A Meiji-era house on Kagoshima Bay.

Mori Izo (森伊蔵) is a sweet-potato shochu made by Mori Izo Shuzo (森伊蔵酒造) in Tarumizu, a city on the eastern shore of Kagoshima Bay in southern Kyushu. Japanese Wikipedia gives the brewery’s founding year as 1885, the eighteenth year of the Meiji era, and the same year appears in a February 2020 announcement by the trading company JALUX, which also says the brewhouse in use today was built that year. Japanese Wikipedia lists the business as a special limited company (tokurei yugen kaisha), with its head office in Tarumizu’s Ushine area.

The brewery is older than the brand. Before Mori Izo, Japanese Wikipedia says, the house made a shochu called Kinko, after Kinkō Bay, the local name for Kagoshima Bay. Citing a 2019 profile in the Nikkei’s NIKKEI The STYLE, it says that Mori Kakushi came home in 1981, took over the brewery in 1986 as the fifth head of the house, and in 1988 launched a shochu bearing his father’s name: Mori Izo. Since then, it says, the brewery has made just the one brand.

JALUX’s English-language release of February 2020 romanises the name as “Moriizo,” gives the maker as Moriizo Shuzo Co., Ltd., and calls Kakushi Mori “the fifth-generation head of the Mori family.” It also says the brand was established in 1988.

Kogane Sengan, native yeast and clay jars.

Most of what is published about how Mori Izo is made comes from that 2020 JALUX release. It says the shochu is distilled from Kogane Sengan sweet potatoes grown for the company and fermented with yeast native to the brewhouse built in 1885, and that it is then aged in clay jars — kame — that have been in use since the brewery’s founding. The water, JALUX says, is soft groundwater drawn from the company’s own well, fed from the Takakuma mountains.

The range is short. The company’s website lists Mori Izo in 1.8-litre and 720 ml bottles, a version sold only on Japan Airlines international flights, and two editions it describes as long-aged: Gokujo Mori Izo, in a 720 ml bottle, and Rakusui Kishu Mori Izo, in a 600 ml bottle. The JAL edition, the company says, has been sold in flight on the airline’s international routes since 1998.

The brewery sells through a small number of named channels. Its website lists Mori Izo Shuhan, which takes telephone reservations and chooses buyers by lottery, along with Takashimaya department stores in cities including Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka and Kyoto, and Yamakataya in Kagoshima; an archived version of the site from 2020 says the company does not sell online. In the JALUX release Mori Kakushi said that, until then, the brand had been sold through Japan Airlines and department stores.

That release also announced the brand’s first exports. From February 2020, JALUX said, it would act as exclusive export agent, starting with Gokujo Mori Izo, a 25 per cent shochu aged for at least three years, and shipping mainly to the United States, Europe and China as well as other Asian markets. JALUX said Gokujo Mori Izo is aged in a storehouse where temperature and humidity stay stable, and that it planned to sell the shochu mainly through hotels and Japanese restaurants in major cities abroad. It also said that Jacques Chirac, the former French president, drank Mori Izo and sent the brewery a letter of thanks.

Explaining the choice of partner, Mori Kakushi said in the release that the brewery wanted to answer growing demand from customers overseas, and that it needed a company with international experience in fine wines and spirits; JALUX pointed to its record of importing wine and Champagne and exporting sake. The trading company also tied the launch to the growing interest in washoku, Japanese cuisine, which UNESCO added to its intangible cultural heritage list in 2013.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are Japanese shochu and awamori names: Kurokirishima, Satsuma Shiranami, Mitake, Mori Izo, Kannoko, Zuisen and Kumesen. Shochu is Japan’s native distilled spirit, and Japanese Wikipedia describes it by its main ingredient: sweet potato, barley, rice, buckwheat or brown sugar among others. Sweet-potato, or imo, shochu is made mainly in Kagoshima and Miyazaki in southern Kyushu, and in Kagoshima it is registered under the geographical indication “Satsuma shochu.” Barley, or mugi, shochu is made widely, including in Oita, home of iichiko. Awamori is the spirit of the Ryukyu Islands: made from rice with black koji and distilled once in a pot still, and called kusu when it has been stored for three years or more.

The makers are mostly regional companies tied to a single town. Kurokirishima comes from Kirishima Shuzo of Miyakonojo in Miyazaki, whose origins Japanese Wikipedia dates to 1916. Satsuma Shiranami and the oak-aged barley shochu Kannoko are both made by Satsuma Shuzo of Makurazaki, at the southern tip of the Satsuma Peninsula. Mitake is made on the island of Yakushima by Mitake Shuzo, which began there in 1958; Mori Izo is made by Mori Izo Shuzo in Tarumizu, Kagoshima. In Okinawa, Zuisen Shuzo has made awamori in Shuri, now part of Naha, since 1887, and Kumesen is an Okinawan awamori name.

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

One family, one name.

Mori Izo’s brand story is a family story. The name on the bottle is that of Mori Kakushi’s father, and Mori Kakushi is named as the company’s representative both on Japanese Wikipedia and in the JALUX release, where he spoke of his family making shochu for more than 130 years. JALUX’s role, as it described it in 2020, is that of exclusive export agent.

Outside Japan the name is spelled in more than one way: JALUX’s English release uses “Moriizo,” while the brewery’s own website title reads 森伊蔵酒造 in Japanese. The company’s website is built around the product list and the places where each bottle can be bought.

For a design guide, Mori Izo shows how a single product name, a founding date and a method — sweet potatoes, native yeast and clay jars — can carry a brand without a large range or a loud identity. Compare Satsuma Shiranami, another Kagoshima imo shochu, and Kurokirishima, from Miyakonojo in neighbouring Miyazaki. For this guide we use clay brown, ember orange and rice-paper white with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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