A Kyoto drinks company and a name borrowed from painting.

Sho Chiku Bai — in Japanese 松竹梅, shōchikubai — is the sake brand of Takara Shuzo, the drinks company of the Kyoto-based Takara Holdings group. Japanese Wikipedia traces the business to 1842; the operating company Takara Shuzo was incorporated in 1925, and in 2002 the old company was split so that a new Takara Shuzo took over the drinks business while the parent became Takara Holdings, headquartered in Fushimi, Kyoto’s historic brewing district. A multilingual guide published by Japan’s tourism authorities says the company was founded by the Yomo family, brewed only sake for its first 22 years, and added shochu and mirin from 1864.

The name is three plants. Pine, bamboo and plum are the “Three Friends of Winter,” a motif that English Wikipedia traces to Chinese poetry and painting of the Tang and Song dynasties: plants that stay green or bloom in the cold, standing for steadfastness and resilience. In Japan the trio became a New Year emblem and a three-step ranking, with pine at the top. The tourism-authority text links the three to strength, longevity and beauty, and connects winter to the brewing season itself, when cold weather keeps fermentation slow and clean.

The brand did not begin at Takara. Japanese Wikipedia says Sho Chiku Bai was created by Inoue Shinjirō, a brewer in Nada, the sake district of Kobe, and that when his brewery ran into difficulty in 1933 Takara set up a company named Shōchikubai Shuzō to support him. That company later became independent, but the Sho Chiku Bai brand stayed with Takara. Its premium line carries the Shirakabegura name, and Takara’s Nada brewery for the brand stands in Higashinada, Kobe; in 2011 the line added a sparkling sake called Mio, Japanese Wikipedia says.

A celebration sake, and a long run of television.

Takara has long positioned Sho Chiku Bai as a sake for happy occasions. A 2012 Takara press release introducing a cedar-cask New Year sake described the brand as “the sake of joy,” and “joy” — yorokobi — runs through its advertising. In a commercial announced by Takara Holdings in December 2019 for the first New Year of the Reiwa era, the actors Watari Tetsuya and Yoshinaga Sayuri trade toasts to small joys, big joys and many joys.

That commercial continued a relationship with the same circle of actors that goes back half a century. Japanese Wikipedia says the film star Ishihara Yūjirō first appeared in a Sho Chiku Bai advertisement in 1970, the start of a long association between Takara and his company, Ishihara Production. Watari, also of Ishihara Production, took over as the brand’s face; Takara’s 2019 release marked his 32nd year in Sho Chiku Bai advertising, which dates his first campaign to 1988. In 2020 Takara marked fifty years of the pairing with a limited set whose labels joined the two actors in what it called a “phantom co-starring,” the lifestyle magazine Serai reported in July 2020.

Visually, the brand leans on the motif in its name. The three plants are a stock design in Japan, stamped on New Year sweets and greeting cards. Takara’s corporate emblem, by contrast, is a single character: Japanese Wikipedia notes that the traditional form of 宝, “treasure,” serves as the company mark and appears on its shochu labels. For more on the lettering, see What Font Does Sho Chiku Bai Use?

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.

From Nada to the San Francisco Bay.

Sho Chiku Bai is also an American sake. Takara Sake USA says Takara began exporting the brand to California in 1951, and that it founded its American company in Berkeley in 1983, choosing the site for Calrose rice grown in Northern California and water from the Sierra Nevada; the tourism-authority guide likewise dates Takara Sake USA to 1983 and calls it a pioneer of sake brewing in the United States. The company says its first American-made sake, Sho Chiku Bai Classic Junmai, was released in March 1983 and became its flagship, that a nigori followed in the mid-1980s, and that the Classic won a gold medal at the US National Sake Appraisal in 2011. A tasting room at the Berkeley brewery has been open since 1983, the company says. At home, Japanese Wikipedia records that Sho Chiku Bai sake has won gold medals many times at Japan’s National New Sake Appraisal, including in the 2024 brewing year.

Takara’s reach in drink goes beyond sake. The company’s own history describes how Takara Shuzo spread its shochu and mirin across Japan after 1925 and moved into beer after the Second World War, before turning back to its core Japanese drinks from the late 1960s. In 1986 it bought the Tomatin distillery in the Scottish Highlands, Japanese Wikipedia says, and English Wikipedia describes Takara Shuzo as the largest distiller of traditional shochu in Japan.

For a design guide, Sho Chiku Bai shows how a name taken from a centuries-old painting motif can give a sake brand an instant seasonal palette and a celebratory register, carried for decades by the same faces on Japanese television. Compare Gekkeikan, the Fushimi sake house founded in 1637, and Ozeki, from the Nada brewing district. For this guide we use pine green, plum red and gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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