Tora Shoyu Kinira Shoyu (とら醤油 黄ニラしょうゆ)

The story behind it

Have you met kinira? These are golden Chinese chives, grown shielded from light so they blanch, and Okayama Prefecture accounts for roughly 70% of the national crop. It is a labor-intensive premium vegetable that the prefecture has grown since around 1872, and something close to a local treasure.

Tora Shoyu, founded in 1860 at the very end of the Edo period in Sakatsu, Kurashiki, a place blessed with water, soybeans, and salt, put those yellow chives into a bottle of shoyu (soy sauce). It is an all-purpose shoyu, combining honjozo shoyu with Okayama-grown kinira and extracts of sea bream, kombu, and shiitake. The idea reportedly came from a customer who was struck by a dish of sea bream meuniere topped with kinira.

After release, word spread on social media that it was almost too good on rice with raw egg, and it became a local hit selling around 30,000 bottles a year. A new regional flavor, born where an Okayama field met an Okayama brewery.