Baieido

Baieido traces its roots to the Muromachi period, when founder Kakuuemon Yamatoya worked as a wholesaler of medicinal herbs in the port city of Sakai, just south of Osaka. In 1657 his descendant took the name Jinkoya Sakubei and narrowed the business to incense ingredients and incense sticks — the point at which the house dates its founding, making it one of the oldest continuously operating incense makers in the Sakai tradition, a rival lineage to Kyoto's better-known houses.

Sakai's status as a major trading port put the city at the center of Japan's incense-ingredient trade for centuries, and Baieido's stock-in-trade grew out of that access to imported aromatic woods. The house's best-known incense today is Kobunboku ('plum blossom'), a blend that has remained in continuous production for more than a century and still anchors its catalogue.

Now in its fourth century, Baieido runs a shopfront and showroom in Sakai alongside an online shop, Kokoudo, and continues to sell both everyday and temple-grade incense sticks made to the same ingredient-based approach the Sakubei name was built on.