A bidder’s guide to what is in the bottle: the five kinds the hall sells, the towns they come from, how to read a label and a drop, and what each has cost a man
Men come down the stairs knowing one shoyu, the one on the table at home. The rest of the world calls it soy sauce and leaves it at that. There are five kinds, and the Shoyuken sells all of them the way a wine merchant sells Burgundy: by the kind, the town, the vat and the year. This guide is what the benches wish they had read first. The kinds, the towns and the methods are real. The prices are the hall’s.
Shoyu is soybeans, wheat, salt and water, and a mould called kōji that is given months or years in a vat to work on them. The mash is then pressed, and what runs out is the shoyu.
Everything that tells the five kinds apart is a matter of proportion and time: how much wheat to how much bean, how much salt, how long in the vat, and what the mash is steeped in.
| Kind | Looks | Made of | Home |
|---|---|---|---|
| Koikuchi 濃口 | Deep red-brown | Soybeans and wheat, about half and half | Chiba, and by now everywhere |
| Usukuchi 淡口 | Amber. Lighter, and saltier | The same, with more salt and less time | Tatsuno, in Hyogo |
| Tamari たまり | Near black, and thick | Soybeans, with little or no wheat | Aichi, Mie and Gifu |
| Saishikomi 再仕込み | Dark and dense | Brewed in shoyu instead of brine | Yanai, in Yamaguchi |
| Shiro 白 | Pale amber | Wheat, nine parts to one of soybeans | Hekinan, in Aichi |
A lot at the hall is named the way a bottle of old wine is named, and each part of the name is something a man has paid for.
| On the label | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| The kind | One of the five. It tells you the colour and the weight before the bottle is opened. |
| The town | Where it was brewed. Each kind has a home, and a bottle from the home town is bid up for it. |
| The vat | The cedar vat it came from, by number. A vat is taller than a man and bound with hoops of bamboo, and it may be a hundred years old. What lives in the wood goes into the shoyu, so no two vats make quite the same one. Barely one bottle in a hundred of this country’s shoyu still comes out of wood. |
| The winters | How long it stayed in the vat. The mash works through the summers and rests through the winters, so the benches count winters. More winters are darker and rounder. They are not always better. They are always dearer. |
| The bottle | How much there is. It is never much. The house sells one large bottle, of one kind, and that not often. |
| The estimate | What the house expects the lot to fetch. It is always small and always sensible. Compare the last table on this page. |
Koikuchi means “dark mouth”. It is the shoyu most people mean when they say shoyu: more than four bottles in every five sold in Japan are this kind. It is equal parts soybean and wheat, and it has somewhere between six months and two years in the vat. Its home is Chiba, in the towns of Noda and Choshi.
Because it is everywhere, a new man assumes it is ordinary, and bids as if he were doing the room a favour. The benches have a saying about that: the ordinary lot is the one that opens lowest.
In Kyushu they make it sweet. A man who grew up on the sweet one tastes home in it for the rest of his life, and there is a man on the third bench who can tell you what that costs.
At the hall: night 3, which opened at ¥20,000, and night 5, which opened at ¥6,000.
Usukuchi means “light mouth”, and the light is the colour, not the taste. It is paler than koikuchi and saltier, with more salt in the brine and less time in the vat. It has been made in Tatsuno since 1666, for the cooks of Kyoto and Osaka, who want a turnip to stay white in the pot.
It does not improve with waiting, and it looks like nothing on the dish. Both facts have been used, by confident men, as reasons to bid.
At the hall: night 4. It opened at ¥5,000.
Tamari is the old kind: soybeans and salt, with little wheat or none at all. It comes from Aichi, Mie and Gifu, and it began as the liquid that pooled in a vat of miso. It is nearly black, and thick enough to coat. Sushi counters like it for sashimi, and rice-cracker makers like it for the shine.
A drop of it does not spread on the dish. It stands. Men who make things for a living tend to bid on it.
At the hall: night 2. It opened at ¥10,000.
Saishikomi means “brewed again”. The mash is steeped not in salt water but in shoyu fresh from the press, so that everything in the bottle has been through the vat twice. It is said to have begun in Yanai, in Yamaguchi, in the 1780s, and there it is also called kanro, sweet dew. It takes twice the beans, twice the wheat and twice the time.
The hall’s oldest rule of thumb is about this one. A man who cannot explain why he wants a thing twice should not bid on a thing made twice.
At the hall: night 1. It opened at ¥3,000.
Shiro is white shoyu, and it is tamari turned inside out: nine parts wheat to one of beans. It comes from Hekinan, in Aichi. It is pale amber, the colour of weak tea, and sweeter than the rest. It has three months in the vat, and no winters at all.
It is also the one that does not keep. Sealed or open, it darkens, which is why its makers give it six or eight months where a dark shoyu is given a year or two. A man who buys a white shoyu to own it has bought something that will not be the same thing by spring.
At the hall: night 6. It opened at ¥8,000.
At the tasting you are given one drop, and the time to look at it. This is what the benches look at.
| Look at | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| The rim | Tilt the dish to the lamp. A good drop is red at its edge, like a coal. A drop that is brown all the way to the edge has been open too long. |
| Whether it stands | A drop that sits up on the porcelain is thick: a tamari, or something brewed twice. A drop that runs is a light one. Neither is a fault. |
| How pale it is | Pale does not mean weak. The palest lot in the hall is the one that cost the most. |
| The nose | Smell it before you taste it. At the national competition the judges’ first round is the colour and the smell alone, and nothing is tasted until the second. Old cedar, dark sugar, something like a struck match. If it smells of a place you used to live, put the dish down. |
| The taste | You have one. Most men spend it too quickly, and remember it for years. |
| The man next to you | If he has stopped looking at his dish and started looking at the pillar, the price is about to change. |
| Night | Lot | Estimate | The mallet fell at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Night 1 | Lot 7. Saishikomi | ¥3,000 to ¥5,000 | ¥1,480,000 |
| Night 2 | Lot 12. Tamari | ¥10,000 to ¥15,000 | ¥2,600,000 |
| Night 3 | Lot 3. Koikuchi | ¥20,000 to ¥30,000 | ¥3,300,000 |
| Night 4 | Lot 9. Usukuchi | ¥5,000 to ¥8,000 | ¥1,950,000 |
| Night 5 | Lot 5. Koikuchi, sweet | ¥6,000 to ¥9,000 | ¥4,100,000 |
| Night 6 | Lot 1. Shiro | ¥8,000 to ¥12,000 | ¥4,800,000 |
For comparison, the dearest shoyu to be had in an ordinary shop is a twenty-year-old from Kagawa. It costs about five thousand yen, for a bottle you could close your hand around.
Nobody has yet asked the hall what its own bottles would cost in a shop.