The medicine peddlers

The prefecture tells the story this way. In 1683 Maeda Masatoshi, second lord of the Toyama domain, learned the formula for a stomach remedy called hangontan. His teacher was a physician of Okayama, Mandai Jōkan. In 1690, inside Edo Castle, a fellow daimyo was seized with stomach pain. Masatoshi gave him hangontan and the pain stopped at once. The lords who saw it asked him to sell the pills across their domains, and Toyama's medicine trade began.

The prefecture presents the tale as tradition, and so should you. What is not in doubt is what followed.

Senyō-kōri

The system the peddlers built is called senyō-kōri: use first, profit later. A salesman visits a household and leaves a box of medicines, the okigusuri box, as the family's home pharmacy. The family uses what it needs. Months later the salesman returns, counts what is gone, restocks the box, and only then collects payment for what was used. Five steps, and the prefecture still prints them as a numbered list.

For a farming household with no doctor within reach and no cash to stock several remedies in advance, it solved everything. The peddler took the risk; the customer paid for results. The salesmen walked the country on foot with their stock in a wicker pack called a yanagi-gōri. They brought gifts, woodblock prints and paper balloons, and the prefecture says plainly that the gifts were about trust.

The customer paid only for what had already worked. Everything else about the business follows from that.

What a sales network does to a region

The peddlers needed to read, write and keep accounts, so about three hundred years ago Toyama set up terakoya schools to teach them. About a hundred years ago it founded a pharmacy college, now part of the University of Toyama. The money came home. The prefecture records that its banks and its electricity company were founded on medicine capital, and credits the trade with modernising the whole regional economy.

The industry is still here, and still large. Toyama has around 80 pharmaceutical makers and more than 100 plants. Production in 2024 was ¥633.5 billion. By production per head of population, number of plants and number of plant workers, the prefecture ranks first in Japan. In 2023 Toyama was fourth among prefectures by total value, behind Saitama, Tochigi and Shizuoka. Medicines make up 12.2% of everything the prefecture manufactures.

The box itself is ordinary: cold remedies, stomach medicines, eye drops, the things a household reaches for most. The prefecture notes that boxes now sit in offices as well as homes. The modern industry is different in kind. A change in the pharmaceutical law in April 2005 freed drug companies to outsource manufacturing entirely, and Toyama's plants invested heavily and took the contracts. Much of what the prefecture makes today carries someone else's label.

The box has not gone away either. National production of medicines for the box trade was ¥2.09 billion in 2024. ¥1.2 billion of that, nearly six in ten yen, was made in Toyama. "Toyama no kusuri" has been a registered collective trademark since 2007, and the prefecture has a mascot called Kusurin.

Rolling pills in Toyama City

The place to see the trade at human scale is Ikedaya Yasubei Shōten, a wooden shop at 1-3-5 Tsutsumimachi-dōri in Toyama City. Take the tram from Toyama Station towards Minami-Toyama, about nine minutes to the Nishimachi stop, and walk a minute or two. The shop still makes and sells Etchū hangontan, and a pharmacist at the counter will advise on the traditional remedies.

The draw is the free pill-rolling demonstration. Staff use an old wooden pill press, and you can try it yourself; it takes about ten minutes and needs no booking. The shop is open 9:00 to 18:00 and closes only over New Year. Upstairs, the restaurant Yakuto serves lunches built on medicinal herbs from 11:30 to 14:00, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Two museums, if you want the full story

The Toyama City Baiyaku Museum, in the folk-arts village at Anyōbō, shows the peddlers' packs, pill-making tools and the prints they gave away. It opens 9:00 to 17:00 and closes only over New Year. The Kanaoka residence in Shinjō-machi is an early-Meiji drug wholesaler's shop, open 9:30 to 17:00 and closed Tuesdays. The statue of Masatoshi, the lord with the stomach pills, stands in the castle park in the centre of town.