Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House

An 1889 Townhouse Facing the Old Road

The Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House (安本酒造店舗兼主屋, Yasumoto Shuzō Tenpo-ken-shuoku) is a 2-storey wooden townhouse built in 1889 at Yasumoto Sake Brewery in Yasuhara-cho, Fukui City, Fukui Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 26, 2015. It was altered in the late Meiji period, has a building area of 156 square meters and is roofed in metal sheet.

Of the ten listed structures at the brewery, this is the only one where the family both kept shop and lived. It faces north onto the old road that leads to Ichijōdani, and it is the face the brewery shows the street.

Shop in Front, Formal Rooms Behind

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House as a two-storey Machiya with lean-to roofs, or Geya, added along both the front and the back. The centre of the ground floor holds the entrance and the shop, a reception room lies to the west, and at the rear there are two formal rooms of ten tatami mats each.

The logic is easy to read. Customers from the road were served in the shop, more important visitors were shown into the reception room, and the best rooms were kept deepest inside. The farther from the street, the more private and more formal the space becomes, which is the usual order for the main house of a merchant brewer.

The formal rooms have a Tokonoma alcove and a Tsukeshoin writing bay, and the Ranma transoms are filled with Kumiko, fine wooden strips fitted together into geometric lattices. The Agency singles this joinery out as delicate, high-grade decoration. None of it can be seen from the road, but it is where the quality of the Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House shows most clearly.

Why It Was Registered

The Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House is registered as number 18-0124, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape.

Together with the 1888 rice storehouse it belongs to the earliest phase of the brewery. With the rice storehouse to its west and the front gate to its east, it forms a single continuous frontage along the old road, while the working buildings added over the following decades spread out behind it.

Seeing the Store and Main House

Because the Yasumoto Sake Brewery Store and Main House fronts the old road, its north facade can be seen from the street. The two-storey block with its lean-to projecting in front reads best from the far side of the road, standing back a little.

The centre of the building is the shop, but no public viewing of the interior, including the formal rooms, is advertised. Fuku-iro, Fukui City's official tourism site, lists brewery tours and tastings at Yasumoto as unavailable. Stay off the grounds and take photographs from the public road.