Fukubijin Sake Brewery Office

A Western-Style Office by the Gate

Fukubijin Sake Brewery Office (福美人酒造事務所, Fukubijin Shuzō Jimusho) is a Taisho-era office building (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 stands just west of the entrance on the south side of the compound. The building is timber, two storeys with a single-storey section, under a tiled roof, and covers 147 square metres. Its walls are clad in horizontal boards, giving it a distinctly Western face.

Among the white plaster and red tiles of the brewery, that boarded facade stands out. It is the first building anyone walking through the gate sees, and it has long been the public front of the company.

The Office by the Gate, a Saijo Type

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes Fukubijin Sake Brewery Office as an example of a pattern that became standard among Saijo sake makers in the Taisho era: a Western-style office placed beside the entrance. Business and reception moved out of the brewing halls and into a separate building near the gate, dressed in a modern style. It captures the moment when Saijo brewing turned into company business.

Inside, the ground floor holds an office with a service counter and a working room, while the upper floor is a tatami room. A Western exterior with Japanese rooms upstairs is a common Taisho combination, modern on the street side, traditional where people sat and talked.

For a brewery founded as a joint-stock company, the office was where deals and accounts were handled. Registered alongside the storehouses, it means the whole operation survives, not only where sake was made but where it was sold and recorded.

What to Look For

Look at the horizontal boarding. Overlapping boards throw fine horizontal shadows across the wall, a sharp contrast with the flat plaster of the storehouses nearby.

Notice the placement, too. Standing just inside the stone gateposts on the west side, the office overlooks everyone who comes and goes. Stand at the gate and the logic of its position is obvious.

Behind it rises the 24-metre Ebisu-gura chimney. Framing the boarded office and the brick stack together from the gate gives one of the classic Saijo brewery views.

Visiting

Fukubijin Sake Brewery Office is still in company use, and there is no announced public access to its interior. The exterior can be seen from the entrance of the Ebisu-gura compound.

Visitors may enter the compound during shop hours, and the office stands immediately to the west inside the gate. Please view it without lingering in the doorway so as not to get in the way of staff.