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This article ran in the Boulder Daily Camera on June 22, 2003.

Catching scents of Japan

300-year-old incense maker has home in Boulder

By Gil Asakawa, For the Camera
June 22, 2003

Do you want to see $500 go up in smoke? Just light up a tightly-wrapped bundle of 35 sticks of "Sho-Kaku" incense.

If the price is too steep, you can buy another bundle of incense, at a much more affordable $2.50. The difference between the two is that the less-expensive is mass-produced, while the other is hand-made. Both are made with secret family fragrance recipes.

If the price is too steep, you can buy another bundle of incense, at a much more affordable $2.50. The difference between the two is that the less-expensive is mass-produced, while the other is hand-made. Both are made with secret family fragrance recipes.

And both are sold by Shoyeido, a 300-year-old incense maker based in Kyoto, which has its North American headquarters in a nondescript warehouse in east Boulder.

Shoyeido has been in Boulder since 1991, when it first moved into a cramped space off the Pearl Street Mall. The company now owns its building and leases part of it. Jeff Banach, the U.S. operations manager, says Boulder was chosen by the company for its distribution and marketing office because of the city's openness to holistic and natural lifestyles.

Shipments from Japan arrive monthly for Banach to supply Shoyeido's more than 4,000 retailers in the United States and Canada, who run the gamut of Whole Foods and other health-food outlets to traditional Japanese shops. Its best retail outlet is Asakichi, a company with three Northern California stores, including one in San Francisco's Japantown, that sell Japanese antiques and arts and crafts.

Banach estimates the Boulder facility sold 30 million sticks of incense last year, and that's just a sliver of the company's sales at home, where he says the brand is ubiquitous and available in "every temple in Japan."

In the United States, the name is still relatively unknown because consumers buy incense without much regard to specific brands. Most incense sold in the United States is made by coating bamboo sticks, Banach says, and is popular because it's inexpensive and has a strong odor.

For some consumers that's OK, he notes. "What you smell in dorm rooms when the bongwater's spilled is really strong stuff. That's our competition — we work to overcome that stereotype."

For connoisseurs, incense on a stick is spoiled by the burning smell of wood. Shoyeido's stick incense is extruded like thin noodles and dried to the right stiffness so it stands on its own. Some of its products are shaped into cones or even tiny fans.

Shoyeido, which was founded by Rokubei Moritsune Hata in 1705 and is now run by the 12th generation of his family, creates different fragrances by mixing some basic ingredients — myrrh, star anise, cinnamon, frankincense, patchouli, sandalwood and aloeswood among them — into various combinations. But the exact recipes are closely held family secrets, Banach says.

Incense probably has been around as long as humans have had fire and noticed that some wood gave off a nicer scent than others. There have been records of early incense use for centuries throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. More recently it's become associated most with Buddhism and Asian cultures.

"It's key to the environmental use of ambient aromatic air," says Laraine Kyle, a Boulder aromatherapist and co-founder of the Institute of Integrative Aromatherapy, who believes incense goes hand-in-hand with aromatherapy, massage, meditation or just working at the computer. "Incense lends itself really well to creating a calming environment. It's a wonderful antidote to stress."

Kyle discovered Shoyeido incense years ago and was its first distributor in Boulder even before the company set up shop here.

"When I went to Japan and attended a 'Koh Doh' ceremony, I recognized their quality," she says.

The Koh Doh, which celebrates incense, is a lesser-known cousin of the celebrated Japanese tea ceremony. In Japan, Shoyeido's reputation is enhanced by such traditional formal settings, but here in the United States Banach is trying to market Shoyeido's incense as a household fragrance like scented candles, not just incense in the traditional sense as a religious or spiritual accompaniment.

"It's not just for meditation or in the dorm room," he says.

But he adds that the rise in popularity of new age lifestyle pursuits such as aromatherapy have helped Shoyeido's market grow.

"When the aromatherapy and the natural products industry took off in the '90s, we followed right along," he says. Since Sept. 11, 2001, though, sales have been somewhat flat because many of Shoyeido's outlets — including the one in San Francisco's Japantown — rely on tourism sales. The bright spot in sales has been the company's Web site (www.shoyeido.com), which has tripled the Boulder office's retail sales since it was launched in 1999.

Shoyeido custom-produces some fragrances specifically for Western customers, with names like "Peace" and "Inspiration" from the U.S.-only "Angellic" line or "Ruby-Strength" and "Amethyst-Balance" from the "Jewel" series.

The Boulder staff, which includes only one Japanese, senior vice president Yuji Matsumura, also repackages traditional lines that are popular in Japan into combinations aimed at Americans. Sometimes, Banach says, the process of just translating the names of fragrances from their imprecise Japanese meanings to catchy English words can be difficult.

For instance, Banach's counterparts in Japan suggested "protection" as a translation for one fragrance, but he managed to dissuade the company from using a name that conjured up the image of condoms.

"It takes a while to hash out the most poetic names," he says with a chuckle.