Ever since it opened for business at the dawn of the Meiji Era, Fundodai Goyo, Inc. has been making high quality soy sauce and miso products, earning a national reputation for excellence and growing steadily throughout the years to become the number one producer in Kumamoto. In addition to their regular product lineup, they have also produced exceptional products to commemorate the changing times. For example, in hopes of promoting Kyushu and Kumamoto soy sauce to the world, they created a specially brewed sweet premium soy sauce (authentically brewed soy sauce) called "Heisei."

In the year of Japan's transition to the Reiwa Era, and to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the company's founding in 1869, Fundodai Goyo, Inc. wanted to take a bold step, creating a product which would reinterpret soy sauce as a condiment and break away from received notions of soy sauce bound to Japanese cuisine, a product squarely aimed at an international audience and easy to use in Western cuisine.

Their solution was clear.

Tōmei Shōyu: Transparent Soy Sauce

Through a specially developed method, Fundodai Goyo, Inc. succeeded in creating a transparent soy sauce which still has all the rich and full flavor of honjōzō shōyu 本醸造醤油 authentically brewed soy sauce.

Why transparent?

At first, a transparent soy sauce may seem like a frivolous invention for a non-beverage product. After all, novelty factor aside, the transparent drink trend of recent years (Suntory's clear milk tea, for example) was born out of a desire to comply with the unspoken expectation in Japanese business culture (especially in traditional companies) that anything other than water at the office looks immature. This obviously doesn't apply to soy sauce. But on closer examination, the advantages of transparent soy sauce come into focus.

Transparent soy sauce has advantages both on aesthetic and practical levels:

Highlighting your ingredients

Perhaps the most radical advantage of transparent soy sauce is that it changes the appearance of soy-based dishes without changing their flavor profile. This change, however, is not an addition or alteration of color -- an artificial change -- but rather a return to nature. In other words, when you cook with Fundodai Goyo's Transparent Soy Sauce, you can bring out your ingredients' true colors.

For example, consider tsuke-maguro 漬けマグロ soy sauce-marinated raw tuna. Here is a stock photograph of the conventional version:

And here is the same dish using Transparent Soy Sauce:

The use of Transparent Soy Sauce creates a fresh appearance. Moreover, from the marbling to the texture of the fish, the natural colors of the tuna are easier to see.

As another example, consider Japanese style pasta, typically soy sauce based. Here is a stock photograph of soy sauce-based pasta with shimeji mushrooms and tuna:

And here is a soy sauce pasta using Transparent Soy Sauce:

As many pasta aficionados know, good quality pasta retains a warm, yellow color after cooking, reflecting the quality of semolina flour and high standards of manufacture. Using Transparent Soy Sauce allows you to highlight this quality, all the while retaining the taste profile required of this dish. Of course, what this also implies is that you can add soy sauce flavor to any pasta or risotto dish without changing its color.

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Enjoy the gap between appearance and taste

Another advantage of Transparent Soy Sauce is that you can enhance your dishes by intentionally creating a surprise effect. In other words, your dishes will taste differently than expected from their appearance.

For example, consider this carpaccio of red snapper with Transparent Soy Sauce gelee:

When you serve this dish to your guests, tell them they don't need to add any sauce or seasoning. They will surely be surprised and delighted to discover that soy sauce flavor is already there.

In the same way that a pinch of salt can be added to ice cream to enhance its flavors, you can also add Transparent Soy Sauce to produce an enhancing effect.

As you can see, this simple dessert has now been enhanced without changing the natural color of the ice cream.

Creating stylish and original dishes

Transparent Soy Sauce gives free reign to your creativity, allowing you to create original dishes. For example, a Transparent Soy Sauce espuma with freshly milled pepper can add visual interest and serve as a flavor accent on a plate of roast beef:

Fewer stains

On the practical level, a transparent soy sauce offers obvious advantages when it comes to stains. A piece of sushi dipped in soy sauce escaping from your chopsticks and dropping onto your clothes (or even worse, into a dish of soy sauce), soy based salad dressing splattering on your collar, soy-based sauce splattering when you slurp noodle dishes. All of these situations either require a quick stain fix or, depending on how bad it is, a cycle in the washing machine or a trip to the cleaners for professional assistance. When you use Transparent Soy Sauce, however, you'll have far less trouble in these situations, if any trouble at all.

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Product Details

• Name: 透明醤油 Tōmei Shōyu (Transparent Soy Sauce)
• Product Code: 166009
• JAN Code: 4902626166091
• Content: 100 ml
• Unit size: 44 mm X 44 mm X 132 mm
• Case size: 194 mm X 146 mm X 143 mm
• Ingredients: Soy sauce distillate, salt, brewed vinegar, seasoning (amino acids, others), trehalose [a sugar], alcohol (may contain soy beans and wheat)
• Weight (unit / case): 245 g / 3.1 kg
• Expiration: 8 months
• Price: 540 JPY for 1, 3,240 JPY for 6, 6,480 JPY for 12 (including tax)

How to order

If you'd like to purchase Fundodai Goyo's Transparent Soy Sauce, you can order it from their online store here if you would like it delivered to an address in Japan. You can also buy it outside of Japan through the Rakuten Global Express store.

Contact information

• Company Name: 株式会社フンドーダイ五葉 | Fundodai Goyo, Inc.
• Address: 〒861-5511 熊本県熊本市北区楠野町972 | 972 Kusunomachi Kita-ku Kumamoto, Kumamoto Prefecture 861-5511
• Telephone: 096-245-0111
• Email: info@fdgoyo.jp (Contact: 古閑 Ms. Koga)