Photo/Illutration Yoshinobu Sakauchi, right, receives a board from manga artist Kenshi Hirokane, who served as a special judge, in Tokyo on Jan. 23. The board says 50 bags of Sakauchi's Yamada Nishiki rice will be bought at a price of 25 million yen. (Hiroki Ito)

A farmer's crop of the premium rice variety is of such sublime quality that the brewer of the renowned sake brand Dassai has agreed to pay him about 25 times the market price for it.

Yoshinobu Sakauchi, 55, who lives in Otawara, Tochigi Prefecture, won the brewery Asahi Shuzo's contest to find the best Yamada Nishiki rice variety to use in Dassai, a “junmai daiginjo” (sake specially brewed with pure rice) brand.

Asahi Shuzo announced the selection on Jan. 23 at an awards ceremony at a Tokyo hotel.

“I’m grateful to receive such a great honor,” Sakauchi said. “It takes longer for Yamada Nishiki rice to be harvested than rice for human consumption and requires much care, but it’s worth it.”

Asahi Shuzo, which is based in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, will buy 50 bags of Sakauchi's rice for 25 million yen ($228,000), or 500,000 yen per bag.

The brewery received 45 entries from farmers of premium Yamada Nishiki rice harvested in 2019. 

Growers from Tochigi Prefecture in eastern Japan to Fukuoka Prefecture in the west competed in the contest, which Asahi Shuzo said it held to revitalize rice farming as well as to ensure a high quality of its main ingredient.

Entries containing cracked rice were not accepted. Contest rules also required rice to have a puffy shape and a “shinpaku,” the white core of a grain, in its center.

The brewery conducted several screenings by machine analysis and visual inspections, whittling down entries to nine in the preliminary screening.

To decide the top three, the brewery obtained 50 bags of rice each from the nine entries for a final screening.

Sakauchi originally grew Koshihikari, another popular rice variety for human consumption, but four years ago, he started producing Yamada Nishiki rice, which sells for roughly 30 percent higher.

The paddy field where he grows Yamada Nishiki rice now spans about five hectares, approximately 80 percent of his entire rice-field acreage.

But heavy rain brought by Typhoon No. 19, which made landfall in eastern Japan last October, resulted in poor drainage of water from his paddy, significantly denting his harvest from the year before.

Hidetaka Nishida, a manager in charge of production at Asahi Shuzo, said, “We want to deliver sake that impresses our fans."

The sake brewer, he said,  is “under pressure (from people who are looking forward to) what sort of Dassai we will make (from the top-quality Yamada Nishiki).” 

The brewery said it will continue to hold the contest in the future.

(This article was written by Hiroki Ito and Kazufumi Kaneko.)