A port town, a shrine and a shogun’s poem.

Urakasumi is brewed by Saura Co., Ltd. in Shiogama, a port town on Matsushima Bay in Miyagi Prefecture, north-east Japan. The company says it was founded in 1724, in the Kyoho era, when it took over existing brewing rights; Japanese Wikipedia places the founding in the time of Date Tsunamura, the fourth lord of the Sendai domain, and dates the present company’s incorporation to October 1956. Saura reached its 300th anniversary in 2024, a milestone also noted by the Japan National Tourism Organization in a 2025 feature published by Euronews.

The brand name is a piece of poetry. “Urakasumi” means roughly “haze over the bay,” and the company says it comes from a poem by Minamoto no Sanetomo, the third shogun of the Kamakura shogunate, collected in the Kinkaishu. The poem describes the pine wind blurring in haze over the bay at Shiogama as spring arrives across the many islands of the bay; the company says the name was chosen for that gentle picture of spring, and that it aims for a sake with the same soft, calm character.

Shiogama is also a shrine town. Shiogama Jinja, which the company describes as the first-ranked shrine of the old province of Mutsu, and the company says that in the mid-1800s, by order of the Sendai domain, it became the shrine’s official supplier of omiki, the sake offered to the gods. The 2025 JNTO feature says the company still supplies the ceremonial sake to the shrine.

Nanbu brewers and a yeast of its own.

Urakasumi’s modern reputation was built by its brewers. The company says that in 1949 it hired Hirano Sagoro, a master of the Nanbu school of toji, whose style relied on long, cool fermentation; his nephew Hirano Shigeichi became toji in 1960 and worked on Urakasumi for more than fifty years, later serving as honorary toji. Under them, the company says, its ginjo mash gave off an aroma likened to strawberries that drew researchers and brewers to Shiogama.

From that mash came a yeast. According to the company, around 1965 a yeast was isolated from the Hiranos’ ginjo mash at the Miyagi Prefecture sake brewers’ cooperative laboratory; first shared only with Miyagi breweries and Sagoro’s pupils as “Hirano yeast,” it was registered by the Brewing Society of Japan as Kyokai No. 12 in the mid-1980s — the company’s web history gives 1985, its printed profile 1986. Tastes later moved towards showier aromas and the strain fell out of use, the company says, and it now bills itself as the birthplace of No. 12 yeast.

The signature sake came in 1973. The company’s own history says the twelfth head of the house, Saura Shigeo, wanted to sell ginjo-style sake to the public at a time when such sake was rarely sold, and heard that the Zen teacher Akita Tokushige, who had trained at Zuiganji temple in Matsushima, was going to Paris to teach Zen; he named a ginjo Urakasumi Zen with a view to selling it in France. The export plan stalled on paperwork and Zen was sold in Japan instead, in 720ml bottles meant to be served chilled; within a few years it became a junmai ginjo. Shigeo Saura described the launch in the Journal of the Brewing Society of Japan in 1990, and the JNTO feature calls Zen the brewery’s emblem since 1973. Its exports to France came later, the company says, and Zen reached its 50th year in 2023.

Labels and lettering.

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.

A clock-hand twelve, a tsunami and a 300th year.

The old yeast has returned as a product line. In 2019 Saura released a junmai ginjo called Urakasumi No.12 brewed with Kyokai No. 12 yeast, followed by a junmai daiginjo in 2021 and, in 2023, a kimoto junmai fermented in wooden vats and a sparkling version. The No.12 range has its own mark: the company says its logo sets the numeral “12” on a clock-hand motif, to suggest the revived yeast starting to keep time again, and that the shape of the numeral is built on the golden ratio. It treats No.12 as a second pillar beside Zen.

Saura is still a family company. Its president, Saura Koichi, is described by the company as the thirteenth head of the brewery; he joined in 1988 and became president in December 2001. Besides the original brewery in Shiogama, the company built a second brewery, Yamoto, in what is now Higashimatsushima, also on Matsushima Bay, in the early Heisei years, and it also runs a golf club and a beer wholesale business, according to its company profile. The company says about 90 percent of the rice it uses is grown locally in Miyagi.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake struck both. The company says the Shiogama brewery was shaken hard and its grounds were flooded by the tsunami, though all staff were safe, while the inland Yamoto brewery escaped the wave; from April 2011 to March 2023 it ran a recovery project, “Urakasumi-hatsu, Nihonshu no Chikara,” centred on Higashimatsushima.

For a design guide, Urakasumi shows how a 13th-century poem can name a brand for three centuries, and how a clock-hand numeral can turn a laboratory yeast into a label. Compare Masumi, the Suwa sake that is home of Yeast No. 7, and Dewazakura, the Tendo sake house of 1892. For this guide we use a bay indigo, a spring haze and a pine green with a Mincho-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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