Saijo Tsuru Brewery Store and Main House

The Shop and Home on the Street

The Saijo Tsuru Brewery Store and Main House (西條鶴醸造店舗兼主屋, Saijōtsuru Jōzō Tenpo-ken-shuoku) is a two-storey wooden townhouse of the late Meiji period (1898 to 1912) in Saijo Honmachi, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on August 1, 2016. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 155 square meters, and it has served Saijo Tsuru Brewery, founded in 1904, as both its shop and the family's home.

It stands at the southwest corner of a long, narrow lot that runs from south to north, with its front on the street. The Tsunoya, a Taisho-period annex, is built against its back. Everything else on the site, the storehouses and the brick chimney, sits behind it, so the Store and Main House is the first thing a passer-by sees.

An Earthen Passage and Five Rooms in a Row

It was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, as number 34-0198, the first of the five Saijo Tsuru Brewery listings.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the plan of the Saijo Tsuru Brewery Store and Main House in some detail. On the west side of the front is a large door of the lift-up type, and from it a Doma, an earthen-floored passage, runs straight back through the house. Along the east side of the passage, five living rooms follow one another in a single line from front to back.

A lift-up door of this kind was raised during the day to open the shop wide to the street and lowered at night to close it. With the passage and the row of rooms under one roof, the building joins trade and household in the way townhouses of merchants commonly did.

The Entry Room and the Eight-Mat Parlor

The five rooms are not interchangeable. According to the Agency, the step up from the passage into the living quarters is placed in the second room from the front, a four-and-a-half-mat room. Putting the entry one room back, rather than at the shopfront, reads as a way of keeping the front room apart from the family rooms behind it.

The last room, at the back, is an eight-mat Zashiki, the formal parlor. Here the builders used fine, carefully chosen timber around the Tokonoma, the display alcove. The rooms grow more formal as you move from the street toward the rear.

From outside, look at the west half of the facade. The big door marks where the passage begins, and the rooms line up to its east. The street front of the Store and Main House gives a fair idea of how the interior is divided.

Visiting

Because the Saijo Tsuru Brewery Store and Main House faces the street, its exterior can be seen from the road. Neither the brewery's website nor the city's tourism site mentions any opening of the living rooms, so assume the eight-mat parlor cannot be seen.

The brewery shop is open from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and offers tastings; it closes on irregular days. Published sources do not say which building on the lot houses the shop.

If you photograph the facade you will be standing in the road, so watch for traffic. Directions and the conditions for the shop and the brewery tour are gathered on the Saijo Tsuru Brewery page.