(upbeat music) - Seattle was ideally suited during prohibition.

That is to violate prohibition.

A major port that could smuggle in goods from the Pacific, a sea border with Canada that turned Puget Sound into a bootlegging turnpike of fast and stealthy boats, and an eager populace in an open town.

A diverse town too, with all kinds of appetites.

You've heard of bathtub gin, and stills turning out cheap whiskey.

But have you ever heard of the Northwest sake moonshiners?

(theme music) Washington went dry before the rest of the nation.

Booze was restricted by 1916.

In 1919, national prohibition went into effect, and lasted until 1933.

Saloons shut down, breweries closed or like distillers during the recent pandemic that turned to making hand sanitizer, they began making non-alcoholic products.

But Seattle's thirsts would not remain unquenched.

There was a large population of men, gambling joints, and a sex trade fueled by loggers, fishermen, miners, sailors, sawmill workers, and others.

Bribes to members of long corrupt Seattle police department helped lubricate a system that allowed illegal booze to flow.

And some cops were even part of organized bootlegging gangs.

the underground economy wasn't just for the rich who drank in their private clubs.

It flourished in places like Pioneer Square, Japantown, Chinatown, and Jackson street Long standing places where many Seattleites went to sin, and it fed entrepreneurs who took to making moonshine on a grand scale for different markets with their own hidden stills and breweries.

Some scholars believe that prohibition was largely a movement of a white Protestant middle class to control the working class, and immigrants, and people of color, especially in growing urban areas.

(upbeat music) One flourishing moonshine sector catered to the Japanese community where illicit sake was sold to quench the thirst of towns with large Japanese populations, like Seattle, Tacoma, Vancouver BC, and Spokane.

In his landmark book on the first generation of Japanese in the Northwest, "Issei", author Kazuo Ito talked about Japantown's gambling clubs, like the Toyo.

Wherever there were issei, there were sake, women, and gambling, he wrote.

Clubs like the Toyo paid a price to the police to stay open, about a thousand dollars a month.

That's a lot in 1920s dollars.

For that generation, sake was not only a traditional drink for Shinto rituals or special occasions.

It was the beverage of choice for social recreation especially among the abundance of cannery boys and sawmill workers, who were encouraged to drink, and gamble on payday, Ito writes.

The greatest number of Japanese in Seattle at that time, were employed as laborers.

(upbeat music) Sake is called wine, but it is actually brewed from especially milled white rice, and transformed with a fungus called kMji, which is also used in making staples like miso and soy sauce.

By prohibition, California had a thriving commercial rice growing industry in the Sacramento Valley.

In other words, sake ingredients were readily available.

In addition, a hard liquor called show shochu could also be distilled from sake ingredients.

With the addition of other things like sweet potatoes, or barley such a drink was sometimes referred to as Japanese whiskey.

The process of sake brewing can be elaborate, with many steps.

Illegal sake was often made in outlying rural areas away from the prying eyes of the city's dry squad.

Consisting of officers who raided with axes, and smashed and confiscated what they found.

Some operations were large.

(upbeat jazzy music) A rice whiskey operation was busted by the feds between Washelli Cemetery and Edmonds in 1918.

That was the largest ever discovered in the area.

Confiscated were an elaborate still, 3000 pounds of rice, and laundry and garbage containers designed to conceal the booze in a delivery truck.

A raid by Seattle dry squadders in 1919 at a Ravena truck garden, resulted in the arrests of four Japanese men with a 500 gallon mash tub, and bottles labeled grape juice.

The breweries and stills had to be hidden, but so too their points of distribution.

In Seattle's Chinatown, a bust at Fifth and Maynard resulted in 2000 gallons of sake, and rice whiskey being seized.

But one of the men escaped through a secret underground passage.

A rooming house on King Street had attached their sinks' faucets to two 20 gallon copper bats of moonshine and sake, hot and cold running booze.

It was detected because when the police raided, the landlady had left the faucet on.

Seattle celebrated when prohibition ended.

But some people had to reacquaint themselves with the beverages.

Ito quotes a Japanese cafe owner saying the demand for beer after the repeal of prohibition was intense at the Jackson Cafe in the Bush Hotel.

Despite prohibition though, people hadn't lost their taste for their traditional rice based beverage.

Sake endured as a cultural touchstone.

It was even brewed in secret in the barracks of the internment camps of World War II, where West Coast Japanese American citizens were imprisoned.

It helped to keep spirit and culture alive, despite hard times and oppression.

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