”Amakusa Shio no Kai” – Making salt at Sugamuta beach

The ideal environment for salt production

After Okinawa, we also visited a saltworks in Kumamoto. The sea of Amakusa is clean enough for coral to grow naturally. That makes the sea ideal for salt making. ”Amakusa Shio no Kai” manufactures salt manually. They even built the facilities and buildings of the saltworks by hand. Seawater is pumped out of the sea to the top of the five-meter-high tower using a pump installed by the surf. The seawater is then lowered into the basin via a black net. The sunlight and wind help evaporate moisture from the seawater, gradually increasing the concentration of salt as it falls into the basin. The process is repeated many times. It takes about a week to raise the concentration of salt in the seawater from 3% to 12%. The resulting salt particles are larger than common salt, because the salt minerals crystalize slowly. It takes about ten days in the summer or two months in the winter to convert seawater into salt in the salt crystallization chamber. Interestingly, the quality of salt depends on weather and labor.