Kobayashi Sake Brewery Koji Making Room

The Koji-Making House, Where Sake Begins

West of the Sixth Warehouse at the Kobayashi Brewery in Kuriyama, Hokkaido, stands a building named not for a number but for a job. The Seikiku-shitsu is the koji-making house, and koji is the cultured rice that sets sake brewing in motion. A two-story brick structure completed in 1922 (Taisho 11), it is the youngest of the brewery's registered buildings, covering 282 square meters under a sheet-iron gabled roof.

The house runs north to south, about 28 meters along the ridge and roughly ten meters across. A doorway opens toward the south end of the west face. The working heart of the building is tucked into the northwest corner, set aside as the koji room, or koji muro, the warm, enclosed space where a mold called Aspergillus oryzae is grown over steamed rice. On the upper floor, four windows line the long side and one opens on the north gable. There is little ornament here. The design is plain and practical, shaped by what the work required.

Kobayashi Brewery dates to 1878 (Meiji 11), beginning in Sapporo and relocating to Kuriyama in 1901 for the water of the Yubari River. Its sake carries the name Kita no Nishiki, chosen by founder Kobayashi Yonezaburo with an eye to making a name in the north.

Why This Building Is a Registered Cultural Property

The koji-making house was registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property on October 18, 2006. Registration differs from designation. National Treasure and Important Cultural Property status single out the most exceptional works, while registration gives a lighter form of protection to buildings of around fifty years or more that help shape the historic character of a place. The standard met here was that the structure contributes to the country's historic landscape.

Its value lies partly in completing the picture. Many of the registered buildings on the grounds are storage warehouses, but this one is a production space, dedicated to a single crucial stage of brewing. As one of the thirteen structures registered together in 2006, it shows the working brewery as a whole, where storehouses, a rice-steaming house, and this koji room each had a defined role.

Built two decades after the earliest stone warehouses, it also marks the brewery's later confidence in brick. The restraint of its design, free of the decorative touches seen on the Second Warehouse, reflects a building meant first and last to do its job well.

What to Look For When You Visit

Read this building as part of a process rather than a collection. Standing before it, picture the path of the rice: steamed nearby, then brought into the koji room in the northwest corner to be inoculated and tended at a careful warmth for a couple of days. That cultured rice is what later converts starch to sugar so fermentation can begin. The plainness of the exterior is itself the point, a structure made to serve the craft.

Exteriors across the grounds are open to view. The Kita no Nishiki Memorial Hall, in the 1944 former office, displays around five thousand brewing tools and runs a shop and tasting counter where the link between these buildings and the sake in the bottle becomes concrete. Interiors are shown to groups of ten or more by reservation, and the April brewery festival opens the buildings to all comers each year.