Matsumoto Sake Brewery

A Working Brewery on the Shin-Takasegawa

Matsumoto Sake Brewery (松本酒造, Matsumoto Shuzo) is a sake maker founded in 1791 whose brewery and family residence in Yokooji Misu Daikokucho, Fushimi Ward, Kyoto City, keep seven buildings dating from the late Meiji era to around 1954, all listed as National Registered Tangible Cultural Property properties.

The house began in Kyoto's Higashiyama district, where the first Matsumoto Jihei brewed under the trade name Sawaya. The Fushimi Sake Brewers Association and the company's own history place the founding in Yasaka Yumiyacho; Kyoto City's citation says Higashiyama Shichijo. Either way it was a city-centre brewer for well over a century before it came south.

The move to Fushimi is dated differently depending on whom you read. Kyoto City's certification text and the company history give 1922 and describe a relocation. Kyoto City's selection text and the brewers' association give 1923 and call it an expansion, made in search of better water. Fushimi was once written with characters meaning "hidden water", and Matsumoto still draws its brewing water from a well on the premises.

What Matsumoto bought was not an empty plot. According to Kyoto City, the site had been a pharmaceutical factory, and the brewer took over its late-Meiji brick warehouse and brick chimney, along with an early-Taisho office, as working parts of the new brewery. New storehouses followed: the Daikokugura in 1923, the Sakagura Hall (formerly the junmai brewhouse) in 1924, and the Ginjo Brewhouse at about the same time. Around 1954 the family built Mangyoin as their residence, and a gate said to have come from Shoden-in, a sub-temple of Kennin-ji, was moved and reworked in the same years.

Factory brick, Taisho-era timber and earth, post-war Japanese domestic architecture: three periods layered on one working site. Kyoto City singles out that layering as what makes the complex exceptional.

Seven Listings, and One That Was Removed

Registration came in two rounds. Mangyoin and the Main Gate were listed on 8 July 2008. Five brewery buildings followed on 24 December 2013: the Daikokugura, the Sakagura Hall, the Ginjo Brewhouse, the Brick Warehouse and the Brick Chimney. Mangyoin was listed for setting a standard in design; the other six for their contribution to the historic landscape.

The office inherited from the pharmaceutical company was also listed in 2013. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records that its registration was cancelled on 17 November 2025 following demolition or similar alteration. It is no longer a registered property.

The national register is only one of several recognitions. The brewers' association notes that Kyoto City named the buildings historic design structures in 1997, that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry included them among its Heritage of Industrial Modernization in 2007, and that Kyoto City designated them important landscape buildings in 2009. The city's programme on buildings and gardens that give Kyoto its character has also selected and certified the brewery.

How the Site Is Laid Out, and Where to Stand

The listed buildings fall into two clusters. The brewery buildings line the western edge of the site along the Shin-Takasegawa River. Mangyoin and the Main Gate sit on the eastern side, where the street address changes to Emisakecho. Even the two farthest-apart buildings are less than 100 metres from each other.

The spine of the brewery is the Daikokugura, running north to south along the river. To its north the Sakagura Hall faces the water on an east-west axis, with the Ginjo Brewhouse alongside. South of the Daikokugura stands the Meiji brick warehouse, and near it the brick chimney, 18 metres tall. Mangyoin stands north of its garden; the Main Gate opens east onto the street.

Kyoto City names the view of the storehouses and chimney across the Shin-Takasegawa as a defining local landscape. From the levee on the far, western bank, the board-clad walls of the Daikokugura and Sakagura Hall read as one long front, with the chimney rising at its end. In spring the riverbank fills with yellow rapeseed blossom, and that is when most photographers come.

Visiting

Matsumoto does not offer brewery tours. The Kyoto Tourism Federation lists the premises as open for sales only, on weekdays, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and from 1:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., with no visits inside. All seven listed buildings are closed to the public; you see them from outside the site, and photographs are taken from the street or the riverside.

The nearest station is Fushimi-Momoyama on the Keihan Main Line, about 13 minutes on foot. From Momoyama-Goryomae on the Kintetsu Kyoto Line allow about 15 minutes. Both routes lead west through Fushimi's cluster of sake breweries, across the Horikawa canal, and on to the brewery just short of the Shin-Takasegawa. A few parking spaces are reported on site. Telephone +81-75-611-1238.

A sensible circuit starts at the Main Gate on the street, follows the outside of the property, and ends on the Shin-Takasegawa levee, where the brewery buildings come into view one after another.