This research is an interdisciplinary collaboration on medicinal liquors (yakushu, or kusuri-zake) which are made by immersing foods or herbs in alcoholic beverages.
In general, alcoholic beverages tend to be pointed out their adverse effects on our health, but medicinal liquors have been widely regarded as medicines. Specifically, there are a lot of descriptions about them made of today’s sake, shochu, and mirin in books from the Japanese early modern period. Therefore, we conduct a study focusing on them to examine the relationship between alcoholic beverages and our health through a collaboration between surveys of the early modern Japanese literature and cell-based assays, sometimes in cooperation with researchers in other fields.
We investigate the role of alcoholic beverages for health in history, as well as the possibilities of their use in the future.

Fig.1 Descriptions of “zurin-shu,” one of the medicinal liquors made by immersing black
Fig.1 soybeans in present-day sake in literature from the early modern period.…………..
Left:   Suisei zakki (Notes for living well, 1682) archived in Kyoto University Library.………
Right: Gorui nichiyo ryori-sho (Compendium of everyday cooking recipes, 1689)…………
archived in Tokyo Gakugei University Library.…………………………………..

Fig.2 One example of the study on medicinal liquors.………………………………………….
Left:   Black soybean extracts using each solvent as a reproducing “zurin-shu.”…………..
Right: A cultured cell derived from cranial nerve used in the validation of the efficacies…
of “zurin-shu” found from the literature survey. Photo by Sato M.……………