Four centuries of one family, and a local brand called Asahitaka.

Juyondai is the sake of Takagi Shuzo, a family brewery in Tomina, in the city of Murayama in central Yamagata Prefecture. The family dates its brewing at the site to 1615, the first year of the Genna era, and the Yamagata Sake Brewers Association gives the same founding year in its directory of member breweries. In a visit report for All About published in March 2008, the sake writer Akiko Tomoda quoted the head of the house, Tatsugoro Takagi, putting the brewery’s history at a little over 390 years.

The setting matters to the family’s own account of its sake. Tomina is deep snow country, and Tatsugoro Takagi told All About that the snow helps the fermenting mash along. The same report described an earthen storehouse more than two centuries old and spring water drawn from about 25 metres underground, which the house uses both for brewing and for daily life.

For most of the twentieth century the brewery’s main label was not Juyondai at all. All About reported that the house was carried by a locally popular brand called Asahitaka, and the article illustrated the family crest, a pair of crossed hawk feathers in a circle. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the same report, also lists Asahitaka as the brewery’s brand before Juyondai.

The head of the brewery also had a public career. The Drinks Business reported in March 2022 that Tatsugoro Takagi was elected to the Yamagata prefectural assembly in 1988 and served two terms, and in 2008 he told All About that he had worked to improve the roads and bridges around Tomina because, he said, sick people from outlying villages had sometimes died before they could be carried to Tomina. The name Tatsugoro itself runs through the family: according to Japanese Wikipedia, citing Akiko Soejima’s Sake Rice Handbook (2017), it is taken in turn by the heads of Takagi Shuzo.

A number that could be registered, a son who came home and a calligrapher’s hand.

The name came before the sake that made it famous. Tatsugoro Takagi told All About in 2008 that Juyondai, which means “fourteenth generation,” had first been used on an aged sake. He said the brewery had tried to register four numbered names — thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth generation — as trademarks, was told that numbers could not be registered, and yet saw Juyondai alone accepted. The Drinks Business wrote in 2022 that the brand was named in honour of Tatsugoro, the fourteenth head.

The turning point came in 1993. With Tatsugoro increasingly occupied by politics and the brewery’s veteran toji retiring, his son Akitsuna Takagi came home, All About reported. Akitsuna had studied brewing at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and then worked in retail at Queen’s Isetan in Shinjuku. Japanese Wikipedia records his first sake as completed in 1994, and dates Honmaru Hiden Tamagaeshi, the bottling most often credited with making the brand’s name, to 1995. The style ran against the fashion of the time: The Drinks Business described a move away from the light, dry “tanrei” sakes then in vogue toward richer, fruitier and rounder ones, and Akitsuna told All About that he had come home just as the light, dry boom was passing: a year earlier, he said, he would have been swept up in it, and a year later he could not have made the sake he makes.

Akitsuna also explained why he bet on the name. He told All About that while working at Isetan he could look at Juyondai from the outside and found it had an impact the other numbers lacked, and that the antique characters common on sake labels are atmospheric but hard to read, whereas Juyondai is easy to grasp. The lettering itself is the work of the calligrapher Iwasaki Chofu, the 2008 report said, and Japanese Wikipedia repeats the attribution.

The labels were planned around where the bottles would stand. Akitsuna told All About that the green and purple lettering is foil-stamped, because shops that handle sake with care keep it in cool, dim places or in refrigerators, and he wanted the name to stand out there. He said the first version was green and remained the one he felt most attached to; the writer noted that other breweries had since copied the effect.

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.

Rice of its own, a handover of generations and a brand without a website.

The family has worked on its raw material as well as its labels. Japanese Wikipedia, citing Soejima’s Sake Rice Handbook, says Tatsugoro Takagi spent about 18 years breeding the sake rice Ryu no Otoshigo, which it dates to 1999, and counts it as one of a trilogy of rice varieties he developed alongside Sake Mirai and Ushu Homare. The same entry explains the name as a play on the “dragon” character in Tatsugoro, the hereditary name of the house.

The generations have since turned. The Drinks Business reported on 15 March 2022 that Tatsugoro Takagi, the president of the brewery, had died on 2 March, and Japanese Wikipedia cites a Yomiuri Shimbun report of 4 March 2022 giving the same date. Akitsuna Takagi, described by The Drinks Business and by the brewery’s American importer Skurnik Wines as the fifteenth generation, makes the sake. Skurnik describes Juyondai as one of the most sought-after sakes in the world and says Takagi’s example encouraged younger heirs to return to family breweries and build house styles of their own.

The brand needs some care online. The Yamagata Sake Brewers Association directory lists no website for the brewery. Takagi Shuzo is also a common company name: Japanese Wikipedia lists an unrelated Takagi Shuzo in Kochi Prefecture. Another Yamagata house in this series is Dewazakura of Tendo.

For a design guide, Juyondai shows how a plain number, written once by a calligrapher and set in foil that glints from a dim shop shelf, can stand for four centuries of one family and a single generation’s change of style. Compare Dassai, the Yamaguchi junmai daiginjo launched in 1990, and Kubota, the Niigata sake launched in 1985, from the prefecture whose light, dry sakes were in fashion when Akitsuna came home. For this guide we use foil green, foil violet and sumi black with a Mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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