Ishimago Honten

What Is Ishimago Honten?

Ishimago Honten (石孫本店, いしまごほんてん) is a miso and soy sauce brewery in Iwasaki, Yuzawa City, Akita Prefecture, founded in 1855, and five of its storehouses, built between 1883 and 1916, were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on December 11, 1998. The five are the Inner Storehouse (Uchigura) and the No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5 Storehouses. All are two-storey Dozo-zukuri buildings with thick clay walls and sheet-metal roofs.

The name is a contraction. Every head of the house since the founder has taken the name Ishikawa Magozaemon, and locals shortened it by joining the "Ishi" of Ishikawa to the "Mago" of Magozaemon. The current head is the sixth.

These are not museum pieces. The brewing storehouses along the road have held fermenting mash since the day they were finished, and inside them stand wooden vats of thirty koku, roughly 5.4 kiloliters each. According to the brewery, it still makes its koji on shallow wooden trays called koji-buta, ages everything in wood, and uses only ingredients grown in Akita. A visit to Ishimago Honten is a visit to a working brewery.

A Brewery Older Than Its Official Founding Date

Two dates circulate for the start of Ishimago Honten. The local history of Iwasaki Town records that the first Ishikawa Magozaemon, uncle of the village headman Ishikawa Heibei, began brewing soy sauce in 1845. A company pamphlet from the Taisho era gives 1855 instead, and the brewery has kept that year. The Agency for Cultural Affairs and Yuzawa City both use 1855, and the city describes Ishimago as the oldest soy sauce brewer in Ogachi District.

The company's own history says the founder saw that Iwasaki, already a sake town, had the climate and water for soy sauce too, and brought in a master brewer named Nanbu Saburo to experiment. At the time, people in the area mostly seasoned with tamari, and soy sauce had not yet caught on.

The second Magozaemon turned a local business into a regional one. In the Meiji era he made repeated study trips to Noda and Choshi in Chiba, the leading soy sauce centers of the day. He designed the barrel mark "Fundojin," the character for benevolence set inside a balance weight, and he started miso production under the brand Igeta-jirushi Iwasaki Miso. The Agency for Cultural Affairs credits every registered storehouse to his period of rapid growth.

Wartime controls forced the closure of branches across Akita, leaving only the main shop. The brewery says it never stopped production even when rationed soybeans and rice failed to arrive. It was incorporated as Ishimago Honten Co., Ltd. in 2005.

One Master Carpenter, Five Storehouses

Each storehouse at Ishimago Honten keeps its Munafuda, the ridge tablet recording a building's completion. They name the second Ishikawa Magozaemon as client and Saito Hikoemon, a carpenter active in the district, as master builder. Hikoemon's work here spans 33 years, from the Inner Storehouse of 1883 to the No. 5 Storehouse of 1916.

The No. 2 through No. 5 Storehouses stand in a line along the road, running north to south. Each covers 165 square meters, so from the street they read as a matched set. The roof frames tell a different story. The No. 3 and No. 4 Storehouses use a Wagoya, the traditional Japanese frame of horizontal beams and vertical struts. The No. 2 and No. 5 Storehouses use a Western-style truss.

• Inner Storehouse: 1883, a document and valuables store, 96 square meters
• No. 3 Storehouse: 1897, used for pressing, Japanese roof frame
• No. 4 Storehouse: 1900, with a stone-built koji room, Japanese roof frame
• No. 2 Storehouse: 1910, fermentation storehouse, Western-style truss
• No. 5 Storehouse: 1916, fermentation storehouse, Western-style truss

Put them in building order and the switch becomes visible. Up to the No. 4 Storehouse of 1900, Hikoemon framed his roofs the Japanese way; from the No. 1 Storehouse of 1904, which no longer stands, he used trusses. Yuzawa City values the group for exactly this: the chance to follow one carpenter's methods as they changed across the Meiji and Taisho eras.

The listings rest on different criteria. The Inner Storehouse was registered as a structure that would be difficult to reproduce, and the four brewing storehouses as models of good design.

Look for the igeta mark, a hash-shaped double cross, on the storehouse walls. It is the brewery's miso trademark and is also dyed large across the backs of the staff's matching coats. The company says no record explains its origin, though it probably came from the family's parent house, which brewed sake, and was in use as a shop sign before the founding.

The Lost No. 1 Storehouse

When the buildings were registered in 1998, Ishimago Honten had five brewing storehouses in its row. The fifth, the No. 1 Storehouse, stood just north of the No. 2 Storehouse. Built in 1904 with a Western-style truss, it was the soy sauce brewing house, and the company describes it as the largest and oldest of the brewing storehouses.

It collapsed in 2011. The brewery says earlier tremors had already weakened it, and that winter's unusually heavy snow could not all be shoveled off the roof; the shaking of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 finished it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the Ishimago Honten No. 1 Storehouse among properties removed from the register because of demolition or similar loss, with its removal dated May 17, 2012.

Soy sauce production moved next door into the No. 2 Storehouse, which was rebuilt inside to take over the work. It was a fitting successor: the agency's description had already noted that it matched the No. 1 Storehouse in design, size and even its truss construction. The row along the road is now four buildings long, but Ishimago Honten still brews within it.

Visiting Ishimago Honten

Ishimago Honten is an operating business, and anyone may walk into its shop without booking. The storehouse interiors are shown only on a reserved tour, which follows the miso and soy sauce process past the koji room, the wooden vats in the aging storehouses and the old tools still in use. The fee is 1,000 yen per person, including a small gift chosen from three options, and elementary-school children accompanied by an adult go free. The brewery's tour page gives the length as about 30 minutes, while its online shop says about an hour (checked September 24, 2026).

Book at least three days ahead. Tours may be refused when the brewing schedule does not allow them. The brewery asks visitors not to eat natto on the day, since its bacteria can disturb the microbes living in the storehouses. The Yuzawa City tourism association adds yogurt and mandarin oranges to the list and suggests avoiding them from the night before. Morning bookings are recommended for those who want to see brewing work in progress, and the storehouses are cold in winter, so dress warmly.

Hours are 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekends, public holidays, Golden Week and Obon. The brewery closes on the second Saturday of every month. No published source states whether photography is allowed inside the storehouses, so ask on the tour. The exteriors of the No. 2 to No. 5 Storehouses face the road and can be seen from the street in front of the shop.

Ishimago Honten is about a 15-minute walk from Shimo-Yuzawa Station on the JR Ou Line, or about 8 minutes by car from the Jumonji Interchange. According to the tourism association, a few parking spaces are available in summer, but none in winter.