Omori Soy Sauce Brewery

About the Omori Soy Sauce Brewery

The Omori Soy Sauce Brewery (大森醤油醸造所) at Obe, Tonosho Town, Shozu District, Kagawa Prefecture, is a soy sauce works whose early Meiji brewing storehouses and early Taisho koji house and pressing shed were registered as three Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (structures) on March 2, 2004 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

According to the Shodoshima Soy Sauce Cooperative, soy sauce making on the island is traditionally said to date from the 1590s, and the island, long a major salt producer, turned to soy sauce when salt fell into oversupply in the late Edo period. The Japan Tourism Agency notes that up to 400 breweries operated on Shodoshima around the turn of the 20th century, of which about 20 still work today.

Three Buildings

In the south-west corner, the koji house is a two-chamber koji room with double outer walls, a bamboo-slat ceiling and high windows for regulating temperature. East of it, the pressing shed and work area, where the mash was pressed, has a former boiler room on the north and a row of slatted iwaku-mado windows (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Further east, the brewing storehouses are two parallel gabled buildings framed with central posts and two-tier beams, the core of the brewery. The three stand in a line running east from the south-west corner of the site: koji house, pressing shed, brewing storehouses (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

Visiting and Location

No public access information has been confirmed for the brewery; please view it only from the road without entering the premises. The address is 3272-1 Obe, Tonosho Town.