Miya Soy Sauce Store

Miya Soy Sauce Store: A Working Brewery in Old Sanuki

Miya Soy Sauce Store (宮醤油店, Miya Shōyu-ten) is a soy sauce brewery in Sanuki, Futtsu City, Chiba Prefecture, founded in 1834, whose nine shop, storehouse and residential buildings were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2007.

The family still runs the business, trading under the Tamasa mark, and plenty of locals know it simply as Tamasa shōyu. Sanuki was once the castle town of a small domain assessed at 16,000 koku of rice, and the Miya family started brewing here in the late Edo period. According to the Chiba Prefectural Board of Education, the family traces its ancestry to Ise.

What sets the Miya Soy Sauce Store apart is that its heritage buildings are still workplaces. The brewery uses the natural method (天然醸造, tennen jōzō): the moromi mash ferments in wooden vats with no artificial temperature control, so the seasons set the pace. The company became a limited company in 1953 and, by its own account, has kept every stage from raw-material preparation and koji-making to pressing and bottling in-house, upgrading the equipment piece by piece.

Nine Buildings, One Registration

The nine buildings of the Miya Soy Sauce Store were registered on 31 July 2007 and announced in the official gazette on 13 August the same year, under consecutive numbers 12-0073 to 12-0081. The company timeline files the registration under December 2007; the dates here follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.

Eight of the nine qualify for their contribution to the historic landscape. The exception is the Detached Wing, registered instead because the quality of its reception-room carpentry would not be easy to reproduce.

Together the buildings span roughly a century:

• Late Edo period (between 1830 and 1867, per the Agency): Shop Storehouse
• 1872: West Storehouse
• 1892: Shop Building, Side Storehouse and Main House
• 1907: Former Rice Storehouse and East Storehouse
• 1919: Rear Storehouse
• 1925: Detached Wing

1892 was the landmark year. The company history records that the new shop was completed that January and opened with a celebratory sale, and the Main House and Side Storehouse went up the same year.

Reading the Layout, Front to Back

The Miya Soy Sauce Store faces north onto a prefectural road. Three buildings form the street front: from west to east, the Shop Storehouse, the Shop Building and the Side Storehouse. The Agency singles out this trio for the solid, weighty face it gives the street, and it is most of what a passer-by gets to see.

Behind the front, the plot divides by use. The Main House continues directly south of the shop, with the Rear Storehouse to its west and the Detached Wing to the southwest. South of the Main House, across a courtyard, stands the long West Storehouse. Along the east side, the working storehouses line up north to south: the Side Storehouse, then the Former Rice Storehouse, then the East Storehouse.

All six storehouses are earthen Dozo-zukuri structures, but their roofs are framed differently. The Shop Storehouse, West Storehouse and Rear Storehouse use traditional Japanese Wagoya framing, while the Side Storehouse, Former Rice Storehouse and East Storehouse sit on truss roof framing, according to the Agency. In other words, Western-style roof engineering had reached this provincial brewery by 1892.

Most of the storehouses still work for a living. The West Storehouse holds eight wooden casks, the East Storehouse keeps nine as a moromi store, and the Former Rice Storehouse has been converted to hold soy sauce casks.

Visiting and Getting There

The Miya Soy Sauce Store shop is a working retail counter, and anyone can walk in to buy soy sauce. The Futtsu City Tourist Association lists opening hours of 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. (from 9 a.m. on holidays), with New Year's Day the only closing day. Brewery tours are free for up to 50 people; booking ahead is preferred, though same-day requests are accepted. The brewery itself is closed on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, so choose a weekday if you want to see production. The company posts typhoon closures and other changes on its official X account.

The Main House, Detached Wing and Rear Storehouse belong to the family's living quarters and are not open to the public. If you want to take photographs around the shop and storehouses, ask the staff first so you do not get in the way of work.

By train, get off at Sanukimachi Station on the JR Uchibō Line and walk about 12 minutes. By car, it is about 3 minutes from the Futtsu-Chūō Interchange on the Tateyama Expressway along National Route 127 toward the station. The car park takes 10 cars or up to 3 large vehicles (all figures from the Tourist Association).