On the twenty-second of December 2005, Satsuma was designated a geographical indication for alcoholic beverages. Iki, Kuma, and Ryukyu had been designated in 1995, so this came a full decade behind the first group of spirits to be protected this way in Japan.

The conditions are set out in detail and they are all about place. The sweet potato must be grown in Kagoshima, with Amami city and the Oshima district excluded from the area. The koji must be made from rice or from Kagoshima sweet potato. The water must be drawn within the prefecture.

Fermentation and distillation both have to happen in Kagoshima, and the distillation has to be done in a pot still rather than a continuous one.

If the spirit is aged, that happens in the prefecture too, and it is bottled there as well. The crop it depends on grows on the shirasu, the free-draining plateaus of pale volcanic ash that cover much of this prefecture and are good for very little else, which is why sweet potato became the crop here in the first place. The protection works the same way as Bordeaux for wine or Scotch for whisky. Every one of those clauses exists to refuse something from outside the area. A place name, written out as a set of clauses.