Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 1 Storehouse

A Taisho Brewing Storehouse Forty-Seven Metres Long

Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 1 Storehouse (福美人酒造一号蔵, also known as Fukubijin Shuzō Ichigō-gura) is a Taisho-period brewing storehouse at 691 Saijo Honmachi in Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 1 August 2016.

The brewery occupies two separate compounds in Saijo. This one, the main compound, 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.

Why the Building Was Registered

Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 1 Storehouse was entered on the register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property 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.

It was registered on the same day as thirteen other Fukubijin structures on the Ebisu-gura and Daikoku-gura compounds. In a set that runs from the office and dormitories to the chimneys, the No. 1 Storehouse is the centrepiece.

Seeing the No. 1 Storehouse

Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 1 Storehouse is a working brewery building and its interior is not open to the public. What you can see is the exterior, by entering the Ebisu-gura compound during shop hours and looking at the storehouse from the yard.

Walk through the gateposts and it lies straight ahead at the back of the yard, a little north of centre. Take it in together with the Ebisu-gura chimney in front of it and its length becomes clear. To read the joints between its three sections, move a few steps east or west and watch the roofline change height.

The rear of the building backs onto the Rear Storehouse along the north edge of the compound, so it cannot be seen whole from behind. Its public face is the south side, seen from the gate.