Aramasa Sake Brewery

A Brewery Founded in 1852 with Five Listed Storehouses

Aramasa Sake Brewery (新政酒造, Aramasa Shuzō) is a sake brewery in Omachi, Akita City, Akita Prefecture, founded in 1852, and five of the earthen-walled storehouses on its grounds were listed together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan on April 25, 2014. They are the Aijogura, Myojogura and Ginjogura brewhouses and two storehouses that once belonged to a relief society called the Kannonkō.

The characters 新政 are usually read "shinsei," but the brewery reads them "aramasa." According to the brewery's own history, the founder was the first Satō Uhē, and his sake was known locally as "Uhē's sake" before it took the name Aramasa from Shinsei Kōtoku, a slogan of the new Meiji government.

The name carries weight in sake history because of a yeast. Osaka University's account says that in 1930 Oana Fujio of the national brewing research institute isolated the resident yeast from the mash of the fifth-generation brewer, Satō Usaburō, and the strain was later distributed nationwide as Kyōkai No. 6. The Akita Sake Brewers Association describes it as the oldest Kyōkai yeast still on sale.

Three Brewhouses and Two Relief-Society Storehouses

The five buildings at Aramasa Sake Brewery fall into two sets.

The Aijogura, Myojogura and Ginjogura are all described by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as shikomi-gura, the buildings where sake is fermented. The Aijogura and Ginjogura date from the middle Meiji period (1883 to 1897). For the Myojogura, the national database is inconsistent: its era field reads Meiji 20, which is 1887, while the Western-calendar field reads 1945, so the construction date remains open.

The other two carry "Former Kannonko" in their names. The Kannonkō was founded in 1829 by Naba Saburoemon Yūsei, a merchant of the castle town of Kubota, to store grain and help the poor, and Akita City counts it among the earliest social welfare bodies in Japan. Yūsei (1772 to 1837) was born in Omachi 2-chome, the same district as the brewery. Both of these storehouses date from the late Meiji period (1898 to 1912), and the agency notes their value as surviving Kannonkō buildings. When they passed to the brewery is not recorded in the agency's descriptions.

The five registration numbers run consecutively from 05-0200 to 05-0204, all announced in the 77th round of listings, and every one was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

How the Aramasa Sake Brewery Grounds Are Laid Out

Read together, the agency's descriptions place all five ridges on an east-west line, stacked in roughly three rows from south to north. The Ginjogura stands in the southeast corner beside the office. The Myojogura lies to its west, and the Aijogura sits north of the Myojogura. Along the northern edge of the site run the two Kannonkō buildings, the East Granary and Rice Storehouse toward the east and the West Granary toward the west.

The brewhouses share the lot number Omachi 6-71, while the two granaries are listed at 6-23 and 6-134, yet the agency describes all of them as standing on one site.

White lime-plaster walls and a thick plaster band, the hachimaki, wrapped around the top of each wall are common to all five. Every roof is a simple gable. The Ginjogura and both granaries have tiled okiyane roofs, set on posts above the earthen walls, while the Myojogura alone is roofed in steel sheet. The longest is the East Granary and Rice Storehouse at 36 meters overall; the smallest is the Ginjogura, with a footprint of 94 square meters.

Visiting Aramasa Sake Brewery

Aramasa Sake Brewery is a working brewery, and all five storehouses stand inside its production site. Its website does not advertise public tours, and its company page states plainly that it does not sell sake directly at the brewery. Treat the interiors as closed and view the buildings from outside the grounds. Take photographs from the public road and keep clear of vehicles and staff coming and going.

The Akita Sake Brewers Association lists office hours of 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, closed on weekends, public holidays, Golden Week, Obon and the New Year period. Inquiries go to Aramasa Sake Brewery Co., Ltd. at 018-823-6407.

The brewery is about 22 minutes on foot from the west exit of JR Akita Station, roughly 1.5 kilometers in a straight line. The company gives its address as 6-2-35 Omachi.