近世の醤油取引と印

―髙梨兵左衛門家を中心に―

抄録

This paper aims to examine the brand marks of the soy sauce shipped to Edo city by the Takanashi family (now known as Kikkoman Corporation) in Noda town, and clarify aspects of the Takanashi family's soy sauce brands.

The Yamasa Corporation had basically two brand marks during the Edo, Meiji, and Taisho eras. It seems other soy sauce breweries also had few brand marks. Therefore, there has been no study that focuses on brand marks. Meanwhile, the investigation into the Takanashi family clarified they shipped more than ten brand marks for a year during the late Edo era, and shipped 66 brand marks for a year during the Tenpou era. Few soy sauce breweries had as many brand marks as the Takanashi and Mogi families (the Mogi family is related to the Takanashi family). It seems the large number of brand marks is one of their characteristics. Therefore, we identify the differences in their brand marks and explain the reasons for the many brand marks.

The prices of the Takanashi family's brands were classified into between three and five categories; the differences in price denoted the quality of raw materials, mixture proportion and quality of unrefined soy sauce. Particularly, they blended unrefined soy sauces that had different ripeness characteristics. This led to the Takanashi family having many brands. Moreover, there were brand marks called tezirushi (hand marks). Tezirushi were sold individually to wholesalers; they were wholesalers' possessive marks. Tezirushi were made by request for wholesalers, and there were instances where different tezirushi contained the same contents. The reason the wholesalers requested tezirushi was that they wanted to differentiate their sauce from other wholesalers. In conclusion, the many brands of the Takanashi family were an expression of their business policy they tried to meet customer needs, which was one of the factors they had maintained, and increase sales in Edo city market.