Matsumoto Sake Brewery Daikokugura

Three Storehouses Joined as One

Matsumoto Sake Brewery Daikokugura (松本酒造大黒蔵) is a two-storey earthen-walled brewery storehouse in Yokooji Misu Daikokucho, Fushimi Ward, Kyoto City, built in 1923 and listed as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 24 December 2013. It runs north to south along the Shin-Takasegawa River on the western edge of the Matsumoto Sake Brewery site and covers 1,323 square metres.

Nothing else at Matsumoto comes close in scale. The Sakagura Hall next door covers 141 square metres and the Ginjo Brewhouse 80 square metres; the Daikokugura is roughly nine times the larger of the two.

Kyoto City's account of the site explains its place in the sequence. When Matsumoto set up in Fushimi it bought a former pharmaceutical factory and kept that plant's brick warehouse and chimney. The first new brewery building it raised beside them was the Daikokugura, in 1923. The street address, Daikokucho, carries the same name.

How It Is Built

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the building as three earthen-walled storehouses, each 40 metres long, set side by side from east to west and joined into a single structure under gabled roofs of sangawara pantiles. It is dozo-zukuri construction: a timber frame wrapped in thick clay walls, the standard defence against fire for anything valuable in a Japanese town.

The roof framing mixes two traditions. Parts use wagoya, the native Japanese system of stacked horizontal beams and short posts; parts use Western-style trusses. Kyoto City picks out that combination in its citation. The published records do not say which of the three bays uses which.

Outside, vertical boarding covers the walls right up to the eaves. Small windows, each with its own little canopy, are spaced at regular intervals along the length. On a wall this long, those windows are what give the elevation its rhythm.

Why It Was Listed, and What to Look For

The Daikokugura was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency's note is brief: a large storehouse of real bulk that adds colour to Fushimi's riverside scene.

The thing to look at is the long river front. The Sakagura Hall to the north was built a year later with the same vertical boarding and evenly spaced windows, clearly to match. Seen from across the water, the two read as one enormous storehouse. At the southern end the Meiji brick warehouse and chimney take over, and timber gives way to red brick. Kyoto City calls the Daikokugura and chimney, seen from the river, a symbol of the district.

This is not a preserved shell. Matsumoto says it still brews in the storehouses it built in the Taisho era, and the Daikokugura has spent a century as part of a working brewery.

Seeing the Daikokugura

The interior of the Daikokugura is not open. Matsumoto does not run brewery tours and the premises are private, so the building is seen from outside.

The best place is across the Shin-Takasegawa. Because the storehouse follows the river along the western edge of the site, the levee on the opposite, western bank gives an almost square-on view of the whole north-to-south front. From there you can count the windows and get a real sense of the length. Photographs are taken from the levee or the public road.