Odagaki Shoten

What Is Odagaki Shoten?

Odagaki Shoten (小田垣商店) is a black soybean wholesaler founded in 1734 in Tatemachi, Tamba-Sasayama City, Hyogo Prefecture, whose head-office compound of ten buildings dating from the late Edo period to the early Taisho era was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 2, 2007.

The shop fronts the old Kyo Kaido, the highway that once led from the castle town of Sasayama toward Kyoto, and faces west onto it. Behind the shop to the east stand a workshop and a former sake brewery; to the south, a string of domestic buildings runs back toward a garden, and a roofed wall follows the street. The ten listings carry consecutive registration numbers, 28-0283 to 28-0292, and all became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on the same day.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs files three of them (the shop, the workshop and the former sake brewery) under the name Odagaki Shoten and the other seven under Odagaki Family Residence (小田垣家住宅, Odagaki-ke Jūtaku). The split follows function, business on one side and household on the other, but each entry locates itself by reference to its neighbors, so the ten read best as one property. The agency still gives the address as Sasayama City, the name used before the city became Tamba-Sasayama in May 2019.

A Short History of Odagaki Shoten

According to the company's own history, Odagaki Shoten began in 1734, when Odagaki Rokuzaemon, a metal caster, opened a hardware business. In 1868 the family switched to seeds, dealing in black soybean seed stock and then buying and selling the beans themselves. The present name dates from 1935.

The agency's description of the former sake brewery adds a chapter the company history leaves out: it calls that building the core of the house's sake-making era and says the workshop inherited the same role. When the Odagaki family brewed sake is not stated in any source we could check.

In 2015 Odagaki Shoten became a component of the Japan Heritage story built around Dekansho-bushi, the folk song of Tamba-Sasayama whose verses list local produce, black soybeans among them. The Japan Heritage portal singles out the shop's heavy plastered Nuriya-zukuri facade and the merchant-house setting that goes back to the late 18th century.

How the Odagaki Shoten Compound Is Laid Out

Pieced together from the agency's descriptions, the ten Odagaki Shoten buildings sit as follows. Together they span roughly 150 years of construction.

• Store (late Edo period): a large Hirairi Machiya facing west onto the old Kyo Kaido, the public face of the property
• Workshop (early Meiji era): directly east of the shop, behind its earthen-floored entry, and open to it as one continuous space
• Former Sake Brewery (late Edo period): farther east, sharing a single run of roof with the workshop
• Miso Storehouse (end of the Edo period): a small earthen storehouse with an attached well house, south of the workshop
• Storehouse (mid-Meiji era): a two-storey earthen storehouse built against the south side of the miso storehouse
• Tatami Room (late Meiji era): south of the shop across a small courtyard garden, reached from the shop by a covered corridor
• Tea Room (late Meiji era): directly south of the tatami room, looking onto the garden
• Toilet and Bath Building (Taisho era): east of the tea room, linked to the detached room by a corridor
• Detached Room (around 1914): a two-storey reception building on the south side of the lot
• Wall (late Meiji era): runs south from the shop's southwest corner, turns east at the corner of the lot and ends at the entrance of the detached room

The logic is easy to follow on the ground: trade on the street, work and storage behind it, and rooms for receiving guests around the garden to the south. The dates show the reception wing growing southward from the late Meiji era into the Taisho era. All ten were registered under the same criterion, contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Each building has its own page.

The Odagaki Shoten Restoration by New Material Research Laboratory

From 2018, Odagaki Shoten worked through the ten buildings in stages with New Material Research Laboratory, the practice led by the contemporary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto and the architect Tomoyuki Sakakida. The first phase covered five of the ten, including the oldest, late Edo building. The main shop and the Odagaki Mamedou cafe reopened in April 2021, and a second phase in 2022 took in the storehouse of the main shop, the former sake brewery, an adjacent warehouse and the garden.

The work was finished in spring 2025, and two of the residential buildings opened on May 17 that year as Mameya, a guesthouse let to one party at a time. The mayor of Tamba-Sasayama described it as a Taisho-era dwelling with 165 square meters of floor space.

The architects call the approach architecture that returns through time: stripping out fixtures added over the decades and adding earthquake reinforcement in ways that follow the original roof framing and carpentry, so the buildings move back toward their earlier state. A new stone garden now fills the middle of the lot, with a path of black stones laid to resemble black soybeans, a dry garden, moss, and two stone circles modeled on Jomon-period sites. An actual Jomon-period standing stone marks the center of the circle on the guesthouse side.

Visiting Odagaki Shoten

The Odagaki Shoten main store is about 20 minutes by bus from Sasayamaguchi Station on the JR Fukuchiyama Line (JR Takarazuka Line); get off at Kami-tatsumachi and walk about 2 minutes. By car it is about 13 minutes from the Tannan-Sasayamaguchi interchange on the Maizuru-Wakasa Expressway, and there is parking.

Anyone can walk into the main shop and the Odagaki Mamedou cafe, which occupy the shop building and its neighbors. The shop is open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and closes only over the New Year holidays. The cafe runs 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (last order 4:00 p.m.) and closes on Thursdays (the next weekday if Thursday is a holiday) and over New Year. There is no admission charge (checked September 2026).

The two residential buildings that now form Mameya are closed to anyone who is not staying there, and the tea room serves as the guests' breakfast room. For a guided look at the buildings, Odagaki Shoten runs an occasional reservation-only tour that includes a building walk-through, for up to 8 people at 6,000 yen per adult (checked September 2026).

The exterior can be seen from the old Kyo Kaido at any time: the west front of the shop and the wall that continues south from it are what the street offers. If you want to take photos inside the shop, ask the staff first and keep other customers out of the frame.