Brewing Storehouse of Himonoya Sake Brewery (Shikomigura)

A Brewing Hall of 1930

The Brewing Storehouse of Himonoya Sake Brewery (檜物屋酒造店仕込蔵, Himonoya Shuzōten Shikomigura, also written Himonoya Shuzoten) stands at 173 Matsuoka in Nihonmatsu City, Fukushima Prefecture, was completed in 1930, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 7 August 2023.

A shikomigura is where the mash is made. Rice is steamed, cooled, mixed with kōji mould and water in tanks, and left to ferment. The building that houses this work has to do several things at once: hold a stable temperature through a Tōhoku winter, carry the weight of full tanks, and give the crew room to move rice and equipment between floors.

Himonoya's answer is long and narrow. The building runs north to south, two storeys of earthen dozō construction under a tiled roof, with a footprint of about 176 square metres. That is close to four times the area of the small shop storehouse on the street corner, built in 1874, which was registered on the same day.

The two roof forms differ end to end. The north end is hipped, yosemune-zukuri, sloping on all four sides. The south end is gabled, kirizuma-zukuri. It is an unusual pairing on a single ridge and it makes the building easy to identify from the road.

A Western Truss Under a Japanese Roof

The detail that gives this building its interest sits overhead on the second floor. The roof frame is a king-post truss: a triangulated timber assembly, with a vertical post dropping from the apex to the centre of a horizontal tie beam, and diagonal struts bracing outward. The form came into Japan through Western engineering in the Meiji period and spread through factories, schools and railway sheds.

Traditional Japanese roof framing works differently. It stacks short horizontal beams on posts, transferring load downward in steps, which limits how far a roof can span without an interior column. A truss ties the outward thrust of the rafters into a closed triangle instead. The result is a wide clear floor with nothing in the middle of it.

For a brewery in 1930 that mattered. The ground floor is a single room with a doma, an earthen floor, which takes the weight and moisture of brewing directly. The second floor is a single room boarded in timber, uninterrupted overhead. A staircase tucked into the northeast corner links the two without eating into the working space.

So the building is a hybrid: earthen walls and clay tiles from one tradition, a truss from another, joined without fuss because each part solved a problem the brewer actually had.

The North Gable and the Old Highway

Registration under Japan's system for Tangible Cultural Properties, in place since 1996, covers buildings of roughly fifty years or more and records them nationally while leaving them in use. The Shikomigura carries register number 07-0278 from the 105th round, listed under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation.

The Agency's citation singles out the north gable end. Three windows are set into it, spaced across the plastered wall, and that face is what a walker on the old Ōshū Kaidō sees. The highway ran north from Edo through the castle town of Nihonmatsu toward Sendai, and it passes this lot.

Judged as sculpture the north end is plain: a broad triangle of plaster, three openings, tile above. Judged as street architecture it works, because the composition is even and the mass is calm, and it holds one edge of a road whose historic frontage has largely disappeared.

Visiting, and What Comes Out of the Tanks

This is a production building on private land, not an exhibit. There is no admission desk and no fixed opening hours for the Shikomigura itself. The brewery's shop, a few steps away on the same lot, trades from 8:00 to 18:00 and closes on Sundays and public holidays.

Brewery tours and tastings are arranged in advance, and the brewery asks visitors to contact them beforehand. Local tourism bodies have run a paid programme with a modest charge for the tour and a further charge for tasting, roughly thirty minutes, for groups of up to about ten people aged twenty and over. Photo identification is required for tasting. During the brewing season the crew is at work and what a visitor sees changes accordingly; outside it, the tanks are quiet.

Steaming is still done in a koshiki, the traditional steaming vessel, and the mash is built up over four days in three additions rather than all at once, a method that lets the yeast population establish before the volume increases. Fermentation runs twenty to thirty days. Pressing is by the sase method, a stack of cloth bags under a frame press, which is slower than modern alternatives.

The label is Senkonari. Water comes from springs on Mount Adatara, the mountain that Takamura Kōtarō's poems for his wife Chieko, a Nihonmatsu native, made famous for its clear sky. Nihonmatsu Station is five minutes away on foot, and the castle ruins about twenty.