making things, and why I build an organization the way I do. I think the same is probably true for the people who work here too. We are all human, after all.

—When I look into all kinds of workplaces where things are made, I often sense how difficult it is to hold on to that initial drive and sense of purpose in a situation where you continue doing the same thing every day, on and on into the future.

I'm sure there are people who genuinely find joy and fulfillment in pursuing one thing to the utmost and improving it little by little. But I just don't think I have that kind of discipline in me.

—As the plants you grow change, the spirits you make from them change too. What were the very first spirits made as mitosaya like?

There were five kinds: mandarin orange, fig, lemon, various herbs, and wormwood, I think. I forgot the other one (laughs).

—(laughs).

It was like that from the very beginning. Rather than saying, "Let's make this!", it was more a matter of seeing what could be made from what was there, and this is what has emerged. And since we generally keep making the same things for about a year at a time, we are now in our seventh season, and by this point I feel like the overall shape of things has become clearer, and that we are gradually taking small steps forward.

—Were those first five spirits made soon after this facility was up and running?

Yes. But in fact, it took about two years from the time we moved here before we were able to start making spirits. During that time, we renovated the building, went through all kinds of exchanges in order to obtain the license to make alcohol, and of course built connections with producers and growers of botanicals.

The Land Tells What Needs to Be Done

—Starting something new really does take a great deal of work. But to begin with, was there some kind of twist of fate in how you came across this place?

None at all. I found this place searching online (laughs). It would have been nice if there had been a slightly more fateful encounter, or a better story behind it.

—That is surprising. I cannot even imagine what you would have typed in to find a place like this, and in the first place, most people would never think to search for it (laughs).

Exactly. At first, I was looking at all sorts of closed schools. There are closed elementary schools all over Japan, you know.

—Was that because the sites are so large?

Yes, exactly. There is a building, a schoolyard, and if there were a decent natural environment around it and some farmers nearby, I thought maybe I could have a field of my own too, but in the end the scale was just too large. A gymnasium, a three-story reinforced-concrete school building, I would never be able to make full use of it all, and the renovation costs would be enormous, so I started scaling down and looking instead for closed kindergartens and nursery schools. And that is when I found a former herb garden. When I changed the search from closed schools to closed gardens, it showed up. It really was pure chance.

—I don't think I have ever heard the phrase former herb garden before (laughs). But I really feel that the character of mitosaya as it is today is inseparable from this place.

That is absolutely true. In that sense, the place itself decides almost everything we do. When I first came here, I loved it at first sight and said, "This is the one!" But my wife, Yufuko, was more like, "Really?" At the time, there was another property we were weighing against it, in Miyota, near Karuizawa, and it was like a single house deep in the woods. It was naturally very appealing, and because it was a place with nothing there, there was a kind of pleasure in opening it up from scratch, so I think Yufuko preferred that one. But for me, it had to be this place.

—What made you feel that way?

Buildings can always be built from scratch, but things like this in nature are something that take a long time to grow, so I felt it was truly wonderful that we could have something like that in our hands.

—Even if you say it has been eight years since you founded the business, that is still a short span of time when you think in terms of how plants grow.

That is exactly right. The Japanese plum and apricot trees we planted after opening have only just started to bear fruit now. It really does take an enormous amount of time. But that is precisely why it is good. There is simply no growing tired of that kind of natural cycle.

—Earlier, you mentioned that you had newly planted indigo flowers in one corner of the field. Are those also used as ingredients for your spirits?

No, that actually came from a trip I made to Ishigaki Island recently, where I met people growing indigo flowers and henna and heard that they were using them for things like dyeing hair. When you think of indigo, you tend to think only of indigo dyeing for fabric, but I realized it can also be used in ways that act on the body, and that made me want to try growing it myself.

—It was striking to see you tending the indigo flowers in blue jeans.

Whether I am working or off duty, the way I dress doesn't really change. I like wearing clothes and thinking about what to wear, but I'm not the kind of person who owns a huge number of clothes, so I tend to look at what I already have and think, "If I wear it this way, it feels more like workwear." Or, "If I wear it that way, maybe it looks a bit more dressed up," things like that. They are going to get dirty anyway, but when I choose, I find myself leaning toward things that are durable rather than delicate, and that feel good against the skin, so I inevitably end up gravitating toward natural materials. These MOMOTARO JEANS look like they will last a long time.

—I see. When you grow new plants like this, does it generally go well?

No, not really. We are always going through cycles of things going well and things not going well, but I think all of that is part of the work itself.

—I imagine many people today, shaped by a more rational mindset, are uncomfortable with failure and setbacks, but for you, failure seems to be part of the process.

That is fine. After all, if what you want is blueberries, you can just buy them. That's not what we are doing. We try growing blueberries, and then the muntjac come and eat them. So then we build a fence, and little by little they start to grow well, and that is where the joy is. So I think this is just fine.

—As someone writing an article, of course I would be delighted if a great many people took interest, but after actually seeing the stock in mitosaya's cellar, I also found myself feeling that it would be almost wrong if demand were to exceed what you can make.

Well, if that could happen, I certainly would not mind it (laughs). But as you saw, the scale is what it is, the tanks are small, and even the still is only that size, so there is truly only so much we can do. And when that is the case, even when it comes to sourcing ingredients, we are not inclined to work with things that are sold everywhere. We can only really do it this way: this producer we know personally is making something interesting, so we ask if they will share some with us, and then we make spirits from that. If that is enough to keep things going, then I think that is ideal.

—mitosaya's spirits are distinctive not only in their aroma and flavor, but also in the design of their labels. Was that something you had in mind from the very first five releases?

Yes. I had a very strong sense that mitosaya was the label, and that each individual product was a title within it. That is something I learned from books too, but in terms of the coherence of a series, I have always loved bunko (pocketbook sized paperbacks) and paperbacks. If it is Iwanami Bunko, for instance, you can tell what it is just from the spine, and if it is Iwanami, you expect something somewhat austere but deeply worth reading, whereas if it is Chikuma Bunko, you imagine something with a more cultural flavor, something that will be read for a long time. I have always felt that one of the strengths of books, especially of formats with a fixed form like paperbacks, is that the character of the publisher takes visible shape in them. When I started making spirits, I wanted to carry that over as well. There is this label called mitosaya. Within it all sorts of things may appear. But at a glance you still know it is mitosaya, and if it is mitosaya, then you know it is a spirit through which you can experience that kind of aromatic appeal. I hope this can be communicated.

—People do judge a bottle by its label, in every field.

From the beginning, I had a feeling we would probably end up making rather unusual spirits (laughs), so I hoped it might become something where people would think, If it is something made by mitosaya, maybe I will give it a try even if it is a little unusual. Books and spirits are very similar in that way: until you read one, until you drink one, you do not know what is inside, but once you do, you understand what is interesting about it. But there are so many things in the world now. I spend a great deal of time thinking about how to get people to select it and drink it. I still do not know whether I am doing that well even now.

—So the labels were made to have an affinity with art, as a way of making that individuality recognizable.

Spirits stay with you for a long time after you buy them. You keep them around until you finish drinking them, so I felt that appearance too was an important element of a spirit. With books, there is the belly band that helps people choose, right? With copies like "Soon to be a film!" And then once someone buys the book and takes the band off, the cover should still be something they want to keep around. I think about things like that quite a lot.

—Even lined up among many other spirits, they still catch the eye and make you curious.

That said, our spirits really do terribly when they are placed in liquor shops (wry laugh). There is just too much information in a liquor shop, and we get overwhelmed. Ours are small, and what we are trying to say is also not immediately legible, so they simply do not sell at all (laughs).

—(laughs).

Even so, because I believed we could present them in places where we wanted to express in places where we wanted to communicate something. I did not think too much about liquor shops, and instead wanted the packaging to be something that felt right to us when people brought it home and set it down.

—Does the package design take its inspiration from the flavor or the ingredients?

That is the intention, more or less, but in the end the actual drawing is done by the artist we assign, so every time it turns out completely different from what I had imagined (laughs). We often work with one person for a full year, and this year, for example, it is Masanao Hirayama aka HIMAA. We tell him things like, right now we are making a fig spirit, and after that there will be three kinds of mint. And if we ask an illustrator to do the job, I think they might be more inclined to pick up on that intention and do something like, here "I added some flowers," or "I drew an apple," etc. Among those we've asked for the design up to now have been an architect, a painter, a musician, an artist, and now HIMAA. But none of them have given us what we have imagined.

Top: The forest surrounding mitosaya. The cedar trees rise straight and tall.

Bottom: The artwork on the lined-up bottles is all by Masanao Hirayama. The unexpected style of this popular artist is both beautiful and delightfully playful.

—It sounds super fascinating to hear about, but if you were the one involved, I imagine it would make you nervous (laughs).

They all seem to have the attitude of, "I'll listen, at least." So I suppose they do think about it, ...? Or do they? (laughs) Still, there is also a part of me that thinks that is all right.

—The bottles on this shelf, too, are also extremely wonderful pieces of art.

Those are pieces created by a Canadian, Jason Logan. I like them very much too. He has a book called "MAKE INK", and his activities include making ink from natural materials. He doesn't even call himself an artist, but an inkmaker. The colors used for these label designs, too, were all made from natural materials.

—The shades are beautiful, and it is also fun to imagine what the taste might be.

Working with Jason was probably the most intense collaboration of all: I would tell him, "We're making a spirit from grapes," and he would come back with a drawing done in ink made from apples. It was a very conceptual way of execution. I remember thinking, Yes, exactly—this is it, but lately things have been drifting farther and farther apart (laughs).

—At this point, I would like to think you are enjoying even that (laughs). In terms of the unexpectedness of the execution, whose work has stayed with you most?

It would have to be HIMAA, I think. It's an abstract series, but when people think of him, they probably imagine those monochrome, slightly playful characters of his, so some may feel this style is unlike him. But I like it very much. Kenichi Takanaka, who also painted the mitosaya sign, did the series for the spirits we made for a pop-up at Noma, the Danish restaurant, and I asked him to paint something inspired by the Japanese landscape. The one next to it is a series I asked the musician Sam Gendel to do... but there are simply so many kinds that if I start explaining them one by one, it quickly becomes way too much information.

The Pleasure of Making Things Yourself

—It's wonderful to be able to encounter this kind of art through something as familiar as food and drink. Even back when you were running a bookstore, did you already have a desire to make things yourself?

Not at all at first. There were so many interesting books, so many books I had never seen before, and choosing them was simply fun. But once I actually started running a bookstore, it made me realize all over again just how many really good bookstores there are. There were carefully curated large shops, and there were also focused specialty shops like Cow Books. Among them, I was running a secondhand bookstore where eighty or ninety percent of what we carried were used books.

—Is that right.

So if I was going to run a secondhand bookstore, I thought I would better join the antiquarian booksellers' association. There is an association hall in Jimbocho where auctions are held every day, and I thought that if I went there, I would be able to buy the books I liked. But the wholesale prices were so high that I could not buy anything at all. The long-established shops are strong, after all, and if it is specialized books, the shops that specialize in them have completely different customers and completely different resources. They also have the advantage of already knowing, this customer will buy this. There was simply no way I could compete with prices set from a vague expectation like, "If I buy this, maybe it will sell."

—So the secondhand book trade is a tough world too.

From their point of view, I am sure it was more like, don't you dare underestimate us, but I didn't know any of that, so all I could think was like, what an unforgiving world this is... (laughs). So when secondhand books were not enough, and selection alone was not enough either, I felt the only thing left was to create something that did not yet exist in the world, and as a desperate measure, I turned to publishing. Once I started that kind of bookstore, all sorts of people began coming and going, and then I started making things that could only be sold there, things like small artist books and zines. And when I did that, it became a kind of individuality that allowed the bookstore to stand on its own, but little by little, I found myself enjoying making things more and more.

—And TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR, which is still held every year now, was also something you started?

That's right. More and more people started bringing books to us, and I realized just how many people there were saying things like, "I want you to sell the book I made," or, "I want to make a book like this together." As we also began taking part in art book fairs overseas and bringing books there, it started to feel such a waste that there were so many interesting people in the world, and yet our own bookstore was so small, with room for only shelves and tables and no real space to show them. So I decided to create a place where the people making the books could sell them themselves, and that was how TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR began.

—It's now held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, is it not? Where was the first venue?

The first one was at the now-closed VACANT in Harajuku. And then there was a place called EYE OF GYRE, the gallery space at GYRE in Omotesando, so it was held across those two venues. I forget whether there were forty or fifty exhibitors, but we started out on that sort of modest scale, and then an incredible number of people showed up. And having it split across those two venues had its ups and downs, because people were flowing back and forth and it became chaotic. The police even got called, so it turned into quite a commotion.

—That is not exactly the kind of surprise you would be happy about (laughs).

So from the second year onward we changed venues. At first, we held it at 3331 (Arts Chiyoda) in Kanda, which was a former school turned into an art center, but after several years that too became too small. After that we moved to Kyoto University of the Arts in Gaienmae, but got kicked out of there too.

—What? You actually got kicked out?

Well, I grilled some saury fish inside the venue, and apparently the smoke and oil from the fish ended up causing damage to the place. So at the same time we were kicked out, I was also removed as director (laughs). Later, I think it was held at Warehouse TERRADA in Tennozu. And then, eventually, moved to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, where it is now.

—Why on earth were you grilling saury fish there in the first place...?

A friend of mine comes from Choshi, where his family were saury fishermen, and he said, "I want people to know how delicious the fish is," so "I want to make a saury zine and sell grilled fish along there!" And I thought, yes, we should definitely do that, so we did it together.

—It sounds delicious, but the impact of grilling saury fish must have been something else.

Oh, it was incredible (laughs). And that was why we got kicked out.

—(laughs). Your career really is unusual and fascinating when you look back over it. Coming back to the present, could you also tell me about what mitosaya is doing now and where you see it going next?

What I am focused on right now is creating a drugstore. We are going to try using one of the two small pavilions that were already on the property. What we do is create forms of expression using plants, so it does not necessarily have to become alcohol. I would like us to make things in which plants can have an effect on people in some way. That could be a scent, or it could be a visually beautiful bouquet of flowers. It could be alcohol, or it could be medicine.

—As one of the possibilities plants hold.

I had wanted to do it for a long time, but I did not really have enough knowledge. Once you start dealing with things as medicine, issues of licensing and qualifications come into it, so it was not easy to take the first step. But then a staff member with expertise in pharmacy joined us. And when I told her I wanted to try creating a drugstore, she said, let's do it.

—So once again, it comes down to having the right person in the right place.

I think it is the same for anyone: I suppose everyone has something they like, so I hope this can become a place where that can be put to good use. It is all unfamiliar, all things we have never done before, but it is interesting to be doing it. I really do think that one of our important themes is how to keep doing small, interesting things for a long time.

PROFILE

Hiroshi Eguchi

Born in 1972 in Nagano Prefecture. After graduating from university, Eguchi worked for a mail-order company, but left after a few years and opened the bookshop Utrecht in 2002, hoping to make a living from the books he loved. Later, in 2009, he was involved in launching and running the TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR, and, as mentioned in this article, eventually left that world to pursue a path as a distiller. In 2017, Eguchi opened mitosaya Botanical Distillery in Otaki, in southern Chiba Prefecture, and in 2023, he opened the bottling facility CAN-PANY in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa. He now lives close to nature with his wife, their two children, a rescue dog named Mugi, two cats, and a flock of chickens.

@3tosaya