Imai Sake Brewery

A Country Sake Brewery in Toriyama

Imai Sake Brewery (今井酒造店, Imai Shuzōten) is a sake maker founded in 1866 in Toriyama-nakachō, Ota City, Gunma Prefecture, whose shop and main house, three brewing storehouses, a document storehouse and a brick chimney were listed together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan on August 1, 2016. The Gunma sake brewers' cooperative gives the founding year as Keiō 2 (1866), and Ota City says the Imai family had been brewing here since the last years of the Edo period.

Toriyama lies in farmland northwest of central Ota, and the city notes that rice is still grown widely around it. The brewery, in other words, stands in the middle of the fields that could supply its raw material. The Imai family brewed on this site until 2008.

Today the grounds of Imai Sake Brewery hold a retail shop, Shop Kazekura, and a café, Salon Kazekura, while the New Storehouse, one of the Meiji-era brewing buildings, is rented out for concerts, markets and exhibitions.

Six Listed Structures and Their Dates

All six were registered on the same day under consecutive numbers, 10-0331 to 10-0336, and all under the same criterion: that they contribute to the historic landscape of the country. The brewery also mentions on its website that the complex won the grand prize at the third Ota City Landscape Awards in 2013. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives these dates and structures:

• Shop and Main House: early Meiji period (1868 to 1882), moved here in 1900 and renovated in 2003; two-story timber building, 223 square meters
• Main Storehouse: 1908; two-story Dozo-zukuri storehouse, 254 square meters
• New Storehouse: 1909, altered around 1965; two-story timber building, 308 square meters
• Boiler Room and Bottling Room: 1908; two-story timber building, 155 square meters
• Document Storehouse: 1908; two-story dozo-zukuri storehouse, 21 square meters
• Chimney: 1908, altered around 1965; brick, 14 meters high

Five of the six went up in 1908 and 1909, so the brewing plant was rebuilt as a set within a couple of years. Ota City notes that the Imai family kept a large body of brewing and business ledgers dating back almost to the founding, and the construction dates are estimated from those records. The Shop and Main House is the exception. It was originally a farmhouse in the neighboring village of Ōkawa (now the town of Oizumi) and was moved and adapted around 1900.

Walking the Site in Brewing Order

At Imai Sake Brewery the Shop and Main House stands roughly in the middle of the lot, with the brewing buildings clustered to its northwest. Reading the Agency's descriptions alongside Ota City's account, you can match each building to a stage of sake making.

Rice was washed and steamed in the Boiler Room and Bottling Room, which adjoins the Main Storehouse on its east side. From there the steamed rice went next door. The Main Storehouse handled the yeast starter (shubo) and the fermenting mash (moromi), and together with the New Storehouse, which meets it at the north, it covered everything from cooling the rice to storing the pressed sake. The lean-to on the west side of the New Storehouse served as the koji room, where mold was cultivated on rice.

Finished sake came back to the Boiler Room and Bottling Room to be bottled, so the first and last steps shared one building, which also gave the brewery workers a place to rest and sleep. Smoke from the steaming fire ran through an underground flue to the chimney standing just to the south.

The small Document Storehouse, northwest of the main house, held permits, applications and account books rather than anything to do with brewing itself. In the main house the family ran the shop and the office, fed the workers and lived their own lives. Each structure has its own page with the construction details.

Visiting Imai Sake Brewery

Imai Sake Brewery does not offer brewery tours; the Gunma sake brewers' cooperative lists tours as unavailable. Visitors come onto the grounds as customers of the shop and café.

According to the brewery's website, Shop Kazekura is open from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Salon Kazekura from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and both close on Mondays and Tuesdays, with occasional private bookings and extra opening days (checked September 25, 2026). The phone number is 0276-22-2680. Markets, exhibitions and concerts held in the New Storehouse are the chance to step inside one of the brewing buildings; dates appear on the events page of the brewery's website.

The nearest railway station is Jiroembashi on the Tobu Kiryu Line, about 2.2 kilometers away, a walk of just under 30 minutes. The brewery's website mentions parking for about 70 cars, and most visitors arrive by car.