Covid-19 Takes Down SXSW, and Some Good Sake Stories
Some of you may have seen on social media that I was looking forward to being on a sake, food and farming panel at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. Timothy Sullivan, brand ambassador for Hakkaisan Sake , and Tokyo entrepreneur Takuya Hane were to be my co-panelists.
So it was sad though not completely unexpected to learn today that the festival was canceled due to fears that it would aid and abet the spread of Covid-19.
Some of you may know Timothy as a distinguished Sake Samurai and the man behind the educational and informative site Urban Sake. Hane, or Hanesan (yes, all one word) as he likes to be called, is the founder a company called Active Learning and an initiative called Undiscovered Gems of Japan. The purpose of the latter is to foster creativity in rural areas, connecting shrinking villages to a roster of international experts to develop new products and foster international connectivity. I found this Harvard Crimson article written by a former Active Learning intern a good insight into what Hanesan is doing.
The three of us were moving ahead with our panel preparations when the news hit. But Hanesan—and staff members from the Tokyo-based film production company that was planning the event—already had doubts about whether they should or would be able to get out of Japan and make it to the conference.
Ours was just one of thousands of canceled events causing public venues to go dark as the epidemic spreads. I do hope I’ll have the chance at some point to tell the stories I wanted to share: tales of the creative new wave of sake makers that is upending fixed notions of what sake should taste like and brewing for a new, international audience.
Already fingers are being pointed toward governments, agencies, and individuals who are alleged to have mismanaged the crisis. But I hope that in the end, normal human bungling will give way to a concerted, successful international effort to conquer Covid-19. In these super-polarized times, that would be a unifying triumph that the world badly needs.
