Putting a Tamper-Detection Tag on a ¥50,000 Sake: Hakutsuru's Aim Goes Beyond Counterfeiting

What Was Adopted

SBI Traceability announced on August 31 that its traceability service SHIMENAWA had been adopted by Hakutsuru Sake Brewing. The products covered are two variants of Chotokusen Hakutsuru Tenku Fukurozuri Junmai Daiginjo, made with Yamada Nishiki and Hakutsuru Nishiki rice. Both are 720ml bottles with a reference retail price of ¥50,000 before tax, roughly $320 at ¥155 to the dollar. Hakutsuru adopted a 29% rice polishing ratio for the first time in its history and used the fukurozuri method, collecting only the droplets that fall naturally without applied pressure. These sit at the top of the Tenku brand and went on sale nationwide on September 4. The mechanism embeds a tamper-detection NFC tag in the reverse of the bottle's seal; without needing a dedicated app, a consumer holding a smartphone to the tag sees a digital signature confirming the product is genuine and whether it has been opened. Display languages cover Japanese, English and Chinese in both traditional and simplified script — a design plainly built for export. Access information passing through the tag is recorded and managed on a blockchain.

What "Visibility of Legitimate Distribution" Actually Means

Read the press release closely and the problem statement is not confined to counterfeits. Alongside the need to address counterfeiting and illicit distribution as overseas demand grows, it explicitly lists insufficient data on post-purchase consumer behavior and an inability to grasp how products are actually handled by overseas restaurants and liquor retailers. Earlier deployments corroborate the pattern. For cutlery maker Tojiro, a company representative has explained that beyond counterfeiting, the trigger for adoption was concern that products were appearing in discount outlets where they were never meant to be sold, damaging the brand. What SHIMENAWA supplies, then, is both an authentication technology and a means for manufacturers to observe distribution abroad that they cannot otherwise see. The phrase "visibility of legitimate distribution" carries within it the capture of parallel imports and leakage into unintended sales channels. Consumer-facing authentication is the entry point; for the company, the value lies in the distribution data behind it.

Technical Design: Choosing a Permissioned Chain

The distinguishing technical feature is the choice of base layer. SHIMENAWA runs on Corda, an enterprise blockchain designed for inter-company transactions and developed by a consortium of more than 350 financial institutions, regulators, central banks and system vendors; SBI has led its domestic rollout through SBI R3 Japan. Choosing a permissioned chain rather than a public one says a great deal about the use case. What consumers need is not transferability of ownership but tamper-resistance of records, while for the company, confidentiality of distribution data matters. On the development side, digglue built the traceability application and IT FORCE the consumer-facing one, with the branded NFC tag jointly developed with Uni Tag. SBI Traceability itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of SBI Holdings, established in April 2021 with capital of ¥100 million. It has extended deployments beyond breweries such as Asahi Shuzo (Dassai), Shimizu Seizaburo Shoten (Zaku) and Imayotsukasa (Nishikigoi) into cutlery and jewelry, and states that usage rates are set according to the sales scale of the covered product.

The Numbers, and What Comes Next

The market context deserves specifics. According to the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, 2025 sake exports rose 5.5% year on year to ¥45.88 billion by value and 8.0% to 33,500 kiloliters by volume, reaching a record 81 countries and territories. The unit price is the striking figure: average export value per liter reached ¥1,368, roughly 1.8 times the ¥771 recorded a decade earlier. Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau exceed ¥2,000, and China, the top destination, sits at ¥1,998. The Tenku Fukurozuri, at ¥50,000 before tax for 720ml, works out to roughly ¥69,000 per liter — about fifty times the average export unit price. At that price point, the opportunity cost of being unable to prove authenticity easily exceeds the cost of tags and infrastructure. A further element deserves attention: the initiative sits on a longer trajectory. Since January 2023, SBI Traceability has participated in the RWA Token Working Group of the Digital Asset Co-Creation Consortium hosted by Progmat, with 282 member organizations, jointly examining token business schemes linked to SHIMENAWA. The findings published in January 2025 set out that for a token bound one-to-one with a physical asset after production, ownership and the depositor's position must be represented in the token, with terms of use and technical measures designed so that token transfer constitutes transfer of possession by instruction under the Civil Code as well as transfer of that position. In other words, binding physical goods to digital records via NFC tags and blockchain is positioned as the prerequisite infrastructure for real-world asset tokens.

Business Development Insights

1. Authentication is the entry point; the revenue lies in distribution data. What the consumer receives is a one-time confirmation of genuineness; what the manufacturer receives is continuous data on which country, which outlet, and when a bottle was opened. Where Japanese financial institutions build this kind of mechanism into support for regional producers' overseas expansion or into business assessment, positioning it as a management information platform that makes overseas sell-through visible — rather than as a counterfeiting countermeasure — makes the value proposition clearer to client companies. The corollary is that products without sufficient sales volume cannot recover the investment, so adoption polarizes toward high-unit-price goods or high-volume distribution.
2. It is a useful reference case for matching chain type to purpose. That this deployment uses Corda rather than a public chain refutes the simplification that blockchain means public blockchain. Where the requirement is tamper-resistance of records and sharing among identified parties, not free transfer or verification by arbitrary third parties, a permissioned design is the rational answer. When financial institutions propose blockchain to corporate clients, making "is transferability of the asset a requirement" the first branch point in the analysis transfers directly from this case.
3. The prerequisites for tokenizing movable property are being built out on the physical-tag side first. What the joint study with Progmat established is that for a token bound one-to-one to a physical asset to work, its transfer must be constructed as transfer of possession under the Civil Code. For that construction to function, the token and the physical object must be reliably bound in the first place, and it is the tamper-detection tag that secures that binding. For firms considering tokenization of movables such as aged spirits, whisky, or watches, the reliability of the physical binding point is as much a rate-limiting condition as the legal scheme, if not more. A track record deploying authentication tags already in production is therefore an asset that can determine whether entry into this field is viable.

Sources

Project Design Online, "SBI Traceability and Hakutsuru Sake Brewing verify sake authenticity with NFC tags and blockchain," August 31, 2026 https://www.projectdesign.jp/articles/news/ceac55cf-5fdc-43fb-9507-cd214e957153 PR TIMES / SBI Traceability, "Hakutsuru Sake Brewing adopts SBI Traceability's SHIMENAWA to protect the value of its premium sake brand," August 31, 2026 https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000047.000100112.html SHIMENAWA service site https://service.sbi-shimenawa.com/ SBI Traceability, "On the development of SHIMENAWA, a traceability service using the Corda blockchain platform," September 27, 2021 https://www.sbitraceability.co.jp/news/news_20210927_02.html Hakutsuru official online shop, "Chotokusen Hakutsuru Tenku Fukurozuri Junmai Daiginjo Yamada Nishiki 720ml" https://www.e-hakutsuru.com/products/19440 nomooo, "29% polishing ratio: Chotokusen Hakutsuru Tenku Fukurozuri Junmai Daiginjo launches," August 2026 https://www.nomooo.jp/article/2026/08/29/18849.html SBI Holdings, "Publication of findings on RWA tokens linked to the SHIMENAWA traceability platform," January 22, 2025 https://www.sbigroup.co.jp/news/pr/2025/0122_15194.html Progmat, Tatsuya Saito, "A quick explainer: what are traceable RWA tokens that accelerate overseas expansion?" 2025 https://note.com/tatsu_s123/n/ne4173bf52072 nippon.com, "Sake exports reach ¥45.9 billion in 2025: China tops by value, France and Korea set records," February 2026 https://www.nippon.com/ja/japan-data/h02706/ PR TIMES / Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, "2025 sake exports exceed the prior year in both value and volume," February 2026 https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000104.000083559.html WEB3 Chihou Sousei Net, "Bringing the genuine article of Japan to the world at a fair price: SBI Traceability on its motivation and case studies," December 2025 https://www.web3-chihou-sousei.net/interview/shimenawa-2/ SBI R3 Japan, "Supply chain use cases" https://sbir3japan.co.jp/usecases/supplychain-cases/