Hiroshima Sake: Saijō, Soft Water, and the Brewing Method That Made Ginjō Possible
Saijō in Hiroshima is one of Japan's three great sake towns, alongside Nada and Fushimi. The terroir story: Mt. Ryūō's soft water, Miura Senzaburō's soft-water brewing method, and the kura of Sakagura-dōri.
If Nada is Japan's hard-water region and Fushimi its soft-water counterpart, Saijō (西条) — a brewing town in the city of Higashihiroshima — is where soft water was tamed. It's one of Japan's three great sake towns, named in the same breath as Nada and Fushimi, and it's known as the "Sake Capital" (酒都, shuto). What makes it matter beyond the trio is a single technical breakthrough: a brewer here worked out how to make excellent sake from soft, mineral-poor water, and that method became the foundation of ginjō.
That breakthrough is the reason most premium sake tastes the way it does today. This is the case we make for Hiroshima.
If you'd rather start with how Saijō sits among Japan's other regions, our sake regions overview maps the whole country. Here we stay in Hiroshima.
The Soft Water That Was a Problem
Water is roughly 80% of a finished bottle of sake. In Nada, hard Miyamizu water feeds the yeast and drives a fast, firm fermentation. In Saijō, the water does the opposite — and for a long time that was a curse, not a blessing.
The groundwater here rises off Mt. Ryūō (龍王山) and is soft: low in the potassium and phosphorus that yeast feeds on. Drop a Nada-style brew into that water and fermentation stalls. The mash goes sluggish, sugars don't convert cleanly, and the sake comes out thin or spoiled.
So through the early Meiji era, Hiroshima had a reputation problem. The region grew good rice and had a brewing tradition, but its soft water made consistent, high-grade sake genuinely hard to pull off. The water that defines Saijō today was, at first, the thing holding it back.
Miura Senzaburō and the Soft-Water Brewing Method
The man who solved it was Miura Senzaburō (三浦仙三郎, 1847–1908), a brewer from Akitsu on the coast south of Saijō. He started brewing in 1876, failed repeatedly, and by around 1892 had traced the failures to the water itself.
His fix wasn't one trick but a whole discipline, finished by the late 1890s and written down in his 1898 manual Kaijōhō Jissenroku (改醸法実践録). The core ideas: grow the koji slowly and thoroughly so it penetrates deep into the rice, and ferment the mash cold and slow rather than fast. He swapped a toji's intuition for thermometers, cleanliness, and method.
This is the soft-water brewing method (軟水醸造法). Run it on Saijō's gentle water and you no longer get thin sake — you get a brew that's fragrant, soft, and full-flavored. Miura's personal motto was hyakushi senkai (百試千改), "a hundred trials, a thousand revisions," and the name fit.
How Hiroshima Beat Nada at Its Own Game
The method didn't stay a local secret. Miura taught it openly to other brewers and published it so the whole prefecture could use it — an unusually generous move in a competitive trade.
The payoff came fast. At the first National Sake Competition in 1907, Hiroshima sake swept the top placings, beating entries from Nada and Fushimi and stunning the established industry. A region that couldn't reliably brew a generation earlier was suddenly the country's benchmark.
Those low-temperature, careful techniques are exactly the ones that later defined ginjō brewing — slow, cold fermentation to coax out fruity, floral aromatics. That's why Miura is remembered as the "father of ginjō sake." The aromatic daiginjō on a modern shelf traces a direct line back to his soft-water work. Our 8 sake types guide explains how ginjō and daiginjō sit on the label.
The Third Terroir Axis
Put the three great towns side by side and you get a clean lesson in terroir.
Nada has hard Miyamizu water and ferments fast — sharp, dry otokozake, "men's sake." Fushimi has soft water and ferments gently — round, mellow onnazake, "women's sake." Saijō also has soft water, but its story isn't a flavor nickname; it's a technique. Hiroshima's contribution was proving that soft water, handled right, could outdo hard water entirely.
In the glass, Saijō sake tends to read as soft, fragrant, and full — amakuchi leaning, with a mellow body that comes straight out of that slow soft-water fermentation. It's the gentler, more aromatic pole of the spectrum, the opposite of a bone-dry Nada pour.
If you want to taste the contrast directly, read about Nada's hard-water otokozake and Fushimi's soft-water onnazake. Saijō completes the triangle.
The Houses of Sakagura-dōri
The breweries of Saijō cluster on one street, Sakagura-dōri (酒蔵通り, "sake brewery street"), a few minutes' walk from JR Saijō Station — seven working kura within strolling distance of each other. A few of the houses, with their honest histories:
- Hakubotan (白牡丹) — the oldest, with roots reaching back to 1675, making it one of the senior houses of the whole region.
- Kamotsuru (賀茂鶴) — the brand name was adopted in 1873, and the company celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2023; it's the best-known Saijō house, famous for the gold-flecked daiginjō served to U.S. President Obama in 2014.
- Kirei (亀齢) — a house dating to around 1863, named for the wish for "a turtle's longevity."
- Saijōtsuru (西條鶴) — founded 1904.
- Kamoizumi (賀茂泉) — established 1912, an early champion of pure junmai brewing in the post-war era.
- Fukubijin (福美人) — founded 1917, once nicknamed the "university of sake" for the brewers it trained.
You'll spot them by their roofline: tall red-brick chimneys painted with brand names, white plaster and black-and-white namako lattice walls, and red-tile roofs. The streetscape is recognized by Japan's industry ministry as a piece of modern industrial heritage.
For the small-kura, single-region end of the spectrum, see our guide to jizake and craft sake.
Visiting Saijō
Saijō is one of the most compact sake towns in Japan to visit, because all seven breweries sit within a short walk of the station — closer together even than Nada's museums.
JR Saijō Station is roughly 40 minutes by local train from Hiroshima Station (faster if you take the shinkansen to Higashihiroshima and connect). From the ticket gate you're minutes from Sakagura-dōri, where most kura run tasting counters, and several put out free cups of their well water so you can taste the soft Mt. Ryūō source for yourself.
The big day is the Sake Matsuri (酒まつり), held over a weekend in early-to-mid October. The whole town becomes the venue; a "Sake Square" pours hundreds of different sakes from across Japan, and the festival draws crowds well into the hundreds of thousands. For booking, etiquette, and what a kura visit looks like inside, read our guide to visiting sake breweries in Japan.
Where to Go Next
Saijō is the third corner of Japan's sake triangle, and the most quietly important. Nada had the hard water and the Edo shipping lanes; Fushimi had the soft water and the castle town. Saijō had a problem — soft water that wouldn't brew — and a man who solved it so thoroughly that his method became the blueprint for ginjō. The fragrant, full sake of Mt. Ryūō's springs is the proof.
To taste the other two corners, read about Nada's hard-water otokozake and Fushimi's soft-water onnazake. To compare all three against Niigata's tanrei karakuchi, and to place Saijō among Japan's brewing heartlands, start with the sake regions of Japan. And if you're coming to sake from wine, sake for wine lovers translates your palate directly.