Sometimes life is hard.
Life gets you down, and you don’t want to get back up.
But the best thing to do, always, is to pick yourself up off the bed and take a nice walk outside
to the liquor store.
Nothing washes your problems away like booze.
And no one knew the power of booze better than Tatsu’uma Kiyo.
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Nishinomiya was an area that respected sake, or rice wine.
It was full of sake brewers, with famous brewmasters brewing their brews brewily.
In the Edo Period [1603 - 1868], the sake business boomed like IEDs of alcohol.
In this sake paradise lived the Tatsu’uma family, who ran a family-owned brewery.
And into this family was born Tatsu’uma Kiyo, in 1809.
When you think of a family-owned business, you think of a small mom-and-pop store.
For you zoomers, a mom-and-pop store is like a small Amazon that offers pick-up instead of delivery.
They no longer exist today, replaced by large chains that are frequented by shoppers who
post on Twitter telling you to shop at mom-and-pop stores.
But Kiyo’s family-owned business was not small.
Back then, businesses small or big were owned by families, passed down from generation to generation.
They had tailoring families and blacksmithing families and leatherworking families,
all kinds of RPG professions.
The Tatsu’uma house had been in the sake business for generations,
and their brewery was one of the bigger ones.
So Kiyo-chan grew up around alcohol.
Now women were not allowed inside a brewhouse, probably because of the idea that women’s
bodies were not pure.
But she did oversee the workers and washed the sake barrels herself.
By adult age, she already had a Masters in Sake Business, and a PhD in alcoholism.
In these merchant families, the male head of household was like the CEO,
and he passed it down to his son, while his daughter standing there like, “wtf.”
Women couldn’t be head of a house, by law.
But don’t worry, they got to marry strangers to benefit the family.
This didn’t mean women had no power though.
The man was the head, but his wife didn’t just stay in her room writing poetry and having
nightly tea sessions with the brewmaster.
She usually had important duties from hiring to training to managing room and board for workers
to a million different things.
Some women actually ran the business while her husband played the figurehead.
People weren’t dumb.
They didn’t let things like social norms and laws screw their businesses.
Like if a man had one useless twat of a son and one clever daughter,
making the twat the heir would’ve sent the family down a cliff.
But what could you do?
Only a man could be the head of a family,
but a twat shouldn’t be located anywhere near the head, unless you consented.
Well they got around this by giving the daughter a husband and making her new husband
the head of the household.
The husband wouldn’t have held much real power because he was an outsider
with no allies in the household.
The newly married daughter would have been the one in charge.
It was like adopting a husband.
In some places, women were even allowed to be the head of the household for a few years
while the family looked for a male successor.
In Kiyo’s case, her father was the head of the house, but he only had one child:
her, a girl.
So the family adopted a husband for her when she turned 21.
A nice birthday gift for her to play with.
Kiyo’s crotch was like a machine gun.
To make up for her dad’s soft seed, she rapid-fired out a bunch of kids.
Some sources say 12.
Gotta have workers crushing that rice, always thinking about the family, that Kiyo.
And she was about to introduce that efficiency of production into the family business.
Kiyo never became the head of the family.
After her husband died, that position went to her eldest son,
then her daughter-in-law temporarily, then her grandson.
But she was always the one calling the sake shots.
As a woman, there were things she couldn’t do though.
She couldn’t mess with the brewing process, that was a man’s job.
She couldn’t sit at the negotiation tables.
And she couldn’t be in the shop area selling stuff.
Kiyo relied on an expert brewmaster to handle the brewing process, but she also needed someone
who could go where she couldn’t, someone who could talk to other men.
Imagine getting yelled at by a woman. What a horrible thought.
“I need a deputy,” she said.
And she found one in a smart and hardworking boy of 13 who was hired to work in the kitchen.
She made him stick by her and trained him to be her right hand.
What was the boy’s name?
Who gives a crap. In a Kiyo power move, she renamed him.
She called him Tatsuenosuke, after her family name, to remind the boy who he belonged to.
Tatsuenosuke remained her right hand until she died.
There was a business strategy that people did back then that’s a little hard to do now,
called marriage.
Like how samurai houses used marriage to make alliances and team up to destroy enemies,
merchant houses did the same.
And it was just as vicious.
Kiyo used her children as pawns in marriage chess.
Like she married off daughters to other brewery families, and sent sons to be adoptive husbands.
Kiyo helped family members build branch houses.
A branch house was a family that branched off from the main house.
What was the benefit?
Sometimes a family might have a bunch of capable sons, but they could only choose one heir.
What happened to the other sons?
It would have been a waste to marry them off as adoptive husbands.
Instead, since her family was rich, Kiyo was like,
“Here’s some startup money, go start your own families and businesses.”
A branch house could be in the same line of business as the main house,
and they would help each other out.
Or a branch house could be in a totally different field, which meant they were a safety in case
the main industry fell on hard times.
A house with many branches had a lot of prestige.
Everyone wanted to do business with a huge family empire.
Oh and Kiyo once organized a coup of another merchant house.
One day, she adopted a husband for one of her daughters.
He was pretty cute.
Thing was, this husband was part of another brewery family.
Thing was was, this husband was the only child of this other family, the heir.
Kiyo sent the new couple to start a branch house.
Since he was heir to his old household, his old house eventually got absorbed into the new branch.
It was a coup by marriage, and Kiyo must have drawn some powerful sorcery from her ass
to pull it off.
Under Kiyo’s leadership, the Tatsu’uma brand, called Hakushika,
rose to the top in an industry run by men.
Hakushika shipped to nobles, party animals, and domestic abusers across the country.
But sake was a risky business.
A bacterial contamination could ruin a whole year’s worth of sake,
and fires were a constant threat.
That’s why big breweries expanded to other industries.
The Tatsu’uma house got into the money business.
They ran a currency exchange.
The nearby city of Osaka commonly used silver, and Edo liked to use gold.
The new exchange exchanged between gold and silver, giving the family some income and
a stash of gold and silver that protected them against price changes in gold and silver.
They also jumped into banking.
They lent money to other breweries and even to the new Meiji government.
Getting into moneylending was pretty common for large businesses.
Some women like to collect jewelry, Kiyo liked to collect land and property.
For generations, the Tatsu’uma family had donated money to the family temple.
The problem with donating is that you don’t make money from it.
Being a healthy b--ch, Kiyo stopped that BS and lent them money instead.
At some point, the temple couldn’t keep up the payments, and to get rid of the debt,
they gave Kiyo some of their properties instead.
This happened with a few other breweries, and she grabbed their properties too.
She then used these to start a real estate business.
Kiyo also got into the shipping business, like buying actual ships to carry her sake
and other products.
She became one of the earliest brewers to ship sake to Edo on a large scale.
When steamships became a thing, she saw the advantage of this new technology and bought
a fleet of steamships.
She dabbled in a million other things, too many to talk about.
Kiyo did do some questionable business practices.
When she didn’t have enough sake to meet demand, she bought sake from other breweries
and sold them under her brand.
Usually they tweaked the flavor so it tasted similar.
This practice was invented by the Tatsu’uma family.
It actually benefited smaller brewers because they didn’t have to worry about
packing, bottling, marketing, or selling to customers.
It helped them survive a risky business.
But customers probably wouldn’t like hearing about how their Hakushika sake was made by
a different company.
This still happens today all the time, though companies don’t really like to talk about it.
By 1894, Hakushika became the largest sake empire in Japan,
making 3 times more sake than the number 2 guy.
It’s still a huge liquor company today.
Tatsu’uma Kiyo was born in the Edo Period, and lived through the Meiji change in government.
She died in 1900 at the age of 92.
She lived a long life, so she probably didn’t drink much of her product.
Two years later, Tatsuenosuke her deputy, the dude who followed her from age 13, also died.
It was the end of an era.
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