Fukubijin Sake Brewery Employee Dormitory

Where the Brewers Slept

Fukubijin Sake Brewery Employee Dormitory (福美人酒造従業員寮, Fukubijin Shuzō Jūgyōin-ryō) is a Taisho-era dormitory (1912 to 1926) on the Ebisu-gura compound in Saijo Honmachi, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 1 August 2016.

It continues directly west from the Fukujin Dormitory. It is a two-storey timber building with a tiled roof and its ridge running east to west, covering 120 square metres, with walls mainly clad in Shitami-itabari clapboard.

The ground floor holds a tatami-floored changing room and an earth-floored Doma area; the upper floor housed the workers. Work and daily life shared the same compound, only a wall apart.

Living Quarters Next to the Brewing Halls

Sake brewing in Japan was traditionally winter work. Each season, a master brewer, the toji, and his crew of kurabito would move into the brewery as seasonal workers and stay until spring. Fukubijin Sake Brewery Employee Dormitory is where they lived.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles it out as valuable because it preserves the living space of those seasonal brewers right beside the brewing storehouses. Brewery buildings survive in many places; the lodgings of the people who worked in them are far rarer.

Fukubijin was known as the Saijo Sake Brewing School for the many master brewers it trained. The people who learned and passed on that skill spent their winters in this building, next door to the storehouses where they worked.

What to Look For

The dormitory joins the Fukujin Dormitory to the east in one continuous line. Both have boarded walls, giving them the look of dwellings rather than the white plaster of the brewing halls.

The changing room and doma on the ground floor suggest the daily routine of changing into work clothes and heading into the storehouse. You cannot see inside, but the row of upper-floor windows hints at the crews who once slept here.

Visiting

There is no announced public access to the interior of Fukubijin Sake Brewery Employee Dormitory. You can see the exterior from inside the Ebisu-gura compound during shop hours or from the road outside.

It stands toward the west of the compound and is easiest to find together with the Fukujin Dormitory. Its current use is not published, so please keep away from the entrances.