Kojima Family Residence West Sake Brewery and Preparation Room

The working end of a brewing household

Kojima Family Residence West Sake Brewery and Preparation Room (小島家住宅西酒蔵及び仕込場, Kojima-ke Jūtaku Nishi-sakagura oyobi Shikomiba) is a late Edo-period brewing complex in the castle town of Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, built between 1830 and 1867 and entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005.

With a floor area of 307 square meters, it is the largest of the seven registered Kojima buildings. A single-story preparation room stands behind the main house to the west, and a three-story brewery adjoins it further back. The preparation room is timber-framed; the brewery is Dozo-zukuri, built with thick clay-plastered walls. Both are roofed in Kirizuma-zukuri gables of Sangawara-buki pantiles. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the structure as clay-walled and timber construction of three stories with a single-story portion.

The Kojima family have brewed here since 1597 by their own reckoning, their speciality nindōshu, a medicinal liquor flavoured with honeysuckle. If the main house on the street is the shop front, Kojima Family Residence West Sake Brewery and Preparation Room is where the sake was actually made.

A building shaped by the sequence of work

What makes this complex worth understanding is how directly the stages of brewing are written into its plan and section.

The preparation room nearest the house stands entirely open-sided: posts and a roof, no walls. The washing area and the kettle area were set here. Rinsing rice and steaming it release water and steam in quantity, and leaving the walls out was not a design preference but a way of letting heat and moisture escape.

Behind it the west brewery closes up completely. Its ground floor held the koji room, where the mould culture is grown, and the maturing space. Koji needs steady temperature and humidity; maturing sake resents swings in the outside air. An open shed and a sealed storehouse standing back to back is the physical answer to two opposite requirements.

The second floor and above took raw materials and equipment. Rice bales, tubs and casks went upstairs so that the ground floor stayed clear for work, and that is where the three-story height comes from.

Registration came under the criterion of contribution to the historic landscape, with the number 23-0177. Seven Kojima buildings joined the register together on 9 February 2005: the main house, the guest wing, the south storehouse, the north sake brewery and north storehouse, this complex, the reception room and the roofed wall.

What to look for

Height, first. A three-story Dozo-zukuri storehouse rises well above the two-story main house. In a castle town of low rooflines only this building stretches up, and walking the perimeter of the block brings its tiled ridge into view above the house in front.

Then the contrast between open and closed. The roof carried on bare posts and the shuttered clay wall belong to one property yet behave in opposite ways. The phrase used of breweries in the official description, a form particular to the trade, comes from exactly this gap.

Finally the arithmetic of scale. At 307 square meters this complex covers twice the 150 square meters of the neighbouring main house. More ground went to making sake than to living. That ratio states plainly what the household did for a living.

Visiting

Kojima Family Residence West Sake Brewery and Preparation Room is privately owned and closed to visitors. Standing deep in the plot, it cannot be seen properly from the street either. What a visitor can take in is the depth of the compound and the roofline showing behind the main house.

Kojima Jozo sells nindōshu on the premises. Inuyama Tourist Association gives the hours as 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a break from noon to 1:00 p.m., closed Sundays and Wednesday mornings; telephone 0568-61-0165, parking for 10 cars. Entering the shop is not the same as entering the brewery.

Since 2025 part of the compound has operated as lodging. The operator's site presents the Kojima property as the Neriya wing, with guest rooms and a Japanese restaurant, and advertises tours of the buildings, though these are listed as in preparation. Anyone hoping to see the brewery itself should ask the operator directly.

The nearest station is Meitetsu Inuyama, about 10 minutes on foot from the west exit; Inuyama is roughly 30 minutes from Meitetsu Nagoya Station.

Photography inside the gate requires the agreement of the owner or operator, the ground being private and in daily use by a shop and an inn. From the street there is no restriction.