Q&A with Prof. Merry “Corky” White
Merry “Corky” White is a Professor of Anthropology with specialties in Japanese studies, food, and travel. A caterer prior to entering graduate school, she has written two cookbooks, one of which (Cooking for Crowds) recently celebrated its 40th anniversary with a reissue by Princeton University Press. She has been awarded a research grant from the AAS for an ethnographic project in Japan titled, “Industry Transformation and Global Market Forces: A Case of Japanese Whisky.”
Q: Welcome Professor White! First of all, congratulations on your travel research grant for your project, “Industry Transformation and Global Market Forces: A Case of Japanese Whisky”. How did you get involved or interested in this kind of research?
A: Well, where to begin! It really started with coffee. Coffee is such a fixation with me and I really didn’t intend to do a big project after my book on coffee in Japan, but about four years ago I happened to see the results of a whisky auction that took place in Hong Kong. All the big auctions take place there and everybody from all over the world comes. At this auction, one bottle of Suntory special Yamazaki 25-year-old single malt got $950,000- one bottle! And you know that bottle will never be opened. No, I mean, who’s gonna drink that? It’s a show-off item, it’s really about value and about demonstrating your power through purchase. That kind of stunned and intrigued me but I wasn’t really interested in following the high end because, well, I really love being on the ground. I don’t drink very much but I was going to bars in Japan with friends and just noticing these long shelves of Japanese whiskies. The variety and the numbers are just astounding and I wanted to find out more so I wrote an article about it for an academic culinary magazine. After that, I started getting requests for more information and it started snowballing. It was kind of like a project that came about in spite of me rather than directed by me. Now I’m really interested in continuing the research, especially after visiting distilleries where you get a sense of what the work of whisky really is. It’s just amazing stuff.
I discovered that people in Japanese whisky distilleries, everyone, from the women on the factory floor who put the labels on the bottles all the way to the master blender or distiller, gets to taste a given whisky along its way of aging and production. And that’s unique because everybody gets a voice to say, you know, “We should be doing this” or “This is bad”. It seems to be so democratic versus someplace like Scotland where only the master distiller tastes it, the Master Taster. And not just Scotland, that style is more usual all over the world, so I thought, “Is this really true? I thought Japan was so hierarchical?” And it is! It’s really true.
After that, I started getting requests for more information and it started snowballing. It was kind of like a project that came about in spite of me rather than directed by me. Now I’m really interested in continuing the research, especially after visiting distilleries where you get a sense of what the work of whisky really is.
Q: An interesting process and prices like that are incredible! How is it you’ve seen the value of these whiskies increase?
A: Value is a really slippery thing and I’m really interested in understanding value in this kind of study. The fact that Japanese whisky is called specifically called Japanese whisky is unique and a lot of that value comes from things like those big international whisky auctions, which happen several times a year. They’re sort of like the Academy Awards because what prices whiskies get seem to establish their ranking or their worth, their taste worth. But there are other factors that intersect with value. I’m interested in people- over the last few years I have 
been doing a study of Japanese food workers- involved in all kinds of food work. I mean, the artisanal chef, or the industrial frozen food product worker, or someone who’s a domestic food maker like the mom who makes the bentos for the kids’ lunches. All of that fell into this thing called food workers. In that research I was also looking at work itself, where is work valued? And where is something called an industrial product versus a craft product versus an art product. What’s the work that goes into that distinction? So I followed food workers all over Japan and am doing some writing about that now actually.
Q: I am glad you bring that project up because this is not your first Northeast Asia Council award correct? In 2015 you also received a travel grant for the project, “Technology, Technique, and Culture in Japanese Food Work”. How did that previous research help contribute to your current project?
A: Well before even that project I did a project on coffee in Japan which I believe I mentioned briefly earlier. One of the products of that research was a book I wrote called Coffee Life in Japan. It has gotten an amazing amount of press, which surprised me! I mean I’ve been asked by people to come to Coffee Association meetings and give a speech. It’s really been picked up by people involved in the coffee industry all over the world because they find that Japanese coffee is so beautiful and so tasty. There’s a word in Japanese, kodawari, which means something that’s made with great attention to detail and a kind of passion and it really applies to the care put into Japanese coffee. So I’m thinking about all the things I learned from coffee and the coffee spaces like coffee shops. They’re like three to a block everywhere in Japan, there are so many coffee shops -and they’re not chains like Starbucks. They do have Starbucks, but they’re actually beginning to close down because people say, you know, “There’s nothing distinctive about a Starbucks shop, they’re all the same. Why would I want to go there?” People really care about their coffee! Otherwise, they just stay home and drink instant. My research in coffee has stuck with me and as a result some of these ideas I’m having about whisky transferred out of my earlier studies of food workers and coffee.
There’s a word in Japanese, kodawari (こだわり), which means something that’s made with great attention to detail and a kind of passion and it really applies to the care put into Japanese coffee.
I’m also interested in the places where people drink in the same way I was interested in coffee shops. And are they social spaces? And the answer for coffee is, yes of course. Nobody brings a laptop into a coffee shop except at Starbucks where Americans go. It’s very rare there to see people camping out working or internetting. Internet for the longest time was not available in coffee shops in Japan, except at Starbucks. Drinking is more integrative however, you’re talking to people and you get to be a different kind of person in this space that maybe is not like the person you are at home or the person you are at work. You get to sort of invent yourself or even be completely anonymous and I’ve found people enjoy that, it’s a luxury to be private in public. That public anonymity is happening in coffee shops, but sometimes in bars as well. Anyway, so all of these ideas are not sorted out yet but I expect that something will occur in the field that will focus on one or another or several of these aspects, and many of those aspects are informed by my earlier research.
Q: It sounds like the scope of this project is large, there’s so much potential and interesting information! How do you narrow those concepts down for fieldwork?
A: Thank you, part of that scope comes from the freedom of not having done it yet you know, that’s a great freedom and lets me still kind of ramble. At some point, I’ll be expected to focus on the specifics and actually, recently some of the trade people wrote to me and said, “When are you coming and how can we help you?” They’ve been really wonderful- [laughs] what I’d like to say is “Send me one of those high price bottles!”, but that won’t happen. In terms of narrowing though, it comes from a couple of things. One, it depends on access, will I really be able to talk to workers on the floor? And yes, I’m sure I will be able to, but then will I actually want that? I’m not sure. I’ll do it until it doesn’t look interesting anymore, but even then sometimes you need to push past that moment. Make sure it really isn’t interesting before you 
abandon it because sometimes something will just suddenly come up. That’s the great thing about fieldwork you come in, theoretically anyway, without a point that you are looking to make- without a hypothesis. And that’s why classic fieldwork is at least two years, to really flesh out what is interesting and worth pursuing further.
Q: What is your process, how do you really get into the research, through interviews or something else? Is it different from ethnographic fieldwork somewhere like here in America?
A: It’s actually really hard in Japan to come in from outside and get access, especially to something like this. Information is valuable there and corporate information is high-security stuff. I was really, really lucky because I’m a Japan scholar and I’ve been connected. This is the 60th year I’ve been going to Japan so I’m really in there right, this is me. So I’ve gotten to know a lot of people who ended up, as they grew up, more important than you would have imagined and I have lots and lots of connections. I went to Harvard for school and I found out that the CEO of Suntory went to Harvard Business School. In fact, his professor, a Japanese professor of management, was somebody I kind of knew! So the connection was made and I got to meet the CEO about three months ago in New York. And he said, “Whatever we can do to help” and then it turns out that almost everybody I knew was connected to him! This is what makes field work interesting, it depends on the sort of cultural environment in which you’re going, but very rarely is it okay just to come in and start knocking on doors. Cold calls are not very easy to do in our line of research and you have to be connected. So I’m very lucky for Suntory and the smaller distilleries, who were very welcoming and I’ve already been able to visit some of them.
Is Suntory your focus for this research? Could you tell us a little bit about that company?
Suntory is an enormous corporation in Japan, you may have even heard of it. Suntory now owns Jim Bean, Sam Adams from here in Boston, and they own Laphroaig and Bowmore- they own a lot of Scottish whiskies like those. They make their own whiskies in Japan as well as in Scotland and their whiskies are fantastic! But it’s not just their scope that gives them quality, in fact you’d think it would be quite the opposite of that, “How can it be good if it’s so global?” We tend to mistrust size to get good quality. But somehow they’re doing fine. Of course, there are distortions and there are issues, but Suntory has also been part of a lot of discussions about what are the legal standards for a blend.
‘Blend’ as in blended whiskey?
Yes and there’s something really interesting about blends, they do a lot of blends in coffee too. The idea of a blended coffee was seen as not so good. People thought, “What are they trying to hide, you know, by mixing beans?” In coffee, the high price ones are typically single-origin beans, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, or Guatemalan Huehuetenango, or something similar. That has cachet and seems to give value. And sure, they’re really good, well-grown beans, but it also allows you this sense of identity with the place from which it came, the origin of the beans. If you stand at the counter of a coffee shop and you say, I want that, I don’t know, Jamaican Blue Mountain for example, you feel like you’ve entered Jamaica in some small way. But blends, which are not very highly valued here, are really valued in Japan. This is because the worth of the brew -or in the case of whisky it would be the bottle- depends on a master blender. This person has a sense of taste, taking the best qualities of this bean and matching them with different complementary beans or different whiskies, depending on what you’re talking about.
The blend is supposed to be better than the sum of its parts. So it’s highly valued if you know the blender or his reputation -and it usually is his reputation although that’s starting to change. So I’m really interested in all these individual aspects of meaning-making in making the value of whisky but then I’m also doing kind of an industrial study of this giant corporation. This is very new for me because it’s also a study of whisky itself as an industry. Some distilleries are very small, many got transformed from family-run sake manufacturers.
Very small artisanal sake people sometimes switched into whisky, same people, same family, sometimes same buildings even, but completely different procedures and product. I’m interested in these small family-run whisky makers, who are excellent by the way, and have these very artisanal bottles, sort of like a craft beer but it’s a craft whisky. I’m interested in what’s going on with them, but also focusing on Suntory as a big case study. And I don’t really know yet where the whole thing is gonna go! One thing about doing fieldwork is it’s always going to change or even trip you up. You have to be ready to turn on a dime or as they say now, “Pivot!” So I’m going to be doing a multi-level study, and also a multi-sited ethnography. The multi-level would involve scales of makers, but it would also involve broader things like global awareness, how much is that bottle known?
But blends, which are not very highly valued here, are really valued in Japan. This is because the worth of the brew -or in the case of whisky it would be the bottle- depends on a master blender. This person has a sense of taste, taking the best qualities of this bean and matching them with different complementary beans or different whiskies, depending on what you’re talking about. The blend is supposed to be better than the sum of its parts.
You’ve touched on this idea of global markets and overseas popularity earlier in the interview as well. Have you seen Japanese whisky gaining popularity in that market? Or here in the States specifically?
When determining popularity on a global market you have to ask a couple of questions. Most importantly you’ve got to ask, “What is its actual market? Who’s the audience for it?” There’s one bottle that I’m going to use actually for a faculty tasting called Nikka Days. Nikka is the number two Japanese whiskey maker -well it may be on par with Suntory actually. Nikka has this bottle called Nikka Days and I inquired about that bottle because I realized it was not sold in Japan, only in America. The reason is somebody in marketing latched on to the idea that Americans do something called ‘day drinking’ so they thought, this very new kind of connoisseur needs a new bottle and they crafted this bottle just for America and called it Nikka Days. It’s a medium price, around $40 a bottle, which is actually cheap since you don’t drink that much in a sitting. I once took a bottle of Nikka Days to a conference to do a talk about these things and had little tiny plastic cups up front. Now at this conference, my talk was scheduled for 8am and the bottle was empty by the end, people were even coming up to the table for repeat doses. It was 8am on a Sunday! So they were in fact engaging in day drinking and that’s what’s interesting, the marketing of these things. They look for niches, look for audiences. There’s a Suntory bottle called Toki and Toki is really, really popular because it’s also in the $30 to $40 range. There are Toki bars, here in the US, which is sort of a Suntory-sponsored bar- but they have everything, it’s not just Suntory. There they make what used to be called, in America, a highball. It would contain whiskey, ice, and some water, and that was what made a drink a highball. Highballs in Japan were popular in the 1920s and 30s and into the 40s and 50s although slightly less so. In the post-
war years, gradually high balls were seen as old fashioned, more ‘my grandfather’s drink’ so it went out of favor among young drinkers. Suntory then started marketing this machine that sits on the counter of the bar and dispenses the right amount of whisky, water, and ice for a highball. It’s like an instant highball machine! And this immediately became very popular among young women, they felt this was kind of like their drink, but it was popular among young people in general as well.
They revived the highball, which is brand new to a lot of these young people, and made ‘grandad’s drink’ into something which is now fashionable. They created a market, especially with young women, that didn’t exist before. So pay attention, it’s always interesting to send people out and ask them to see how many Japanese whiskies they have behind the bar. And are they being considered Japanese whiskies? Or are they just part of the whole spectrum of whiskies without being distinguished particularly as Japanese. It might be called Toki, which is a Japanese word, but sometimes people just come out and say, “I’d like a Toki” and they’re not really framing it as Japanese.
Well, it sounds like you’ve got some interesting work cut out! Thank you so much for your time today, before you go can you give us a peak at your research timeline? This project was initially awarded in Fall of 2021, but I’m assuming the pandemic prevented you from visiting?
Yes, because of the pandemic, nobody could travel to Japan that year. So last year I finally got a visa but by the time I got it, my sabbatical term in the Fall was almost over. It didn’t pay to go for three weeks and so they are allowing me to use it, I hope, at the end of this term. So I’ll go this Spring, and then I’ll go again next Spring term in 2024. When I go this Spring at the end of April I’m visiting Suntory’s biggest distillery, and I actually had to get a special invitation which took a while. Then I’ll be going up to the northernmost island of Japan, which is called Hokkaido. Have you been? It’s so beautiful, that’s actually what I’ll leave with, anyone who can go should visit! It’s wonderful there.