Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 3 Storehouse

Fifty-Eight Metres of Brewery

Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 3 Storehouse (福美人酒造三号蔵, Fukubijin Shuzō Sangō-gura) is a sake storehouse built around 1924 in Saijo Suehirocho, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 1 August 2016.

It stands at the centre of Daikoku-gura, the second of the two compounds the Fukubijin brewery owns in Saijo, with its ridge running east to west. The walls are Dozo-zukuri, the thick earthen construction of the traditional Japanese storehouse, rising two storeys under a gabled roof laid with red tiles.

The numbers are what stop you. The building runs 58 metres along its ridge and covers 785 square metres, the largest floor area of any registered Fukubijin building. Inside, the plan divides into eastern and western halves, so what reads from outside as one continuous storehouse has long worked as two.

A lean-to on the south side shelters a well, which is why the official record lists the structure as coming with a well. The ground floor is an earth-floored work area, and the upper floor was given a ceiling at some point after construction.

A Record of Expansion

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the No. 3 Storehouse as a structure that shows how the brewery grew after its founding. Daikoku-gura was built on farmland behind the old townscape to raise output, and Higashihiroshima City calls it the only brewery in Saijo sized to make two thousand koku of sake in a single winter. This building is the core of that operation.

Older Saijo breweries were squeezed onto long, narrow plots behind the houses of the old post road. Open farmland let Fukubijin stretch a single storehouse to 58 metres, and the result shows a brewery breaking out of the old town pattern to expand production.

Sources differ slightly on the date. The national database gives around 1924, while Higashihiroshima City gives 1925. Either way, Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 3 Storehouse belongs to the last years of the Taisho era.

On 21 February 2024 the city designated Daikoku-gura as part of the Saijo Sake Brewery Group, a municipal cultural property, and lists this storehouse among its components. It is protected under both the national register and the city designation.

What to Look For

Length is the point. A white Shikkui plaster wall runs unbroken beneath a straight line of red roof tiles, the red-and-white pairing that defines Saijo's brewery district.

Just to the south rises the No. 3 Storehouse Chimney, part of the same compound. The long horizontal of the storehouse and the tall vertical of the brick stack make a composition you will not find anywhere else in town.

The later upper-floor ceiling is a small clue to the building's working life: a space once open to the roof framing was adapted as the brewery's needs changed.

Visiting

The No. 3 Storehouse is still part of a working brewery, and the Daikoku-gura compound is not open to visitors. Both the company and Higashihiroshima City list it as closed to the public, so there is no access to the site or the interior.

What you can see is whatever is visible from outside the compound. The 27-metre chimney is the easiest landmark; Fukubijin Sake Brewery No. 3 Storehouse runs east to west on its north side. Note that this is not the Ebisu-gura compound, which is the part of the brewery open to visitors.