Ito Gōshi, the brewery behind "Shikishima" (敷嶋), closed its doors in 2000 and was brought back to life by its ninth-generation owner, Yu Ito. His father, the eighth generation, made the decision to close while Ito was still in high school. He was underage at the time, had no real familiarity with sake, and went off to university without ever quite feeling the weight of what had happened. After graduating, he joined NTT Docomo.

The turning point came in 2014, at the funeral of his grandfather, the seventh generation. Late that night, standing in front of the coffin, he drank a bottle of unpasteurized "Shikishima" — brewed before the closure and kept in a refrigerator for fourteen years. That fourteen-year-old nama was astonishingly good, and with the shock came a single thought: it would be a waste, and a genuine shame, to let this sake disappear. That feeling became his decision to walk the thorny path of reviving the brewery.

The style Shikishima is chasing is what Ito calls "an elegant gorilla" — clean sweet umami, but big-boned, powerful and rich. Most of the range sits at 18% ABV. At a time when the industry is moving steadily towards lower alcohol, the deliberate choice to brew sake with this much drinking presence is genuinely interesting, and it makes you want to cheer him on. It happens to be a style we like ourselves, and we want to back what Ito is attempting.

He has not stopped at the brewing. He is also working on how to put the site — more than 1,800 tsubo, roughly 6,000 square metres — to use for the surrounding area. In 2024 he opened it as a complex housing a café, a shop and a restaurant, so that people from the town can use the grounds. Rather than reviving the kura simply as a place that makes sake, he is regenerating it as a place where people gather and new exchanges begin.