Gyokusendo Sake Brewery

Seven Buildings of a Working Brewery in Yoro

Gyokusendo Sake Brewery (玉泉堂酒造, Gyokusendō Shuzō) is a sake maker founded in 1806 in Takada, Yoro Town, Gifu Prefecture, and seven of its buildings, put up between 1875 and 1928, were entered on the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 April 2014. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the address as 126 Takada Aza-Machi and neighbouring lots, and all seven stand within that one block.

The house label, Reisen (醴泉, "sweet spring"), comes from a local story the brewery tells: in 717 Empress Genshō visited a waterfall and spring near here and praised the water. This is the country of the Yōrō Falls legend, in which a devoted son found the falls running with sake, and the brewery still draws soft groundwater from the Yōrō Mountains for its brewing. An older label, Minogiku, is also still made.

Takada grew up as a market town beside a river port in the early Edo period. According to Yoro Town's local heritage site, it sat where the Kurihan Kaidō and the Yōrō Kaidō roads met, and when Mino-Takada Station opened on the Yōrō Railway in 1913 the town became a collecting point for regional freight. The brewery's Shop and Main House faces north onto that old road.

What Was Registered, and When

All seven buildings were registered on the same day under consecutive numbers, 21-0223 through 21-0229, and all under the same criterion: that they contribute to the historic landscape of the nation. The listing values the brewery as an ensemble on its street more than any single building on its own. The construction dates given by the Agency are these:

• Shop and Main House: 1875, two-storey timber
• Retail Store: 1924, remodelled in the mid-Showa period, two-storey timber
• North Brewhouse: 1926, two-storey Dozo-zukuri (earthen-walled)
• South Brewhouse: 1926, two-storey dozo-zukuri
• Inspection Office and Tax Office: 1926, two-storey timber
• Rice Washing Plant: 1926, single-storey timber
• Storehouse: 1928, two-storey dozo-zukuri

Four of the seven date from 1926, and they are the production buildings: both brewhouses, the rice-washing shed and the rooms where liquor tax was handled. The brewing side of the business seems to have been rebuilt in one campaign that year. Only the street front is older, a house and shop from 1875, with a Taisho-era retail counter added beside it and an early Showa storehouse for family belongings behind. Commerce wears Meiji clothes here; the working core is Taisho.

Walking the Site in Brewing Order

The Agency's descriptions let you piece the layout together. On the road, facing north, stands the Shop and Main House with a frontage of 19 metres. To its east is the Retail Store, 5.8 metres wide. These are the only two buildings you see from the street.

Behind the house the production buildings follow the order of the work. Rice was washed and steamed in the Rice Washing Plant, an open-sided shed at the end of a lean-to off the North Brewhouse. The steamed rice went up to the koji room that once occupied the upper floor of the North Brewhouse, where it was spread out and held at the right temperature. Downstairs, in this long east-west hall, the fermenting tubs stood in rows.

Joined to the North Brewhouse's southern gable is the South Brewhouse, running north to south. Here the fermented mash was separated into sake and lees, refined, aged and bottled. At the east end of the North Brewhouse's front sits the Inspection Office and Tax Office, where the product met the tax man. The Storehouse behind the main house, by contrast, held the family's household goods rather than anything to do with brewing.

Wash, steam, ferment, press and age, inspect, sell over the counter on the street: the whole life of a bottle of sake in a country brewery is laid out across these seven buildings. Each has its own page with the structural detail.

Visiting and Getting There

Gyokusendo Sake Brewery is a working business, and the interiors of all seven buildings are closed to the public. Its official website lists no tours or open days (checked 24 September 2026). The company is closed on Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and over the Obon and New Year breaks; the phone number is 0584-32-1155.

What you can see is the street front of the Shop and Main House and the Retail Store: black plaster on the upper floor and projecting wooden lattices below. Standing on the far side of the road gets both buildings into one view. The brewhouses, the washing shed and the storehouse sit behind the house and are barely visible from the street. Please stay off the premises and keep photography to the public road.

The nearest station is Mino-Takada on the Yōrō Railway's Yōrō Line, which runs between Kuwana and Ōgaki. The brewery is under ten minutes' walk west of the station, past Takada's shopping street to the old road beyond.