The narrow, winding road that leads to Senkin Shuzo, a small sake brewery in the tiny town of Iwaizumi, Iwate Prefecture, is icy and treacherous. The train lines that used to connect Iwaizumi to Morioka, the nearest major city, were closed after landslides dislodged the tracks last summer. Yuri Yaegashi, whose husband, Giichiro Yaegashi, is the brewery's ninth-generation president, meets me at Morioka Station, and on the two-hour drive through the mountains along Route 455, she tells me that they've had an unusually high number of visitors in the past year.

"After the earthquake, we received many emails, and people came to see us. I've never experienced so much kindness from strangers," she says.

Like a lot of sake producers in the Tohoku region, Senkin Shuzo and the Yaegashis, whose family has been making sake since 1854, have experienced several changes since last March. Many sake breweries were destroyed or damaged when the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami devastated large swathes of northeastern Japan. Of the 114 breweries in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, 93 were affected, according to the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association.