Mention Shodoshima to the Japanese and two things come to mind: olives and, if they are movie buffs, “Twenty-Four Eyes,” a 1954 film directed by Keisuke Kinoshita that was shot there. Shodoshima is the second largest island in Japan’s scenic Seto Inland Sea and is home to 30,000 residents. It is one of the best places in Japan to grow olives. Since 1908, it was even the first location in the country where this actually happened.
But it is shoyu, not olives or films, that brought me to Shodoshima.
Shodoshima is about an hour’s drive from Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, and is one of Japan’s most important shoyu production areas. According to Keiko Kuroshima, a shoyu sommelier from Shodoshima, the islanders began making shoyu more than 400 years ago in the early Edo period (1603-1868), and the local industry grew so much that between 1878 and 1886 alone, approximately 400 brewers.
