Ginza Kimuraya (銀座木村家 / 木村屋總本店)

Ginza Kimuraya traces its origin to 1869, when a former samurai left unemployed by the Meiji Restoration, Yasubei Kimura, met a baker who had trained under a Dutch resident of Nagasaki's Dejima trading post and opened a Western-style bread shop, first called Bun'eido and renamed Kimuraya the following year. In 1874, Kimura and his son Eizaburo adapted the sake-yeast starter used for a steamed bun called sakamanju to leaven bread in a way suited to Japanese palates — the company's own history dates the result, anpan, a bun filled with sweetened azuki bean paste, to that year.

The bun's reputation was made the following spring. On April 4, 1875, Kimura presented Emperor Meiji with a sakura anpan studded with a salted cherry blossom sourced from Yoshino, and the emperor and Empress Shoken reportedly asked that it continue to be served to them afterward — the same date is now marked in Japan as Anpan Day, and Kimuraya's own corporate history page recounts the audience and the flower detail directly.

The Ginza flagship still occupies a multi-floor building at 4-5-7 Ginza: a bakery on the ground floor, a café upstairs, and a Western-style grill above that, run today as a roughly 95-employee company making close to 130 products, some of them seasonal. By its own and outside accounts it remains Japan's oldest Western-style bakery still trading under a name it chose for itself in 1870.