Nakagawa Seibē

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Nakagawa Seibē ( Japanese 中 川 清 兵衛 ; born January 15, 1848 in Yoita , Echigo Province (today: Niigata Prefecture ), Japan ; † April 2, 1916 in Nagoya ) was a Japanese brewer . After training in Germany, he became master brewer of the first Japanese brewery on Hokkaidō in 1876 , from which today's Sapporo Bier AG ( Sapporo Bīru kabushiki-gaisha ) emerged.

Life

Nakagawa Seibē came from a merchant family from Yoita in Niigata Prefecture. At the age of 18, he traveled to Europe privately. In 1872 he came to Berlin from England via Bremerhaven . Here he met Aoki Shūzō , who later became the Japanese Foreign Minister, who was a student in Berlin at the time. Aoki helped him financially and advised him to train as a brewer. He also managed to get the Japanese government to pay for the training. The Berlin brewery company Tivoli sent Nakagawa to their branch in Fürstenwalde in 1873 , where he learned the craft of malting and brewing within 26 months . On May 1, 1875, he was handed his master craftsman's certificate. Then Nakagawa returned to Japan. Aoki, who was now the official Japanese envoy in Germany, sent a letter of recommendation to the Kaitakushi ( 開拓 使 ), the state development authority for Hokkaidō.

Japan had founded the Kaitakushi in 1869 to promote the development and colonization of the island of Hokkaidō. The agency employed numerous Western specialists. Louis Böhmer , a horticultural expert from Lüneburg who emigrated to America, had introduced to Japan numerous cultivated plants that could thrive in the Hokkaidō climate, including barley . When wild hops were found on the island , the idea of ​​establishing the brewing industry was born. Nakagawa was hired as a brewer by Kaitakushi on August 24, 1875 to work out plans for the establishment of the first Japanese brewery. He compiled a list of the equipment and raw materials to be procured for an annual production of 72 koku (about 130,000 liters) of beer. In September 1876 the brewery was officially opened in Sapporo . It soon became apparent, however, that the quantity and quality of the local barley were insufficient, so that replacement had to be ordered from Germany. In May 1877, Kawabata completed the first beer, which was named Sapporo beer. It was supplied to the imperial troops during the Satsuma rebellion . Soon it was also being delivered to Tokyo and was enjoying growing demand. In 1882 the Kaitakushi was dissolved. The brewery was privatized in 1886 and changed hands again in December 1887. It was now called the Sapporo Brewery and became the nucleus of today's Sapporo Bier Aktiengesellschaft .

Nakagawa left the company in 1891 and settled in the port city of Otaru about 30 km west of Sapporo, where he ran an inn until 1898 . He then lived with his eldest son Makoto in Nagoya , where he died in 1916.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nakagawa Seibei ( memento from November 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) in the Lexicon of Japans Students on the homepage of the East Asia Department of the Berlin State Library .
  2. ↑ a b Dahms: Märkische Bierspuren , 2014.
  3. ↑ Bernd Lepach: From the life of Germans in Japan: Louis Böhmer and Alfred Unger - two gardeners of the Meiji era (1868–1912) . In: Japan at a glance . No. 157, September 2011, pp. 3–6 ( PDF ; 1.73 MB).
Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Nakagawa is the family name, Seibē the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Nakagawa, Seibē
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 中 川 清 兵衛 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION japanese beer brewer
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Yoita , Echigo Province (today: Niigata Prefecture ), Japan
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 1916
Place of death Nagoya , Japan