Hamadaya (濱田屋)

Hamadaya has made goma-dofu, the silken sesame-tofu substitute central to Koyasan's Buddhist vegetarian shojin ryori cuisine, since the mid-Meiji period, and the shop is now run by the fifth generation of the founding Hamada family. The recipe is deliberately narrow: hand-peeled white sesame seeds, one hundred percent Yoshino kuzu (arrowroot starch, with no substitute starches used), and spring water drawn from the Maruyama Benzaiten shrine on the mountain - three ingredients, no shortcuts. Production carries an explicitly devotional character rather than being treated as ordinary food manufacturing: staff recite the Heart Sutra once and a mantra three times during the process, and a portion of the tofu is offered to Kobo Daishi, the temple complex's founder, as part of the site's daily religious observances, framed on the shop's own site as work done at the foot of the saint himself. The shop sells the tofu fresh daily from its Koyasan storefront in square and round cuts, plain or in a matcha version, alongside smaller in-store portions finished with wasabi-soy or sweetened with powdered sugar. It is a narrow specialty - one dish, essentially, refined across roughly a century and a half - rather than a general confectioner, and it stays tied directly to the temple town's religious calendar rather than operating as a standalone souvenir shop.