Kuchikamizake: did the Japanese sake chewed by Japanese virgins exist? And what did it taste like?

Today we will talk about kuchikamizake, the first Japanese fermented rice drink. But we are not talking about sake (or it would be better to say nihonshu since Japanese law means all alcohol in general by sake), but about the first porridge of rice chewed and then left to ferment.

But not from the saliva of ordinary people, but of Shinto priestesses, Japanese virgins of great beauty. Everything in the norm is a classic Japanese erotic dream, and we have seen worse, such as vending machines in schoolgirls pantries, busty disguises, and various Sado-maso rituals.

Japan’s beauty is also made up of this strange and odd mix of the holy, the secular, and morbid carnality.

And then it’s the minimum: if it has to be chewed, spat out, and then fermented, it is better that this bolus of soggy and moist rice be chewed by a beautiful virgin than by an old samurai without dentures.

Fetishes and aesthetics aside, each person’s saliva is different and therefore gives different tastes to the fermented product, for which the saliva of women in their prime is preferred, to whom more pleasant flavors are attributed, even if this seems to be a myth, plausible as a custom, but scientifically irrelevant.

How Kuchikamizake was produced

Kuchikamizake is a word made up of three words that form the perfect triad of low alcohol perversion.

Kuchi is the mouth, kami is chewed, and zake means sake. The rice was washed and then soaked in water to be softened in practice.

The procacious mouths of the virgins chewed it when it had turned milky and soggy, which, thanks to the salivary enzymes, triggered digestion or the breakdown of starch.

This does not mean that it is a good wine; it will tend to become vinegar after a certain point, but the process will start even without yeast or a starter.

To produce kuchikamizake sake, the question is not that simple. If you try to put rice in water, you can wait for days, but it will never ferment by itself.

And this happens because starch is not fermentable.

As barley is not, it needs malting.  It must be broken down into fermentable sugars such as sucrose and fructose.

But to break down sugars, you need enzymes, such as those responsible for the first digestion we do every time we eat, those of the saliva, thanks to salivary amylase, an enzyme that hydrolyzes starch into sugar, which is then digested in the stomach.

These first fermented products were light, sweet drinks, where the low strength of amylase could barely make the sugars ferment.

Therefore, the alcohol content of this pseudo-sake was very low, at 3–4 degrees alcohol—however, more than enough for it to become one of the most requested and precious drinks because it can give euphoria.

The history of kuchikamizake, the chewed sake

But let’s go back to our virgin maidens since we are not only speaking of the fourth century AD but also the mid-1900s, because in the prefecture of Okinawa, in the Ryukyu islands of Japan, the homeland of the mythical awamori, a particular type of shochu, Kuchikamizake, was produced until the 1940s.

They were made for wealthy fetishists, but even today, it is rumored that the practice has not entirely disappeared.

Many ancient societies had to make do and kick off the fermentation by chewing hard. Many pre-Columbian civilizations produced fermented corn starting with chewing, and Kava, produced by the peoples of the Pacific from chewing the roots of Kava, also known as Piper methysticum Forst, was born in this way.