From a samurai household to a sake house in the Suwa basin.

Masumi is the sake of Miyasaka Brewing Company (Miyasaka Jozo), a brewery headquartered in Suwa, Nagano Prefecture. Japanese Wikipedia, citing the member list of the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, gives the brewery’s founding as 1662, in what was then the town of Kamisuwa, and says the business was incorporated as a company in 1933 by the twentieth-generation head, Miyasaka Ihei. It counts Miyasaka Brewing among the Suwa Gokura, the five sake breweries of Suwa.

The family story is the company’s own. Miyasaka Brewing says the Miyasaka family were once samurai retainers of the lords of Suwa and turned to brewing after the wars of the sixteenth century, and that the brewery was established by 1662. The name, according to the Japanese culture site Nihonmono in a December 2022 profile, comes from the Masumi no Kagami, a mirror held at Suwa-taisha, the great shrine of the Suwa region.

The modern brand dates from a near-collapse. The company says the brewery went through a long, hard period from the late nineteenth century into the Taisho era, and that the family considered closing it. In 1919, it says, the young president Masaru Miyasaka refused to close and appointed an equally young brewery worker, Chisato Kubota, as master brewer, and the two travelled Japan each year to learn from leading sake makers.

For a time the Miyasaka business was more than sake. Japanese Wikipedia records that the company began making miso and soy sauce at a separate plant in Suwa in 1916 and later opened miso plants in Tokyo and Kofu; the alcohol and food businesses were split in 2007, and the food company, Shinshu-ichi Miso, became a subsidiary of Sapporo Holdings in 2016. Masumi itself stayed with the brewery.

A yeast with a national number, a mirror for a name and a brushed mark.

The single fact most often attached to Masumi is a microbe. Japanese Wikipedia records that in 1946 Dr Shoichi Yamada of the Ministry of Finance’s brewing research institute named the yeast collected at the Suwa brewery Kyokai No. 7, the seventh of the association yeasts distributed to brewers across Japan. The company tells the same story and calls the strain Brewing Association Yeast Number Seven; it says the strain is still the most widely used sake yeast in the world.

Miyasaka Brewing has since built its range around that inheritance. The company says that from 2019 it began brewing only with its own proprietary strains of the No. 7 yeast. Nihonmono reported in 2022 that Katsuhiko Miyasaka, the president’s son, had joined the brewery in 2013 after working in apparel, and that he launched the project behind a new line built on the No. 7 yeast in 2019.

The written name carries its own history. Japanese Wikipedia credits the painter and calligrapher Nakamura Fusetsu with the Masumi label logo, the two characters 真澄. Our Masumi font guide treats the kanji as brushed calligraphy rather than a typeface, paired with a Latin MASUMI wordmark. The French retailer Whisky.fr says the labels have been redesigned since 2021 by the Japanese designer Shinichiro Ogata, and that the AKA bottling takes its name from the vermilion of the seals long used across Asia.

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.

Two breweries, one family, and an export road.

Masumi is brewed in two places, both in Nagano. Japanese Wikipedia lists the head office and Suwa brewery in Suwa city and the Fujimi brewery in Fujimi, Suwa District. The company says the Fujimi brewery was completed in 1982 under president Kazuhiro Miyasaka, in a mountain village at about 1,000 metres, chosen for its clean surroundings and because the master brewer of the time had grown up there.

The brewery remains in the family. Japanese Wikipedia names Naotaka Miyasaka as the company’s representative, and the company calls him its current president. Nihonmono reported in 2022 that he joined the company in 1983 after studying at Keio University and Gonzaga University, and described his son Katsuhiko as the next head of the company.

Exports became part of the brand under Naotaka Miyasaka. The company says that in 1999 Masumi became the first sake maker to exhibit at the Vinexpo wine fair in Bordeaux, that its overseas sales grew from the 2000s, and that it opened sales offices in Hong Kong in 2005 and Shenzhen in 2019. Nihonmono quoted the family’s aim of a sake that can stand beside wine in the global market. The brewery marked its 350th anniversary in 2012, Japanese Wikipedia notes.

The name needs a little care. Masumi is also a common Japanese given name, and the Shinshu-ichi Miso company that grew out of the family’s food business is now a separate firm; the brewery’s own site is masumi.co.jp.

For a design guide, Masumi shows how a shrine mirror, a brushed two-character name and a yeast with a national number can carry a family brewery from the Suwa basin to wine fairs abroad. Compare Gekkeikan, the Fushimi sake house, and Hakkaisan, the Niigata brewery, or the Yamagata brewery Dewazakura. For this guide we use seal vermilion, brush ink and lake blue with a mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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