At the Soy Sauce Brewery

So we went to visit this soy sauce brewery in this small town called Ashikita, down in Kumamoto, and honestly what struck me most wasn’t the production methods or even the whole complicated history of how they’ve been making soy sauce since 1909. It was the story behind why we were even there in the first place.

The Iwanaga family nearly lost everything in 2020 when these torrential rains flooded Kyushu. Sodai Iwanaga was telling us about how the water reached two meters high in their town, and I’m standing there trying to imagine that, trying to picture your entire life’s work—five generations of it—just underwater. Instead of giving up, which honestly would have made sense, they decided to crowdfund their rebuilding. Almost a thousand people helped them raise nearly ninety thousand dollars. And the messages people sent back were just devastating in the best way. Someone wrote that their dining table had never been without a bottle of Iwanaga soy sauce. Like, this product was that woven into someone’s life.

What got me was thinking about how many people’s entire existence is tied up in these small businesses, these things they’ve inherited and cared for and built their identity around. The Iwanagas could have walked away. Instead they asked their community for help, and their community showed up. And now they’re making soy sauce and vinegar and miso paste again in this little factory that feels like it hasn’t really changed much in decades, which is kind of the point.

Visiting the brewery, I kept thinking about how the visual design of their products—the labels, the bottles, the whole presentation—was actually telling a story. Every detail mattered. It wasn’t just about what was inside the bottle. It was about this family choosing to rebuild, choosing to keep doing what they’ve always done, in a place that’s still visibly recovering. You can see the recovery happening around Ashikita if you look. And somehow their soy sauce is part of that healing process. One bottle at a time.