is a drinking custom in

Miyako Island is the largest and the most populous island among the Miyako Islands of Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. Miyako Island is administered as part of the City of Miyakojima, which includes not only Miyako Island, but also five other populated islands ...

Okinawa Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan. Okinawa Prefecture is the southernmost and westernmost prefecture of Japan, has a population of 1,457,162 (as of 2 February 2020) and a geographic area of 2,281 km2 (880 sq mi). Naha is the capital and largest city o ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. The custom involves one person offering a toast to each of several other people in a round.

Custom

This group ritual involves people sitting in a circle. One person, the ''oya'' (master of ceremonies), makes a speech related to the particular celebration or ceremony being observed, filling his own glass with alcohol, usually an Okinawan distilled beverage called

awamori ''Awamori'' (, Okinawan: , āmui'') is an alcoholic beverage indigenous and unique to Okinawa, Japan. It is made from long grain indica rice, and is not a direct product of brewing (like ''sake'') but of distillation (like ''shōchū''). The ...

, and drains it. The ''oya'' then moves around the circle and pours awamori for everyone. After that he makes a short closing speech and chooses another ''oya'' to start the next round.

History

Similar group rituals involving

sake Sake, also spelled saké ( ; also referred to as Japanese rice wine), is an alcoholic beverage of Japanese origin made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Despite the name ''Japanese rice wine'', sake, and indee ...

were once practiced across Japan. However, because the consumption of sake itself was limited to auspicious occasions, the popularization of ''otōri'' happened relatively recently. It is said that multi-turn ''ōtori'' started only after Okinawa Prefecture returned to Japan in 1972. Another popularized drinking ritual called ''Yoron kenpō'' can be found on

Yoron Island , also known as Yoron, is one of the Amami Islands.''Teikoku's Complete Atlas of Japan'', Teikoku-Shoin Co., Ltd., Tokyo, The island, 20.8 km² (8 sq. mi.) in area, has a population of approximately 6,000 people, and is administered as the ...

Kagoshima Prefecture is a prefecture of Japan located on the island of Kyushu and the Ryukyu Islands. Kagoshima Prefecture has a population of 1,599,779 (1 January 2020) and has a geographic area of 9,187 km2 (3,547 sq mi). Kagoshima Prefecture borders Kumamoto P ...

. The word ''otōri'' was used by Miyako's northern neighbor,

Ryūkyū The , also known as the or the , are a chain of Japanese islands that stretch southwest from Kyushu to Taiwan: the Ōsumi, Tokara, Amami, Okinawa, and Sakishima Islands (further divided into the Miyako and Yaeyama Islands), with Yonaguni ...

Okinawa Island is the largest of the Okinawa Islands and the Ryukyu (''Nansei'') Islands of Japan in the Kyushu region. It is the smallest and least populated of the five main islands of Japan. The island is approximately long, an average wide, and has an ...

. As part of New Year's rituals, the king offered awamori to the royal family members, and the highest-ranking officials called ''sanshikan''. In the 1980s, ''otōri'' became popular in

Perspectives

''Otōri'' is seen as a root cause of alcohol-related health problems in Miyako. In 2005, Miyako Health Authority started issuing ''ōtori cards'', red cards (off liquor) and yellow cards (giving one's liver a rest), with which people were supposed to decline the offer more easily. In 2020, Okinawa's prefectural government issued an advisory requesting that people refrain from the practice because of concerns relating to the spread of

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

References

*Otōri, Miyako's way of drinking sake (part 1)(2002), Ryukyu Shimpo (evening), Aug. 18. *Otōri, Miyako's way of drinking sake (part 2)(2002), Ryukyu Shimpo (evening), Aug. 25.
Otōri, by Ganaha Munehiro, in Japanese

Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Otori Drinking culture Miyako culture