Ayagiku Sake Brewery (formerly Izumiya Sake Brewery) Detached Tatami Room

A Nine-Mat Room for the Brewery's Guests

The Ayagiku Sake Brewery (formerly Izumiya Sake Brewery) Detached Tatami Room (綾菊酒造（旧泉谷酒造場）離れ座敷, Hanare Zashiki) is a single-story timber reception room from the early Showa period in Yamadashita, Ayagawa Town, Kagawa Prefecture, registered as a national Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 2, 2006. It was built as a Zashiki, a formal tatami room, where the brewery entertained its visitors.

The Detached Tatami Room stands southeast of the East Sake Storehouse, attached to the east side of the office, with its ridge running east to west. It measures two and a half bays by three bays (a bay, or ken, is roughly 1.8 meters), with a building area of 33 square meters, and inside is a single room of nine tatami mats. The storehouses beside it range from 318 square meters to 474 square meters, so this building is about a tenth of their size.

Like the Middle and East Sake Storehouses, it carries "formerly Izumiya Sake Brewery" in its registered name, recording that it once belonged to the Izumiya brewery.

Why a Room, Not a Storehouse, Was Registered

The Detached Tatami Room was registered as number 37-0306 under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that, small as it is, it preserves a picture of how the brewery once operated.

A sake brewery was never just a set of brewing halls. Receiving buyers and business partners, and hosting them properly in a tatami room, was part of the trade. At Ayagiku that space survives right beside the storehouses, joined to the office. The Detached Tatami Room shows that this compound was a place for welcoming people as much as a place for making sake.

A Hipped Roof with a Stepped South Eave

The roof is hipped, in the Yosemune-zukuri form, and laid in Sangawara-buki pan tiles. On the south side only, the eaves drop down one step, so that the roof is laid in two tiers. This stepped form is called shikoro-buki, after the shikoro, the layered neck guard that hangs in tiers from a Japanese warrior's helmet.

That southern step is the detail to look for on the Ayagiku Detached Tatami Room. Of the four slopes of the hipped roof, only the south one breaks partway down and reaches out lower. The south is presumably the side the room opens onto, and the lowered eave can be read as a way to deepen the overhang, though no primary source states the intention.

At two and a half bays by three, the building is slightly deeper north to south than it is wide east to west. Because the ridge runs east to west, the roof ends up with a short ridge along that axis.

Visiting the Detached Tatami Room

The Detached Tatami Room is attached to the office and is far less conspicuous from the road in front than the storehouses. The interior is not advertised as open to the public.

The brewery's reservation-only tours center on the storehouses and the production facility, and it has not published whether the Detached Tatami Room is included. If you want to see it, ask when you book whether you can at least view the exterior, and check on photography at the same time.