Yasumoto Sake Brewery

A Sake Brewery Facing the Old Road to Ichijōdani

Yasumoto Sake Brewery (安本酒造, Yasumoto Shuzō) is a sake brewery in Yasuhara-cho, Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture, founded in 1853, and ten of the structures on its lot were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on March 26, 2015: the store and main house, the rice storehouse, the storehouse, brewing storehouses 1 and 2, the pressing house, the bottling factory, the chimney, the front gate and the south wall. Its flagship label today is Hakugakusen.

According to the brewery, the Yasumoto family were money changers before they turned to sake. In 1853 the Matsudaira lords of Echizen, the domain centred on Fukui, entrusted them with brewing a domain label called Kokufushi, and the family has made sake ever since. Local tradition holds that the name Yasuhara means "the Yasumoto field", and one account traces the family back to the Heian period. The present head, Takeshi Yasumoto, counts himself the 47th generation; in 2001 he became his own chief brewer (tōji) and launched the Hakugakusen brand.

The brewery stands in the Tōgō district on the eastern side of Fukui City, along the Asuwa River. The old road that runs past its front continues up the valley to Ichijōdani, the ruined castle town of the Asakura warlords. The Agency for Cultural Affairs opens its description of Yasumoto Sake Brewery with exactly that point: a brewery whose front faces north onto the old road to Ichijōdani.

Ten Listings on a Single Day

The ten Yasumoto Sake Brewery listings carry consecutive registration numbers, 18-0124 to 18-0133, and were announced as part of the 80th round of registrations on March 26, 2015. Fukui City's own list of cultural properties shows all ten in a row.

Nine were registered for their contribution to the historic landscape. Only the chimney was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property under the other criterion, as a model of design. In the Agency's classification, the seven buildings from the store and main house to the bottling factory count as buildings, while the chimney, the front gate and the south wall count as other structures. Each is counted as one unit.

Put in date order, the rice storehouse comes first in 1888, followed by the store and main house and brewing storehouse 1 in 1889, brewing storehouse 2 in 1908, the storehouse and the pressing house in 1918, and the bottling factory in 1937. The front gate, the south wall and the chimney are dated to the early Showa period. Brewing storehouse 1 was altered in 1937 and the pressing house in 1927. Read together, the dates show a brewery that began with a house and a rice store in the late 1880s and kept adding working buildings, one stage of production at a time, for about half a century.

The Agency records that the chimney was damaged in the Fukui earthquake of 1948; about 4.7 meters of it survive.

How the Yasumoto Lot Is Laid Out

Piecing together the Agency's descriptions, the Yasumoto Sake Brewery lot has its north edge on the old road, with the family's house and shop along the road and the brewing buildings running back from it.

The store and main house stands in the middle of the road frontage, with the rice storehouse beside it to the west, in the northwest corner. East of the house, the front gate opens onto the road. Behind the gate rises the chimney, and south of that brewing storehouse 1 stretches back in a long north-south range. The pressing house joins its south end, and brewing storehouse 2 stands east of the pressing house across a work area. The storehouse sits halfway down the west side of the lot. At the far south end, the bottling factory runs east to west, and the south wall continues from it westward along the back boundary.

Follow the buildings by function and the sequence of sake making lines up roughly from the road toward the back: rice is stored, polished and steamed; koji and the yeast starter are prepared; the mash ferments in tanks; the sake is pressed and finally bottled. The north half of brewing storehouse 1 held the old rice-polishing room and rice-steaming room, and the pressing house includes the former starter room.

What a visitor can see from outside is mainly the road frontage, where the north face of the store and main house, the rice storehouse and the front gate form one continuous streetscape. The Agency does not describe brewing storehouse 2, the pressing house or the storehouse as facing a road.

Visiting Yasumoto Sake Brewery

Yasumoto Sake Brewery is a working brewery. According to Fuku-iro, Fukui City's official tourism site, it does not offer brewery tours or tastings, and no opportunity to see inside the buildings is advertised, so plan to view the architecture from the old road.

Fuku-iro lists business hours of 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with no regular closing day. The company is Yasumoto Shuzō Co., Ltd., telephone 0776-41-0011, and it gives its address as 7-4 Yasuhara-cho, Fukui City.

Stay off the private grounds and take photographs from the public road without blocking traffic. The brewery has not published a policy on photography.

The nearest station is Echizen-Tōgō on the JR Etsumi-Hoku Line (also called the Kuzuryū Line), about a 5-minute walk away. From JR Fukui Station a taxi takes about 20 minutes. Trains on the Etsumi-Hoku Line are infrequent, so check the timetable before you go.