Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building

What Is the Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building?

The Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building (信洋舎製紙所漉場棟, Shin'yōsha Seishijo Sukiba-tō) is a single-storey timber workshop for forming sheets of handmade paper in Sadatomo-cho, Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, built in the late Meiji period (1898–1912) and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2020.

A sukiba is the room where paper is actually formed at the vat, and this one has never stopped doing that job. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building in the present tense, as a space in use for papermaking.

The building is long and narrow, about 19 m along its north–south ridge (Ketayuki) and about 6.5 m across (Harima), with a building area of 133 m². It is the only single-storey building among the mill's four, and its south end joins the Former Rest Area and Drying Room Building.

Why the Papermaking Building Was Registered

The Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency sees it as a factory building set among the papermaking workshops that line the foot of Mount Daitoku, the core of the Echizen washi district.

The 2020 registration report treated the four Shinyosha buildings as a single factory laid out in the order of the work. Within that sequence, this is where the paper itself takes shape. That a Meiji vat room is still a vat room, used for the same work it was built for, is the main reason it matters.

Its date range, late Meiji, is the latest of the four. The mill began with the drying building of 1886, and the Papermaking Building shows how the works had organized a dedicated forming room by the end of the era.

What to Look For

Windows define the Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building. The Agency notes that continuous runs of glass were installed for light and ventilation, and that they shape the character of the building inside and out. From outside, the glazing reads as a band along the wall; inside, the light spreads across a single open room.

The interior has no partitions, so the full 19 m length serves as one workspace. A papermaker at the vat judges by eye whether the fiber has settled evenly on the screen, which helps explain why a sheet-forming room would be built to stay bright and airy.

Fukui Prefecture describes the mill's buildings as gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) with Sangawara-buki pantile roofs, concrete floors and boarded interior walls. The Papermaking Building keeps that plain, practical finish, well suited to a room where water is everywhere.

Visiting the Papermaking Building

The Shinyosha Paper Mill Papermaking Building is a working room and is not open to the public. Watching papermaking here is at the mill's discretion, so contact Shinyosha by email well in advance. The workshop opened to visitors during the RENEW open-factory event in 2017; how far into this room visitors were allowed is not recorded.

If you are invited in, keep clear of the vats and the papermakers' hands, and ask before taking photographs. Directions to the mill are on the Shinyosha Paper Mill page.