Former Okada Family Residence (Miyanomae, Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture)

Former Okada Residence: A Dated 1674 Townhouse and Japan's Oldest Recorded Sake Brewery

A ridge tag fixed inside the roof frame records the year the shopfront was raised: Enpō 2, the year 1674. Carpenters often left such plaques, called munafuda, naming the builder and the date of construction. The one preserved here is the reason the Former Okada Residence can be placed in an exact year rather than an estimated decade, and it puts the building among the very few seventeenth-century townhouses anywhere in Japan whose age is documented this precisely.

The property sits in the former merchant quarter of Itami, a city north of Osaka that built its fortune on sake. Two main buildings face the street and run back along a narrow plot: a timber-framed shop at the front and a tall, two-storey storehouse behind it where sake was brewed. Between them stand a kettle house and a washing area added later. Together they form one of the most complete surviving pictures of how an Edo-period brewing household actually worked.

From Matsuya Yohei to the Okada Family

The first owner was a brewer named Matsuya Yohei, whose name appears in local records from Kanbun 5 (1665). Old documents and inscribed foundation stones tie him to the shop built in 1674. Around Shōtoku 5 (1715) he added the sake storehouse to the north and expanded production.

The business changed hands more than once. From 1722 the family's fortunes slipped, and in Kyōhō 14 (1729) a brewer from Osaka, Kashimaya Seiemon, bought the shop and storehouse. He built a second brewery to the east, and during Itami's peak brewing years in the Bunka and Bunsei eras (1804–1830) he added a thousand-koku warehouse to push output higher.

Brewing continued under later owners. The house passed to the Okada family when Okada Shōzō acquired it in 1900 and carried out major alterations the following year. It was named after this family. Production kept going into the modern era, latterly as the north brewery of the Otegara sake company, until brewing finally stopped in 1984. The buildings then passed to Itami City. Over the centuries the sake made here carried names such as Shōroku in the Edo period and, later, Fukichō and Otegara.

Why It Was Designated

The shop and storehouse were designated an Important Cultural Property in 1992. The shop earns its standing as the oldest townhouse in Itami and one of the small number of seventeenth-century town dwellings in Japan that can be dated with confidence. The storehouse is rarer still: it is the oldest surviving sake brewery in the country whose construction date has been established.

What makes the designation unusual is that the brewery was not preserved in isolation. The shop, the brewery, the kettle house and the washing area survive as a connected group, so a visitor can read the layout of an entire working operation rather than a single salvaged structure. Excavation during the restoration confirmed that sake was being brewed on the site from the time the shop was first built, which closes the gap between the residence and the trade it served.

What to Look For

Step into the earthen-floored half of the shop and look up. The roof frame here is left exposed: heavy beams run the length of the building in two tiers, with shorter beams laid across them and short posts rising to the ridge, all locked together with through-tenons. It is a frankly muscular piece of carpentry, built to carry weight rather than to be admired, which is exactly why it rewards a slow look.

The western half of the shop holds the living rooms, with a low attic floor, the tsushi-nikai, tucked under the eaves. The front of the building shows plastered-over latticed windows and the smooth rendered walls typical of a fire-conscious merchant house. Notice how the openings differ between the two halves; the asymmetry is a record of repeated remodelling, first when the home was converted into a shop and again in the Meiji period.

The storehouse is nearly square in plan, its central roof raised a step above the eaves that sweep down on three sides. Inside, six free-standing posts in two rows carry the upper floor and the high roof. Small windows are set high in the walls, the way a brewery needs them: enough light and air to work by, never so much that the temperature swings. The dim, cool interior now serves as a hall for talks and concerts, but the structure that made it a good place to brew sake is all still there to see.

Around the Site

The residence is part of the Itami City Museum of Art, History and Culture, known as I/M, and entry to the historic houses is free. Next door stands the Former Ishibashi Residence, a late-Edo townhouse designated by Hyogo Prefecture, with a raised shutter front and lattice windows that show a different face of the same merchant district.

Itami's identity as a brewing town runs deep. The local refined sake, Itami morohaku, was prized in Edo, where it was known as Tanjō; in 1804 alone the district shipped some 277,704 barrels north to the capital. The residence and its neighbour belong to the Japan Heritage story that links Itami with the Nada Gogō brewing districts. A short walk through the surrounding streets, with the old brewery lane nearby, fills in the rest of that story, and the museum's permanent display sets out how Itami sake was carried by packhorse and barrel-ship all the way to Edo.