A founder’s trade name, revived after a century and a half.

Kubota the sake has nothing to do with Kubota the Osaka machinery and tractor maker. It is the leading brand of Asahi-Shuzo (朝日酒造), a brewery at Asahi, in the city of Nagaoka, Niigata Prefecture. The company dates its founding to 1830. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the company profile, says brewing began that year under Kubotaya, the trade name of the founder, Hirasawa Kōzaburō, and that the business became a joint-stock company in 1920; the company’s own timeline gives the same two dates.

A second distinction matters just as much. Asahi Shuzo of Iwakuni, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, the maker of Dassai, is a separate company that happens to share the romanised name. It is the Yamaguchi firm, not the Niigata one, that opened the Dassai Blue brewery in Hyde Park, New York, in September 2023, as the office of New York’s governor announced. Japanese Wikipedia also notes that the Niigata brewery has no connection with Asahi Breweries, the beer group.

For most of its history the Nagaoka brewery sold one main label. SAKETIMES reported in June 2022 that before 1985 it sold only Asahiyama, a name Japanese Wikipedia dates to 1921. By the early 1980s, the same article says, local demand was falling as rival breweries competed for drinkers, and the company wanted a sake that would appeal to people in the cities.

The answer was Kubota, launched in 1985. The company says it was developed by its then president, Toru Hirasawa, and its factory manager, Teiji Shima, and that it brought the light, dry tanrei karakuchi style to a new market. SAKETIMES reported that the two studied what kind of sake suited contemporary life and concluded that a crisp, dry style fitted the times, and that reviving the founder’s old trade name signalled a return to the brewery’s roots.

Brush lettering, white paper and a family of numbers.

The first Kubota bottles set the pattern for the range. SAKETIMES reported that the brand launched in 1985 with Senju, a ginjo, and Hyakuju, a tokubetsu honjozo; Manju, a junmai daiginjo, followed in 1986, and Kojyu, a second junmai ginjo, in 1993. The names form a family: each ends in ju (寿), a character used for long life and celebration, and is prefixed by a number — hyaku, a hundred; sen, a thousand; man, ten thousand.

The look has been just as consistent. Describing the classic label in October 2020, Mynavi News wrote that it used white Japanese paper with the name Kubota written by brush and a seal mark.

New products tested the formula. SAKETIMES reported that Kubota Seppou, launched in 2017, was the first Kubota developed with another company and the first in a jet-black bottle. The partner was Snow Peak, the outdoor-equipment maker that is also based in Niigata; WWD Japan reported that Seppou went on sale on 21 September 2017 through Kubota’s member shops and Snow Peak’s own stores, as a sake to be drunk outdoors.

The same year brought Kubota Junmai Daiginjo, sold as a seasonal limited edition in June and July 2017 and made a regular product in April 2018, according to Mynavi News; SAKETIMES called it the first addition to the regular line in about 25 years. The company began a rebranding of Kubota in 2019, Mynavi News reported, strengthening the Manju and Senju lines while adding products for new drinkers.

The clearest design change came on 1 October 2020, when the Junmai Daiginjo was relaunched in a black label. Mynavi News reported that the brush lettering was kept, that the black was meant to express the sake’s crisp finish, and that English product names and descriptions were added for overseas buyers. The company gave two reasons: to stop the bottle looking too like the ju line, and to suit Western food and casual settings as well as Japanese cuisine. No designer was named.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all sake, shochu and soju names: Dassai, Hakkaisan, Kubota, Ozeki, Sho Chiku Bai, iichiko and Chum Churum. Sake, shochu and soju brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family breweries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A sake, shochu or soju brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drink is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its sake, shochu or soju is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A brand built on controlled distribution and a clear taste.

Kubota is sold through a closed network. SAKETIMES reported in 2022 that only licensed members of the official Kubota Club may sell the sake, and that the president, Yasushi Hosoda, felt that bottles reaching supermarket chains through secondary channels had made the brand seem commonplace. Hosoda became head of sales in 2004 and president in 2012, the article said, the first president from outside the Hirasawa family.

The brewery has also had to rebuild. Japanese Wikipedia records that it was damaged in the 2004 Chūetsu earthquake in Niigata. In October 2020, Excite News reported a yuzu liqueur as the first liqueur under the Kubota name, and the National Research Institute of Brewing’s list published in May 2024 included Kubota among the gold-medal sakes at the National New Sake Appraisal.

Online, the name needs care. The name is shared with Kubota Corporation, the machinery group, whose products have nothing to do with sake; the brewery’s own site is asahi-shuzo.co.jp. Our separate note on the Kubota sake logo font covers the lettering.

For a design guide, Kubota shows how a founder’s trade name, a brush-written mark on white paper and a numbered family of names can carry a regional brewery’s sake well beyond its prefecture for four decades. Compare Hakkaisan, another Niigata brewery, and Dassai, the Yamaguchi sake from the other Asahi Shuzo. For this guide we use washi white, sumi black and seal red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kubota’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.