Handa Red Brick Building (former Kabuto Beer Factory) Main

A Five-Storey Brick Tower in a Vinegar Town

Above the two-storey brick base of the Handa Red Brick Building, one block climbs to five storeys and breaks the skyline of this small port on Aichi's Chita Peninsula. That vertical block, completed in 1898 (Meiji 31), is the original main wing of a beer factory built by Marusan Brewery, the maker of Kabuto Beer. The lower floors held fermentation and cold-storage rooms; the tall section carried the company offices and the brewing engineer's rooms. It was the first structure of the complex to go up, and it set the architectural language for everything that followed.

The town was, and still is, better known for vinegar and sake. Marusan was founded by Nakano Matazaemon, the fourth head of the Nakano vinegar house that became today's Mizkan, together with his nephew Morita Zenpei, who later started the Shikishima bakery known now as Pasco. Their decision to build a German-style brewery here, rather than in a major city, is part of what makes the surviving factory unusual.

Why the Main Wing Matters

The main wing was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2004 (registration number 23-0134), under the criterion that recognises a building as a model of its type. Meiji-era brick industrial buildings survive in small numbers, and brick breweries scarcely at all, which gives the wing much of its documentary weight.

The design is credited to Tsumaki Yorinaka, ranked with Tatsuno Kingo and Katayama Tokuma among the three leading architects of the Meiji period. Tsumaki went on to shape the decorative work of Nihonbashi bridge in Tokyo and buildings at the Yokohama waterfront; the Handa factory is thought to be the oldest of his works still standing. Look closely at the windows and the hierarchy is deliberate: the lower openings are comb-shaped arches finished with a keystone, while the fifth-floor windows step up to semicircular arches set with springer stones and keystones.

Brewing drove the engineering. In the fermentation and storage rooms the second floor and the ceiling above were built as fireproof floors, formed by filling the spaces between I-shaped iron beams with brick arches. The outer walls were doubled into cavity walls, trapping air to hold a steady temperature and humidity through the seasons. These were solutions to the practical problem of keeping beer cool in a Japanese summer, and they remain legible in the fabric today.

What to Look For on a Visit

Stand back on the north side first, where the brick face still carries the scars of machine-gun fire from a P-51 Mustang during the Handa air raids of 1945. The factory had by then been requisitioned as a warehouse for the Nakajima Aircraft works, and beer production had stopped; the pitted brick is one of the few war traces left on a registered heritage building in the region. After the war the premises served for a time as a cornstarch plant before the city took the building into its care.

Inside, the ground floor now holds exhibition rooms, a shop and the Re-BRICK cafe and beer hall. Kabuto Beer, which took a gold medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition and later vanished when the brewery closed, was revived in 2005 by a local preservation group; both a Meiji-recipe version and a Taisho-recipe version are poured on draught. The building has been open to the public year-round since a seismic retrofit was completed in 2015. Allow time to walk the exterior as well as the galleries, since the five-storey block reads best from a distance.