Sake

From Anime-Wiki.org

Sake 酒 (pronounced sa-keh) is the national Japanese alcoholic drink, made from rice. However the term sake is also used colloquially to mean an alcoholic drink in general.

[edit] Sake in anime and manga

The consumption of sake features in many anime, typically with humorous effect as characters get drunk. Often characters from the Kansai region of Japan are depicted as drunkards, for example Kitsune in Love Hina or Haruko Kamio in Air.

The legal age for alcohol consumption in Japan is 20. Quite often however underage drinking is depicted in manga, for instance in Living Game, or Love Hina where Naru Narusegawa gets drunk after failing her exams. However in the anime versions of a story, the incident is often turned into something else so that TV broadcasters are not seen to be promoting underage drinking. In the Love Hina anime, Naru is shown apparently drinking glasses of Oolong tea instead of beer (although she nevertheless appears to be drunk). Similarly in the manga Yume Tsukai by Riichi Ueshiba, when teenager Touko Mishima is introduced she is sleeping off the effects of a binge drinking session, with empy bottles everywhere, but in the anime version her comatose state is instead attributed to narcolepsy, with her stating that she needs 18 hours sleep a day.

[edit] About Sake

Contrary to what is commonly believed in the West, sake can be drunk cold, warm, or hot depending on individual preference or the season. In this respect it is not much different to how alcohol is consumed in the west, where drinks are usually served either cold or at room temperature, but "hot toddies" may be drunk in the winter.

In strength sake is similar to wine, however it is not actually a wine, as it is brewed like a beer, i.e. in a two stage fermentation: first the rice starch is converted to sugar (traditionally by the enzymes in saliva by chewing the rice before fermenting it, but in recent centuries by the action of rice mould, A.Oyzae), then the sugar is converted to alcohol by yeast. The combination of mould and yeast used in sake production is known as kouji (麹). An anime which discusses sake production in great depth, and actually features the micro-organism A.Oryzae as a character, is the microbiology comedy Moyashimon.

See also the wikipedia article sake.