A Kishu family, a fishing port and a brewery.

Yamasa is one of the oldest names in Japanese soy sauce. The company says the first Hamaguchi Gihei came from Hiro village (now Hirogawa) in Kishu, today’s Wakayama Prefecture, next to Yuasa, which the company calls the birthplace of soy sauce, and crossed to Choshi, in what is now Chiba Prefecture, where he founded the brewery in 1645. Japanese Wikipedia gives the same year and places the founding in Arano village, in the old province of Shimosa. The company says he may have been drawn by another Kishu man, Sakiyama Jiroemon, who had prospered in Choshi with new fishing methods, and that for generations the heads of the family travelled between the main house in Kishu and the brewery in Choshi. It also says Choshi’s mild, humid climate suited the koji mould on which brewing depends.

The best-known head of the family is Hamaguchi Goryo, who became the seventh Hamaguchi Gihei in 1853. The company recounts that during the Ansei-Nankai earthquake of 1854 Goryo, back in Hiro village, set fire to harvested rice sheaves to guide villagers to high ground before the tsunami arrived, and then paid for a seawall about 600 metres long, built from 1855. Lafcadio Hearn told the story as “A Living God,” and a schoolteacher’s retelling, Inamura no Hi (“The Fire of the Rice Sheaves”), appeared in Japan’s national primary-school reader from 1937 to 1947, the company says.

It was also in Goryo’s time, in 1864, that the shogunate recognised Yamasa as a soy sauce of particular quality with the title of “saijo shoyu,” the finest soy sauce. Japanese Wikipedia and the company both say this is the origin of the small character 上 (“superior”) at the upper right of the Yamasa mark, which the company says it keeps as a reminder to make good products.

A mountain, a syllable and a superior grade.

The name and the mark are the same thing. English Wikipedia describes the logo as a rebus: a mountain-shaped chevron standing for yama (山, mountain) above the katakana character サ (sa), so that the symbol reads “Yamasa.” With the 上 added at the upper right after 1864, that mark became the brand. The company tells one traditional account of its origin: that the mark was given in a dream by Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. A painting of the scene was presented to the Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, in 1894 and is kept in the temple’s treasure hall, where the company says it is shown once a year.

The company also chose to put the mark in its corporate name. In November 1928 the family business, until then Hamaguchi Gihei Shoten, became a joint-stock company, Yamasa Shoyu, and the company says that at a time when firms usually took the name of a place or an owner, it deliberately named itself after its trademark. By then, it says, output had grown about thirty-fold since 1893 under the tenth Gihei, through mechanisation and the absorption of other Choshi brewers.

Its archive shows how the brand was advertised. The company’s collection includes a 1905 newspaper advertisement in the Tokyo daily Yorozu Chōhō, an advertisement drawn by the cartoonist Okamoto Ippei, father of the artist Okamoto Taro, and late-Meiji signboards presented to the shops that sold its soy sauce. Workers’ hanten coats worn until about the 1950s carried a hem pattern built from the characters for soy sauce. In 1895 Yamasa became the first soy sauce maker in the Kanto region appointed purveyor to the Imperial Household Ministry, the company says, and it lists awards at the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Panama-Pacific exposition.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make condiments and seasonings, and all of them come from Japan: Mizkan, Ajinomoto, S&B, Kagome, Otafuku, Bull-Dog and Yamasa. Japanese condiment and seasoning brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to companies that have grown into much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a neighbourhood shop to a restaurant kitchen.

A condiment brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a bottle, a label, a name and the dish it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production 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 products are actually made 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 products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Sauces, umami science and an Oregon brewery.

Yamasa has repeatedly reached beyond plain soy sauce. Japanese Wikipedia says that in 1885 the eighth Hamaguchi Gihei made a soy-based sauce he named Shinmi Shoyu, took out a manufacturing patent, and sold it as Mikado Sauce; the company says it was exported to the United States. In the 1950s the Yamasa researcher Akira Kuninaka worked on the umami compounds of dried bonito and shiitake, Japanese Wikipedia says. The company says its researchers found a way to make inosinate and guanylate industrially and identified the “synergy effect” when these are combined with glutamate from kelp, and Japanese Wikipedia says the work won the Imperial Invention Prize in 1964.

Later products built on that interest in broth. Japanese Wikipedia dates Yamasa’s noodle broth concentrate to 1967 and its bottled ready-to-use tsuyu to 1979, and the company says its kombu tsuyu reversed the usual rule by making kelp, rather than bonito, the lead stock. Packaging has carried the brand too: in 2009 Yamasa launched Sendo no Itteki, soy sauce in a pouch-style container that the company says keeps it fresh for 70 days after opening, and Japanese Wikipedia says the container won a Good Design Award.

Production stays largely in Chiba, with one major exception. English Wikipedia lists factories in Choshi and Narita, the latter completed in 2011, and a third in Salem, Oregon, run by Yamasa Corporation USA. Yamasa Corporation USA says it was set up as an American company in 1992 and that its brewery in the Willamette Valley was completed in 1994, on a site chosen for a climate and water it compares with Japan; Japanese Wikipedia dates the completion to July 1994. Abroad, Japanese Wikipedia records a stake in San-J International, the Virginia tamari maker, in 2004, a subsidiary in Bangkok in 2008 and Yamasa Europe in Amsterdam in 2015, and at home the company took over the business of Sanjirushi Jozo of Kuwana in 2005. Japanese Wikipedia puts sales for the year to December 2025 at ¥71.4 billion. The head office remains in Choshi.

For a design guide, Yamasa shows how a single mark — a mountain, a syllable and a one-character grade — can serve as product label, company name and family emblem for nearly four centuries. Compare Kikkoman, its fellow Chiba soy sauce brewer, and Lee Kum Kee, the Hong Kong sauce house. For this guide we use soy black, a brewery red and a koji cream with a Mincho serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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