From a family offshoot in 1925 to Kizakura Co. in 2006.

Kizakura Co., Ltd. is a sake maker based in Fushimi, the southern district of Kyoto that has been one of Japan’s main brewing centres for centuries. By the standards of its neighbours it is young. The company dates its founding to October 1925, when, in its own words, its founder Matsumoto Jirokuro left his family’s sake business and set up the Matsumoto Jirokuro Shoten in the Shinmachi area of Fushimi, laying the foundation of the Kizakura brand. Japanese Wikipedia describes the new firm as a branch of the Fushimi brewer Sawaya, today Matsumoto Shuzo.

The name came from a flower. The company’s English site explains that kizakura is a rare variety of satozakura cherry with yellow double blossoms that open a little later than the familiar pink Yoshino cherry, and that the founder chose it because he loved the ambience of the yellow blossom.

The company was incorporated as Matsumoto Jirokuro Shoten in 1951, took the name Kizakura Shuzo in 1964 and, on 1 October 2006, dropped “Shuzo” (brewing) to become Kizakura Co., Ltd., a change Japanese Wikipedia links to the company’s growth beyond sake. It is still led by the Matsumoto family: the company lists Matsumoto Shinji as chairman and Matsumoto Yuji as president, and in his message as president it says Kizakura marked its 100th anniversary in October 2025.

Kizakura brews in two places. The company lists its Misu brewery and the Fushimi-gura brewery in Kyoto and a Tamba brewery in Hyogo Prefecture, with an affiliated Higashiyama brewery in Kyoto. It dates the Tamba plant, which allowed year-round brewing, to 1974; Japanese Wikipedia gives 1972. The company credits its sake’s soft character to Fushimizu, the spring water of Fushimi, and says the place name Fushimi itself comes from that spring water.

A kappa family drawn by two cartoonists, and early television.

Kizakura’s identity is inseparable from the kappa, the water sprite of Japanese folklore. The company says it adopted the kappa as its character in 1955. The first artist was the cartoonist Shimizu Kon, whose series Kappa Tengoku (“Kappa Heaven”) ran in the weekly Shūkan Asahi from 1953; Japanese Wikipedia says the series caught the eye of Kizakura’s president, which led to the commission. In 1974 the character design passed to a second cartoonist, Kojima Kō, the company says.

The kappa are a whole cast rather than a single mascot. The company’s gallery introduces a kappa family of father, mother, daughter, son and grandfather, each with a short comic biography, and the father is, naturally, fond of Kizakura. Japanese Wikipedia says the brewery’s long-running “Kappa no Uta” (Kappa Song) jingle has been used for decades and returned to the air when the company took its new name in 2006.

Television made the characters famous. The company says it began running TV commercials in 1957, and its president’s message describes Kizakura as a latecomer that won customers partly through television advertising it pioneered in the industry. The company’s gallery lists animated kappa commercials from 1959 onwards, with titles such as “Kappa Festival” and “Kappa Dragon Palace”.

The characters also have a home. The company runs the Kizakura Memorial Hall and its Kappa Gallery at the Kizakura Kappa Country complex in Fushimi, which, it says, displays original kappa drawings by both Shimizu and Kojima alongside the company’s commercials since the 1950s, together with exhibits on kappa legends from around Japan.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Japanese sake breweries: Juyondai, Kokuryu, Dewazakura, Tatenokawa, Hakutsuru, Kizakura and Masumi. Sake breweries in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small family kura that still carry a founding family’s name to larger companies with brands sold far beyond their home region, and a single sake can be found everywhere from a local shop to a restaurant list abroad.

A sake 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, added new breweries or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its sake is actually brewed 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 is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Popular sake, then beer, whisky and a new Fushimi brewery.

Kizakura built its business on everyday sake. The company lists Kin-jirushi Kizakura in 1966, Kizakura Mild in 1979, a softer sake aimed at younger and female drinkers, and Kizakura Don in 1982, its full entry into sake sold in paper packs. Later came Yamahai Shikomi in 1991, when Japan abolished its old grading system for sake, Karakuchi Ikkon in 1999 and the premium Kizakura S Junmai Daiginjo in 2015. On its English site the company says it became popular by making quality sake at a reasonable price despite being a relatively young brewery.

Beer came next. The company says it entered craft brewing in 1995, the same year it opened the Kappa Country restaurant, and its English site calls its Kyoto Beer range the oldest craft beer brewery in Kyoto, using ingredients such as Kyoto matcha, yuzu, sake yeast and black beans. The Lucky Cat and Lucky Dog beers followed in 2017 and the Akuma no Beer (“Devil’s Beer”) range in 2021. Kizakura began a whisky business in 2018, the company says, and released its Tamba 1st Edition single malt in 2022.

In 2016 the company opened Fushimi-gura, a combined sake and craft-beer brewery with a museum and restaurant where, the company says, visitors can learn how sake and craft beer are made. It also lists a US subsidiary, Kizakura U.S.A., Inc., among its branches.

For a design guide, Kizakura shows how a company founded late in an old trade used a yellow flower for its name and a cartoon family of kappa for its face, and kept both for seven decades. Compare Gekkeikan, its far older Fushimi neighbour, Sho Chiku Bai, Takara’s sake from Kyoto, and Hakutsuru of Kobe. For this guide we use yellow blossom, kappa green and river ink with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product, character or logo is reproduced.

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