Soy Sauce, Sake & Senbei - Private Day Tour from Tokyo

Soy sauce, sake, mirin and miso all start the same way: rice, koji mould, time and patience. This day trip takes you to the corner of Japan where three of them are still made at industrial scale, and lets you taste each one at the place it is brewed.

We collect you from your Tokyo hotel in a private van. First stop is Sawara, an Edo-period merchant town on a canal in Chiba, where black wooden warehouses still line the water. Two of those warehouses are working breweries. One has been making sake and mirin since the Edo period, and the tasting counter is inside the old brewhouse itself. Most visitors have never tasted real brewed mirin – it is thick, golden and sweet like syrup, nothing like the bottle sold in supermarkets.

Then we drive east to Choshi, at the far tip of Chiba. Choshi is one of the largest soy sauce producing towns in Japan, and the smell of fermenting soybeans hangs over the whole district. You walk through a working factory and see the koji rooms, the fermentation tanks and the pressing floor. Afterwards there is soy sauce soft serve ice cream, which tastes like salted caramel and surprises everybody.

The last stop is the Choshi Electric Railway, a tiny local line that nearly went bankrupt and now survives by selling rice crackers. At Inubo Station you grill your own nure senbei over charcoal, brush it with soy sauce, and eat it hot. The station shop and the crackers are the reason the trains still run. From there it is a short walk to Cape Inubosaki lighthouse, where the Pacific hits the cliffs and you can see the curve of the horizon.

We finish with a seafood lunch at the Choshi fish market if you want one, then drive you back to your hotel in Tokyo.

This is a private trip. Only your group is in the van. Your driver-guide speaks English, Urdu and Hindi, and can adjust the pace or skip a stop if you prefer. We drive; you do not touch a train or a timetable all day.

One fixed price for the whole group of up to six people, not per person.

If a brewery or factory is closed on your date we will tell you before the tour and you can choose a substitute stop of the same type or a full refund of your booking, guaranteed.

Flexible day

This is your private tour, so the day is flexible. If you want to skip a stop, stay longer somewhere or add a place nearby, write it in the booking notes or tell your driver-guide on the day and we will adjust the route where time allows.