Murai Brewery Side Storehouse

The Murai Brewery Side Storehouse

The Murai Brewery Side Storehouse (村井醸造脇蔵, Murai Jōzō Wakigura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse standing on a corner site at 72 Makabe in the Makabe district of Sakuragawa City, Ibaraki Prefecture, built before 1902 and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 4 December 2000. It has a floor area of 105 square meters and was originally a grain store.

Of the four registered properties belonging to the Murai Jōzō brewery, this one came first. Its registration number, 08-0045, places it near the beginning of Ibaraki Prefecture's sequence, and the date matters locally: in 1999 the town administration began pushing the registration system in earnest, and within a few years around 104 buildings in Makabe had been added to the register. That campaign is what turned the district into a place people travel to. The Murai Brewery Side Storehouse was part of the first wave. The brewery's shop building and chimney followed four years later.

The Ibaraki Prefectural Board of Education describes it as standing at an intersection and functioning as an important landmark in the streetscape, and the description is a fair account of what the building does. Corner plots expose two elevations instead of one, and a storehouse on a corner ends up carrying more of the visual work of a street than its size suggests.

A Grain Store and the House That Built It

The Murai family has been in the fermenting trade on this ground since the Edo period. The oldest surviving record of the connection is not local at all: a publication issued by the tourism association of Hino in Shiga Prefecture notes that during the Enpō era, between 1673 and 1680, a travelling merchant named Murai Jūsuke set up an outlet selling soy sauce and miso in the town of Makabe in Hitachi Province, and that this is the earliest documented instance of a Hino merchant opening a branch in the Kantō region. Makabe sat on the route by which goods from the Kyoto and Osaka region reached the markets of the northeast, which is why an Ōmi merchant was here at all.

A house dealing in soy sauce, miso and later sake needed somewhere to keep grain, and that is what the Murai Brewery Side Storehouse was built for. The Japanese record uses the word kokugura, a grain store, and the term wakigura in the building's registered name simply means the storehouse standing to the side of the principal one. The naming is functional rather than descriptive, which is how most storehouses in a merchant compound end up labelled.

Dating is given as before 1902, which in the Japanese calendar is the thirty-fifth year of Meiji. The register does not narrow it further. What that limit tells you is that the building predates the era of concrete and steel entirely, and belongs to the phase when Makabe merchants were still answering the problem of fire and damp with earth, timber and stone.

Three Materials, Stacked

The stone base

The foundation is built of carefully dressed and squared stone, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles it out for the quality of the work. This is not incidental. Makabe sits at the foot of Mount Tsukuba and has quarried granite for centuries, so good stone and the masons to cut it were both local. A dressed ashlar plinth under a storehouse lifts the earth walls clear of ground moisture, and on the Murai Brewery Side Storehouse it also gives the elevation a firm horizontal base to sit on.

Boards, then plaster

Above the stone, the lower wall is faced in vertical boarding and the upper wall in lime plaster. The official description notes that the two are in harmony, and the reason is proportion: the board band is deep enough to read as a substantial base but not so deep that the plaster loses its dominance. It is worth comparing with the brewery's shop building a few paces away, where the dado is horizontal notched-batten weatherboarding instead. Two buildings on one plot, both earthen-walled, solving the same problem in different ways.

The ridge runs north to south

The Murai Brewery Side Storehouse measures 7 Ken along the ridge by 4 ken across, roughly 13 meters by 7 meters, under a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles. The ridge runs north to south, at right angles to the east-west ridge of the shop building. On a corner plot that orientation turns the gable end toward one street and the long flank toward the other, which is what makes the building legible from both approaches.

Visiting the Murai Brewery Side Storehouse

This is an exterior building. The Murai Brewery Side Storehouse is in private ownership, still part of a working brewery compound, and its interior is not open to the public. The good news is that a corner site is the easiest kind to look at properly: you can stand back on the far side of the intersection and take in the gable end, the long flank, the stone plinth and the roofline in a single view, which is more than most storehouses in Makabe allow. There is no fee, no gate to pass and no restriction on photographing the building from the public road.

The address is 72 Makabe, Makabe-chō, Sakuragawa City, the same premises as the Murai Jōzō shop on Kamijuku-dōri. If you want the site explained rather than simply looked at, the brewery runs guided visits by prior arrangement, bookable by telephone or through the enquiry form on its website. Staff prefer the form because the phone often goes unanswered during the brewing season. A visit takes around 30 minutes, handles up to 10 people at once and ends with a free tasting; it runs Monday to Saturday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., with Sundays and public holidays closed. Between October and March the cellar section of the tour is suspended for production, and the kōji room is never shown.

Parking on the premises is limited to roughly three cars plus a microbus or small coach. Larger coaches cannot enter and should use the municipal car park at 279-1 Makabe, which holds 65 vehicles. Iwase Station on the JR Mito Line is about 20 minutes away by taxi; from Tsukuba Station, the Tsukuba city bus reaches Tsukuba-san-guchi in around 50 minutes, where the Sakuragawa city bus, Yamazakura GO, continues about 20 minutes to the Kamijuku stop. By car, allow about 20 minutes from the Sakuragawa-Chikusei interchange on the Kita-Kantō Expressway.

Between 4 February and 3 March the district holds the Makabe Hina Matsuri, when more than a hundred houses and shops set out displays of dolls and some interiors that are otherwise private open their doors. It is the one period when the streets around the Murai Brewery Side Storehouse are crowded, and also the period when a walk through Makabe shows you the most. If you prefer the buildings without the crowd, any clear morning outside that window will do, and the low winter sun raking across a plaster wall is arguably the better light for this particular one.