Hakubotan Sake Brewery Tenpogura Rice Mill

What Is the Hakubotan Sake Brewery Tenpogura Rice Mill?

The Hakubotan Sake Brewery Tenpogura Rice Mill (白牡丹酒造天保蔵精米所, Hakubotan Shuzō Tenpōgura Seimaijo) is an earthen-walled rice-polishing building of the late Meiji period (1898 to 1912) at Tenpogura in Saijo Honmachi, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 28, 2017. It stands at the south end of the Tenpogura lot and was enlarged and altered around 1961.

The main block is a fully two-storey storehouse with a gabled roof of pantiles, 15 meters long and 5.7 meters deep. A Geya lean-to runs along the north side, bringing the building area to 121 square meters. The walls have timber boarding at the base with Shikkui lime plaster above, and drip tiles cross the gable ends. The roof is framed with trusses.

The north wall of the lean-to has boarding below and a row of large glass windows above. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes this north face as a modern front well suited to a testing room.

Why Tenpogura Rice Mill Was Registered

The Tenpogura Rice Mill was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, number 34-0239, as a model of design. Of Hakubotan's eight registered structures, only this building and the Tenpogura Well were listed on that basis; the other six were registered for their contribution to the landscape.

What earns that listing is the meeting of old and new in one building: a traditional earthen shell, and inside and alongside it a trussed roof and a glazed lean-to. A late-Meiji storehouse with a Western-style roof frame and a bright, laboratory-like wall on its north side shows its history plainly.

Polishing is the first step in making sake. In its description of the Saijo Sake Breweries historic site, the Agency for Cultural Affairs names the early use of powered rice-polishing machines at Saijo's Kimura brewery as one reason Hiroshima sake won national recognition. Hakubotan Sake Brewery Tenpogura Rice Mill is a building that carried out that same task, and it ties Hakubotan to that chapter of Saijo's modern brewing history.

What to Look For

At Tenpogura Rice Mill, compare the north lean-to with the main block. The main block has the closed face of a storehouse, white plaster with small openings. The lean-to sets a line of glass windows above its boarding to let light in. Given that the lean-to is described as a testing room, the brightness fits its use.

Look for the drip tiles on the gable ends. On a narrow gable only 5.7 meters wide, the line of tiles cuts across the white wall and gives it a clear horizontal break.

The trusses are hidden inside. A truss uses triangulated members to send the roof load out to the side walls; it is a Western framing method that spread in Japan from the Meiji era, so here modern engineering sits inside a traditional storehouse shell.

Hakubotan says on its website that it polishes all of its rice in-house, mostly brown rice grown in Hiroshima Prefecture. The company chronology also notes that in 1968 the rice mill was moved from the head-office plant to the Yonemitsu brewery. The chronology does not say which building that entry refers to, and the current use of the Tenpogura Rice Mill could not be confirmed.

Visiting Tenpogura Rice Mill

The interior of Tenpogura Rice Mill is not part of Hakubotan's visitor guide. The public area is the head-office exhibition room, so assume you cannot go inside the mill.

The mill stands at the south end of Tenpogura, but how much of it can be seen depends on conditions on the ground. View it from the public road only and do not enter the premises.

Exhibition room hours and directions from Saijo Station are on the Hakubotan Sake Brewery group page.