A Journey to West Tokyo
In a city of fourteen million people, there is exactly one soy sauce brewery left. To find it, you leave Shinjuku and head west — until the towers thin out, the road starts to follow a river, and the hills begin. This is the other Tokyo: a valley along the Tama where a few families have brewed soy sauce and sake for generations, quietly, while the city reinvented itself around them. The Tokyo we live near, and keep going back to. Come with us.
The Tokyo no one photographs
Forget the neon. Follow the Tama River west and Tokyo becomes forested ridges, clear water, and quiet brewing towns — Akiruno, Ome, Fussa, Higashimurayama. The breweries here have outlasted the Edo period, the war, and the city's reinvention, simply by not changing.
Kondo Jozo — soy sauce, made in Tokyo
In 1978, Tokyo still had twenty-two soy sauce breweries. Today it has one. In the Akikawa valley of Akiruno, the Kondo family has brewed Kikkogo soy sauce since 1908 — in century-old wooden barrels, with domestic soybeans and wheat and the clear water of the Akigawa River, by slow natural fermentation. They turn away large orders to protect the quality, and they wear the craft lightly: in the end, the brewer says, it isn't people who make soy sauce — it's the microbes, and his only job is to give them the right home.
Sawanoi — sake by the river
Where the Tama runs clear through the Okutama hills, Ozawa Shuzo has brewed sake by the Tama River since 1702 (Genroku 15), drawing on the mountain water that gives the region its character. Cedar, garden, and the river just outside the door.
Ishikawa Brewery — under the great keyaki
In Fussa, the Ishikawa family has brewed since 1863 (Bunkyu 3), beneath towering zelkova trees, making both sake and some of the earliest craft beer in Japan — a kura you can walk into and feel an earlier century still standing. Their Tamajiman Komotaru is cedar-aged, and unmistakably West Tokyo.
Toshimaya — Tokyo's oldest name in sake
Toshimaya's roots reach back to 1596 as Edo's oldest sake shop; the brewery that makes its sake today was established in Higashimurayama in 1935 — Tokyo's oldest name in sake, still brewing with the patience of another era. Their Juemon is unfiltered, rich, and worth the wait.
A note for our customers outside the U.S.
The sake of West Tokyo is part of this landscape — and, under our export license, available to customers outside the United States. Within the U.S., you can still bring home the region's soy sauce.
Outside the U.S.? Contact us about West Tokyo sake.
Bring West Tokyo to your table
Try our Tokyo Corn Rice, made with corn from Kodaira, just east of these hills.
Taste a piece of West Tokyo → Shop Kondo Soy Sauce
Another of our Journeys — the places, and the people, behind everything we sell. We live an hour east of these hills, so we keep going back. We are a connection. Your kitchen to Japan.