A soy-sauce family, a widow’s company and a new name.

Nanbu Bijin is the sake of Nanbu Bijin Co., Ltd., a brewery in Ninohe, a city in the north of Iwate Prefecture in Japan’s Tohoku region. The company runs its main brewery in the Fukuoka district of the city and a second, newer brewery at Basenkyo, also in Ninohe.

The company dates its business to 1902. Its own history says that the main branch of the Kuji family, in what is now the town of Ichinohe, ran a soy-sauce brewery, and that the first-generation head, Sueta Kuji, applied that brewing know-how to sake when he set up in present-day Ninohe. The first brand was Hori no Tomo; the company says the name came from the Horino area, where it hired its craftsmen, and from the wells it drew its water from. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same founding year and founder.

The company says that because their son was still a child, Sueta Kuji’s wife took over as the second generation and set up Kuji Shuzo as a partnership company in 1916. Their son Hideo became the third generation.

The present name came after the war. According to the company, Hideo began hiring brewers from the Nanbu toji guild, and in 1951, with guidance from the then head of the local tax office, the sake was named Nanbu Bijin: “Nanbu” for the old Nanbu domain that once ruled the area, and “bijin,” beauty, for the light, clean taste of the sake. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same 1951 date and explanation.

The company changed its own name to match the sake much later. It says that in 2001 Kuji Shuzo became Nanbu Bijin Co., Ltd., with the fourth generation, Hiroshi Kuji, as representative director, and that in 2013 the fifth generation, Kosuke Kuji, took over as representative director.

A master brewer, a local rice and an early start abroad.

The company credits much of its reputation to a brewer. It says that Hajime Yamaguchi, a Nanbu toji who had trained under the brewer Sagoro Hirano, came to Nanbu Bijin to brew its premium grades. The company says his sake made Nanbu Bijin one of Iwate’s leading names, and that it then spread to specialist sake shops in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyushu as drinkers began to look for regional sake.

Rice from home is the next thread. The brewery uses Gin Otome, a sake rice certified by Iwate Prefecture. In a press release dated 2 August 2017, the company described it as grown by a team of Ninohe farmers, with trial brewing carried out by the company, and its brewing water as underground water from the Orizume Basenkyo area.

Exports came early. The company says it began shipping abroad in 1997, starting with a very small first consignment, and that it was involved in founding an association of sake exporters. Japanese Wikipedia dates the start of exports to the same year and records that Japan Airlines began serving Nanbu Bijin in first class in 2007. The company says it obtained kosher certification in 2013 — Japanese Wikipedia gives 17 April 2013 — and that in 2019 it obtained international vegan certification. It says ANA began pouring its daiginjo in international first class in December 2020.

Kosuke Kuji, who the company says joined in 1990 after graduating from Tokyo University of Agriculture, has also been a public face for sake. The company says he appeared in the documentary Kampai! For the Love of Sake, which had its world premiere at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2015.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all Japanese sake names: Born, Nanbu Bijin, Tedorigawa, Koshi no Kanbai, Tamanohikari, Urakasumi and Tengumai. They come from breweries spread across the country rather than from one district — from Iwate and Miyagi in the north-east, through Niigata, to Fukui and Ishikawa on the Sea of Japan coast and to Kyoto — and most of the names on their labels are brands rather than company names, so a single brewery can sell sake under more than one name.

Sake is brewed from rice, water and koji, and many breweries describe their identity through the place, the water and the master brewer, or toji, behind each bottle. Brewers have traditionally belonged to regional guilds, such as the Nanbu toji of Iwate or the Noto toji of Ishikawa, and breweries often name the guild or the brewer in their own story. A label, a brushed name and the region it promises usually carry more of a sake brand’s look than any single bottle shape.

That makes the plain questions worth asking: who founded the brewery and when, who owns it now, where its sake is made, and how its labels have changed. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the brewery says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Old and new: a 2019 relaunch built on a logo and a crest.

The clearest design statement from the brewery is its own. The company says it carried out a rebranding to rethink what Nanbu Bijin should be in a global era, reorganising its range and redesigning the labels of its premium grades. Its guiding theme is the Japanese phrase onko chishin, roughly “learning from the old to understand the new.” The company says the new labels, introduced from the brewing year that began in 2019, use only two elements: the long-standing Nanbu Bijin logo and the family crest of the Kuji family. At the same time, it says, it added English to the product descriptions.

The relaunch came with a new building. The company says that in autumn 2019 it opened the Basenkyo brewery to meet the international HACCP food-hygiene standard, and that from 2019 all its premium sake has been pasteurised once in the bottle and stored at minus five degrees. It frames the whole effort around terroir, borrowing the wine term to argue that the sake could not be made without Ninohe.

The range reaches beyond sake. The company says a change in the liquor tax law let it obtain a liqueur licence, and in 2008 it began making an umeshu with no added sugar, built on its own sake and on plums grown in Esashi, Oshu; Japanese Wikipedia records a patent for the method granted on 6 August 2009. The company says it built a liqueur plant in a Ninohe industrial park in 2010, using local fruit such as blueberries and strawberries.

The brewery has also spoken up in hard times. Japanese Wikipedia records that after the March 2011 earthquake it joined other Tohoku breweries in a campaign called Hanasake! Nippon!, posting a video on YouTube that asked people not to cancel cherry-blossom parties, and that in 2020 it worked with a Kitakami company to produce ethanol for disinfection. It also records that Nanbu Bijin sake was served at the G20 Osaka Summit on 28 June 2019.

Online, the company’s site is nanbubijin.co.jp, while its direct-sales shop runs at nanbubijin.jp.

For a design guide, Nanbu Bijin shows how a regional name, an old logo and a family crest can be pared back into a label meant to read in both Japanese and English. Compare Dewazakura, another Tohoku sake house, and Juyondai, the Yamagata family brewery named for its generations. For this guide we use ink black, crest crimson and Basenkyo green with a Mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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