kagumi

Finding and translating Kokuteeru (1924) was a year long journey that helps to answer the question ＂who wrote the first Japanese cocktail book?＂ Whilst this honour goes to Tokuzo Akiyama’s book Cocktails: How To Mix Drinks, Yonekichi Maeda’s Kokuteeru is considered to be the more systematic and practical text which was published a month later. Western style spirits and bartending made their way into Japanese culture as early as 1872. And by the early 1900s Japanese bartenders ran their own Western style establishments. Kokuteeru gives us a fascinating glimpse as to how 1920s Japanese bartenders began to define themselves and their profession.

The entirety of the net profits-100%- from the publication of this English translation of Kokuteeru will fund the Yonekichi Maeda Scholarship: an internship program that will send Australian bartenders to Japan to learn about Japanese bartending. This scholarship will allow the next generation of Australian bartenders to learn the art of Japanese cocktail bartending and will promote a return of the ’journeyman bartender’ to the education scheme of the bartending profession.