SHOYEIDO: A Factory Inheriting the Hata Family’s Incense Craft, and Sasaya Connecting Generations

Within different cultures, we often rediscover our own.
Masataka Hata — 12th-Generation Head of Shoyeido (2024)

SHOYEIDO is a long-established incense house that has continued making incense in Kyoto for 300 years or more. Its history has not been sustained simply by keeping everything the same. It has transferred craftspeople’s skills to machines, created shops that introduce it to new customers, and completed, in a new generation, incense sticks envisioned by the previous one. Inherited quality is intertwined with decisions to change how it reaches people.

Sasaya, introduced in 2026, embodies that continuity in a single incense stick. The 12th-generation head’s wish to make slender incense with a delicate fragrance took form in the era of the 13th, Motoaki Hata. Fragrance, manufacturing techniques, the sourcing of ingredients, and packaging graphics: succession at Shoyeido means not separating these elements, but bringing them into a form that allows incense-making to continue.

Key Facts
The Founders and the Origins of the Brand
The Brand’s Approach
References

Key Facts

Founded: Around 1705, when Sasaya opened for business in Kyoto
First head: Moriyoshi Rokuzaemon Hata; incense-making became a full-fledged activity under the Shoyeido name during the time of the third generation, Moritsune
Incorporation: Established as Shoyeido Yugen Kaisha in 1942; reorganized as a kabushiki kaisha in 1995
Current head: Motoaki Hata, 13th generation; became representative director and president in 2025
Official website: Shoyeido Incense

The Founders and the Origins of the Brand

From Sasaya Around 1705 to the Third Generation’s Incense-Making

Shoyeido began as a business called Sasaya, established in Kyoto by Moriyoshi Rokuzaemon Hata, who had been a village head in Tanba-Sasayama. This was around 1705, the second year of the Hoei era. During the time of the third-generation head, Moritsune, who served as mondo at the imperial palace, the business became fully engaged in incense-making under the Shoyeido name. The mondo was responsible for managing the palace’s water and ice.

The business of obtaining incense ingredients from overseas involved uncertainty about their arrival. Ships sometimes sank in the trade conducted through Nagasaki, and the family home burned during the upheavals at the end of the shogunate. The Hata family kept the business going through rebuilding and succession problems.

In 1897, the company developed cone-shaped “kosuiko,” or perfumed incense, suited to ways of life abroad, and exported it to the United States. It became a yugen kaisha in 1942, establishing a structure to preserve the family business amid wartime constraints on workers, materials, and equipment. In 1990, it established a U.S. company in Boulder, Colorado. Kyoto’s incense-making has been supported by relationships overseas, both in obtaining ingredients and in bringing fragrance to customers.

A Factory to Carry Forward Skills: What the 12th-Generation Head, Masataka Hata, Envisioned in the Workshop

After graduating from university, Masataka Hata spent a year in Britain and joined Shoyeido in 1977. Rather than sending him to train at another company, his father chose the incense workshop as his first assignment, to learn manufacturing. Two craftspeople there were in their fifties and one was in their forties.

Masataka’s idea was to make it possible to produce, by machine, products that these senior craftspeople would approve while they were still active. It was not certain that the company could hire as many young people as it needed to inherit the skills. The goal was not simply to increase output, but to transfer the quality the craftspeople judged to be good into the next manufacturing system.

It took approximately ten years to turn the plan into a factory. First, two warehouses in Kameoka were moved to Nagaokakyo and consolidated. Alongside manufacturing, the company reconsidered the arrangement of warehouses in which stacked ingredients had made older boxes difficult to identify. The Nagaokakyo factory was completed in 1989.

There is no rule that handwork is better.
Masataka Hata (2020)

Masataka believed that both the workshop and the factory could produce good quality. At the same time, handwork had a role because some ingredients could not be handled by machines. Making incense that people would welcome into their lives included considering its burning speed and ease of use. He changed the manufacturing methods while preserving that judgment.

Meeting New Customers through lisn and Experiences Overseas

In 1989, the company also opened lisn, a concept shop in Kyoto’s Kitayama district. Masataka wanted to meet customers who did not yet have a fixed image of incense. When asked what the products were, staff would answer with the English word “incense.” By stepping away from terminology readily associated only with Buddhist rituals, the shop created an entry point for enjoying fragrance in everyday life.

Customers who had long used Shoyeido and those encountering fragrance for the first time at lisn: maintaining points of contact with both expanded the ways the company could communicate the value of its products. Lisn Aoyama opened in 2002, and the Kyoto shop moved from Kitayama in 2004.

Overseas, too, Masataka combined explanation with experience to convey incense culture. His first visit to Boston came about because a private collector with beautiful maki-e lacquer boxes for incense games was looking for someone who could explain how to use them. Since then, he repeatedly provided opportunities to encounter incense at the Japan Society of Boston and elsewhere.

At an event at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2017, after speaking about the history and ingredients of incense, he demonstrated how to prepare ash and appreciate incense, offering participants two scents. Monko, or “listening to incense,” means carefully savoring the fragrance of aromatic wood and other materials. For Masataka, perspectives from people in other cultures were also opportunities to learn anew the value of his own.

Creating Places to Share Fragrance: The Path to Motoaki Hata, the 13th Generation

Motoaki Hata, too, has considered how to reach people encountering fragrance for the first time. At Kunjyukan, opened beside the Kyoto main store in 2018, Motoaki created an experience space that people could enter casually. Motoaki believed even art exhibitions not directly related to incense could bring people in and prompt them to notice fragrance.

“Kaoru Gacha,” introduced in 2022, was an idea from employees. At first, there was uncertainty over how to install the capsule-toy machine, and the idea was once put aside. After considering its design and location, they placed it where it would attract attention, creating a way for people not ordinarily interested in scented sachets to pick one up. The intention was to create a point of contact that people who discovered the fragrance might remember again later in life.

In 2025, following Masataka’s death, Motoaki became representative director and president and the 13th-generation head. With Sasaya, launched on July 15 of the following year, 2026, Motoaki was able to release, as the new head, the fine incense sticks the predecessor had wanted. The predecessor’s initial assessment of the fragrance, a naming suggestion from an adviser of the same generation, and blending by the managing director representing the next generation: judgments from several generations came together in one product.

The Brand’s Approach

Creating Layers of Fragrance through Ingredient Selection and Blending

Shoyeido’s formula books have been handed down through the generations, and its blenders preserve the fragrances. In 2024, Motoaki likened Shoyeido’s scents to an orchestra of overlapping sounds. The idea is to create, through blending, the richness that emerges when multiple materials come together.

Many of those ingredients arrive from China, India, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Directly examining their aromatic character and building relationships with local people are also part of making incense. While valuing the delicacy of natural fragrance materials, Shoyeido continues working to create new fragrances by combining them with the impressions of synthetic materials. Depending on the materials, it uses either the workshop at its Kyoto headquarters or the manufacturing site in Nagaokakyo.

Kneading and Drying: Giving the Blended Fragrance the Form of a Stick

To make incense sticks, powdered ingredients are weighed and blended, then tabuko is added as a binder. Tabuko helps bring the kneaded ingredients together into the shape of an incense stick. After uniform mixing, water is added and the mixture is kneaded, then extruded through a mold with fine holes to form it.

Kneading proceeds with attention to changes in temperature and humidity. The soft, extruded incense is moved onto boards, aligned without gaps, and trimmed at the ends. In the drying room, temperature and humidity are maintained and air is circulated as the incense dries slowly over several days. Even after the materials have been mixed, the work of controlling their form and drying continues.

Craftspeople’s judgment and machine forming are connected within this process. What is passed down is not only a formula but also the skill to understand the state of the kneaded materials and the character of a single stick as it will be used.

Engaging with Agarwood and Sandalwood through Sasaya’s Fineness

The name Sasaya combines the original business name with the idea of a fine, delicate fragrance. It turned the slender Kyoto incense sticks of earlier times, which the previous head had spoken about, into a product that could be manufactured continuously. For Shoyeido, which has refined the rich layering of blends, directly engaging with the aromatic woods themselves—agarwood and sandalwood—represents a new development.

“Dan” expresses the fragrance of sandalwood directly.
Motoaki Hata — 13th-Generation Head of Shoyeido (2026)

With Dan, Motoaki aimed to spread through a room the sweetness of sandalwood (in Japanese), which can be sensed by bringing the nose close even without heating it. Making the sticks fine was intended to draw out gentle smoke and a delicate fragrance.

Jin carries a memory from examining agarwood materials overseas. Opening one bag brought back the time Motoaki spent as a small child offering incense at the family Buddhist altar with Motoaki’s grandmother. The product connects with the depth of an aromatic wood that holds nostalgia for Motoaki.

As the circumstances surrounding aromatic woods change, choosing ingredients that would allow production to continue was another challenge for Sasaya. Motoaki believes that a product can endure when three conditions are met: the ingredients can be secured, the technical ability to manufacture it exists, and users accept it. The aim was not only fineness or a fragrant impression, but a form that could continue to reach people in the future.

Sasaya’s Packaging: Motoaki’s Grandfather’s Calligraphy and Meiji-Era Designs

The lettering of “Sasaya” on the packaging is the calligraphy of Motoaki’s grandfather, the president two generations before Motoaki. The packaging also incorporates designs from Meiji-era catalogs, including incense burners and a fan-shaped panel bearing a greeting.

Rather than decorating with old designs for nostalgia alone, the packaging overlays what earlier generations sought to bring their customers with what the company wants to convey today. Sasaya, the name at its beginnings; the previous head’s wish for fine incense sticks; Motoaki’s grandfather’s lettering; present-day manufacturing and blending: bringing these together in one stick and one package reveals Shoyeido’s approach to making things.