Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 1 Storehouse

A Taisho Brewing Storehouse Forty-Seven Metres Long

Fukubijin Shuzo Ichigo-gura (福美人酒造一号蔵, also written Fukubijin Shuzō Ichigō-gura, the No. 1 Storehouse of the Fukubijin sake brewery) is a Taisho-period brewing storehouse at 691 Saijo-honmachi in Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 August 2016.

The brewery occupies two separate compounds in Saijo. This one, the more central of the pair and understood to be the earlier, is known as Ebisu-gura. The No. 1 Storehouse is its working heart: the building where the rice is steamed, the mash is tended and the sake actually comes into being.

It sits a little north of the middle of the compound, its ridge running east to west. What looks at first like a single enormous shed is in fact three buildings joined into one. The east wing measures twenty metres along the ridge and rises two storeys. The west wing runs twenty-three metres, also two storeys. Between them, a single-storey block links the two. Add the parts together and the ridge stretches roughly forty-seven metres, with a registered floor area of 694 square metres.

Walk the length of it and the join becomes obvious. The low central section drops well below the flanking roofs, so the silhouette dips in the middle before rising again, like a pair of hills with a saddle between them.

A Brewery That a Town Willed Into Existence

Most sake breweries descend from a family. This one did not.

The company was founded on 25 May 1917 (Taisho 6) as a joint-stock enterprise, capitalised by sake brewers from across western Japan who pooled their money to build a modern brewery from scratch. Higashihiroshima City records that the promoter was Yoshii Tsuneo, then mayor of Saijo, who saw a large brewing company as a way to expand the town's industry and its tax base. The firm began under the name Saijo Shuzo K.K. and later took the name of its sake, Fukubijin.

The timing was deliberate. Saijo breweries had been winning top honours at the national sake competitions of the 1900s and 1910s, and the town's reputation was rising fast. A purpose-built company brewery, drawing on the best technique available, was a bet on that reputation continuing.

The bet paid off in an unexpected way. Fukubijin became a designated training institution for brewing technicians, and enough master brewers passed through its doors that people began calling it the Saijo Sake Brewing School. Tōji trained here went on to run breweries in other prefectures. For a company barely a decade old, that was an extraordinary position to hold.

The name itself is a small piece of local history. Fuku comes from Fukujin, the old name of this patch of ground; bijin, meaning a beautiful woman, described the character the founders wanted in the sake, round and gentle rather than sharp. Water still comes from a well on the site called Bijin no Ido, the Beauty's Well.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan's Registered Tangible Cultural Property system, introduced in 1996, is a lighter form of protection than designation as an Important Cultural Property. Owners keep the freedom to use and adapt their buildings; in exchange, the register records what makes them worth keeping. The No. 1 Storehouse was listed under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

Its qualification is partly a matter of sheer size. A dozo, the thick-walled earthen storehouse type used here, is normally built as a compact box, because earth walls are heavy and expensive and there are limits to how far a plastered wall will run without trouble. Reaching forty-seven metres meant building three of them and stitching them together. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes the result plainly as a large earthen storehouse serving as the central building of a sake maker.

The construction is listed as dozo-zukuri, two storeys with a partly single-storey section, under a tiled roof. Those thick earth walls are not decoration. Sake fermentation is fussy about temperature, and before mechanical cooling the mass of an earthen wall was the main tool a brewer had for keeping a cold room cold through a Hiroshima winter. The white plaster finish, the dark tiled roof and the small high openings all follow from that requirement.

The building was registered on the same day as several other structures on the Fukubijin site, part of a wave of listings across Saijo in 2016 and 2017 that gave formal recognition to the brewing quarter as a whole.

Seeing It for Yourself

The No. 1 Storehouse is a working brewery building, not a museum, and its interior is not open for general viewing. What you can do is walk into the Ebisu-gura compound, where Fukubijin runs a shop, and look at the storehouse from the yard.

The shop opens from 10:00 to 16:00 with a break between 12:00 and 13:00, on weekdays and at weekends alike. Closures are irregular, so checking before a special trip is sensible. Entry costs nothing. Parking is limited to two spaces, which is another argument for arriving on foot.

Getting here is easy. JR Saijo Station on the Sanyo Line is about seven minutes' walk away, and Hiroshima is under forty minutes by local train. Drivers should allow around ten minutes from the Saijo interchange on the Sanyo Expressway.

Inside the shop, alongside the bottles, sit two objects worth a moment. One is a sake cask used in the fundraising drive that kept the Hiroshima Carp baseball club alive in its early years. The other is a set of calligraphy sheets bearing the words kokushu, national liquor, brushed by successive Japanese prime ministers. Photography of the buildings from outside is unrestricted; ask a member of staff before photographing displays indoors.

Note that Fukubijin's other compound, Daikoku-gura in Saijo-suehiro-cho, is a separate site with its own protection as a city-designated historic site. If you are looking for the No. 1 Storehouse, the address you want is the Saijo-honmachi one.