Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory

Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory: Six Brewery Buildings on Two Sides of a Street

The Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory (ヒガシマル醤油元本社工場, Higashimaru Shōyu Moto-Honsha Kōjō) is a group of soy sauce brewery buildings from the late Edo period to the Taisho era in Ote, Tatsuno-cho, Tatsuno City, Hyogo Prefecture, whose six buildings were entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on December 24, 2013. They carry the consecutive registration numbers 28-0569 to 28-0574, and Tatsuno City presents them together under the single name of the former head office factory.

The owner is Higashimaru Shoyu Co., Ltd., the best-known maker of usukuchi, the pale, light-coloured soy sauce of the Kansai region. According to the company's own history, its new head office was completed in 1978, and today both the head office and the No. 1 Factory stand in Tominaga, another part of Tatsuno-cho. The name Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory marks these buildings as the works that belonged to the head office before that move.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the oldest part, the office, to the late Edo period, which it gives as 1751 to 1830, and the newest building, Brewing Storehouse No. 2, to the Taisho era (1912 to 1926). The other four buildings, along with the pressing house added behind the office, are dated to the mid-Meiji period, 1883 to 1897. Together the six cover a building area of about 2,600 square meters.

How the Six Buildings of the Former Head Office Factory Fit Together

The Agency's descriptions divide the Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory into a north lot and a south lot on either side of an east-west street, and place each building in relation to the others. Put together, they give this layout:

• Office and Pressing House (north lot): a townhouse-style office facing south onto the street, with a pressing house added behind it
• Brewing Storehouse No. 3 (north lot): directly west of the office, its front turned to the street
• Brewing Storehouse and Sundries Storehouse (north lot): an L-shaped block at the west end, with the sundries store along the street and the brewing storehouse running north behind it
• Raw Material Storehouse and Brewing Storehouse (south lot): a composite building in the northeast corner, its east wall on a watercourse, joining the raw material store to a salt-dissolving room, brewing storehouse, mash room and workroom
• Brewing Storehouse No. 1 (south lot): two parallel storehouses in the southeast, the southern one used as the koji room and the northern one as its anteroom
• Brewing Storehouse No. 2 (south lot): two north-south storehouses joined in the southwest corner, packed with large fermentation vats

Read in order of use, the buildings cover the whole of traditional soy sauce making: receiving raw materials and dissolving salt, growing koji, fermenting the mash in wooden vats and pressing it. All six are single-storey Dozo-zukuri buildings with thick earthen walls, and all six were registered on the same ground, as buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

Tatsuno City singles out the white Shikkui plaster walls, the slatted Mushiko-mado windows, the Hongawarabuki tiled roofs and the way the blocks are laid out along a watercourse, and says the buildings sit comfortably in the old castle town and have become one of the views visitors most associate with Tatsuno. Each building has its own page covering its construction and what to look for.

The Former Head Office Factory and the Story of Tatsuno Soy Sauce

Higashimaru Shoyu traces its founding to the Tensho era, around 1580. The company's museum explains that soy sauce making in Tatsuno was begun by Marao Magoemon Nagamura, Yokoyama Gorobee Munenobu, Kataoka Jibee and others, and that it prospered on the strength of usukuchi. Wheat and rice from the Harima plain, soybeans from the foothills and salt from Ako were the raw materials, and the soft, iron-poor groundwater of the Ibo River is credited with making the pale sauce possible.

As modern companies, Asai Shoyu was founded in 1869 in the domain's former produce storehouse, and the Kataoka family's Kikuichi Shoyu partnership was set up in 1893. The two merged on March 5, 1942 to form Tatsuno Shoyu Co., Ltd., which took the name Higashimaru Shoyu in 1964. The company gives, as one source of the name, the fact that the domain-run brewery handed over to Asai Shoyu was known as the Higashigura, the East Storehouse.

On the same block as the Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory stands the office building put up in 1932 as the head office of Kikuichi Shoyu. The sources checked for this page, however, do not say which of the two pre-merger companies built the six factory buildings.

Visiting the Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory

The six buildings of the Higashimaru Soy Sauce Former Head Office Factory belong to a working company, and there is no announced public opening of their interiors. A visit means looking at them from the street without entering the site. Tatsuno City notes that local events are held using these soy sauce storehouses; if there is a chance to see inside, it comes with such an event.

The easiest starting point is the Usukuchi Tatsuno Soy Sauce Museum on the same block, housed in the former head office building of 1932 and opened as a soy sauce museum in November 1979. The Tatsuno Tourism Association gives the walk from JR Hon-Tatsuno Station on the Kishin Line as about 20 minutes. The museum is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (last entry 4:30 p.m.), closed on Mondays (or the following Tuesday when Monday is a holiday) and over the New Year holiday; admission is 10 yen, and there is parking for 30 cars (checked September 2026).

Standing in the street in front of the museum, the townhouse-like fronts of the Office and Pressing House, Brewing Storehouse No. 3 and the Brewing Storehouse and Sundries Storehouse line the north side. On the south lot are the Raw Material Storehouse and Brewing Storehouse and Brewing Storehouses No. 1 and No. 2, the first of these presenting its long east wall to the watercourse. The factory is private property, so keep photography to what can be taken from the street.