Kojiya Tarobei Shoten

What Is Kojiya Tarobei Shoten?

Kojiya Tarobei Shoten (糀屋太郎兵衛商店, Kōjiya Tarobē Shōten) is a koji maker's shop in Uomachi, Matsusaka City, Mie Prefecture, in business since the Edo period, whose four buildings, a tool storehouse of 1855 and three buildings rebuilt after a town fire in 1893, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on February 4, 2021.

Koji is steamed rice grown over with a cultivated mold, Aspergillus oryzae. It is the starter behind miso, soy sauce, sake and the sweet rice drink amazake, and a koji shop makes it by the tray and sells it to households and brewers. The name of this shop says as much: Kojiya is the trade name, "koji house," and Tarobei is the given name that, according to Matsusaka City, successive heads of the family have taken on, sometimes written 太良兵衛 instead of 太郎兵衛.

The four registrations carry consecutive numbers, 24-0282 to 24-0285. The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended them together on July 17, 2020. What makes the group worth registering is that it is complete: shop and house, rice store, tool store and the fermenting room all stand on one plot, so the whole working cycle of a small koji business survives in buildings.

The Fire of 1893 and the Rebuilding of Kojiya Tarobei Shoten

On March 29, 1893, a fire remembered as the Great Matsusaka Fire swept through the town. Matsusaka City records that the shop and main house, the inner storehouse and rice storehouse, and the koji chamber of Kojiya Tarobei Shoten were all caught in it, and that written records and family tradition put their rebuilding in April of the same year. If that is right, the family had the shop, the storehouse and the fermenting room standing again within about a month.

One building escaped. The tool storehouse in the southeast corner of the plot carries brush-written inscriptions dating it to 1855, which makes it the only Edo-period building of the four. Mie Prefecture notes that the covered work area in front of it, the kuramae, was added around 1893, after the fire.

The shop and main house was renovated around 1970, but its black plaster street front still has the look of a Matsusaka townhouse of the mid-Meiji era.

Walking the Kojiya Tarobei Shoten Plot from Street to Back

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes each building by where it stands in relation to the others. Put together, the four buildings of Kojiya Tarobei Shoten line up like this:

• Shop and Main House (about 1893): a two-storey gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) townhouse facing west onto the street, with a projecting lattice (Degōshi) below and a bay window and Mushiko-mado slits above
• Tool Storehouse (1855): a two-storey Dozo-zukuri storehouse for household goods in the southeast of the plot, facing west, which survived the fire
• Inner Storehouse and Rice Storehouse (1893): north of the tool storehouse and facing south, one building holding rice for koji on the west side and koji-making tools on the east
• Koji Chamber (about 1893): a half-sunken fermenting room west of the inner storehouse, facing south, the core of production

Mie Prefecture adds that there used to be a place in front of the tool storehouse for washing kojibuta, the shallow wooden trays in which koji is spread to grow. Rice comes in, trays are washed, koji matures in the chamber and goes out through the shop at the front. You can read the order of the work in the layout.

Three of the buildings were registered for contributing to the historic landscape. The koji chamber alone was registered under a different criterion, as a structure that would not be easy to reproduce. Each building of Kojiya Tarobei Shoten has its own page with details of its construction.

Kojiya Tarobei Shoten and the Uomachi Streetscape

Uomachi lies in the old castle town east of the Matsusaka Castle ruins. The former house of the Hasegawa family, merchants who grew rich selling cotton in Edo, stands in the same district, as does the site of the house of the scholar Motoori Norinaga. Matsusaka City counts Kojiya Tarobei Shoten among the buildings that hold this historic street together.

The city also values the shop for showing, in concrete form, how a merchant family has kept making and selling koji from the Edo period to the present, which gives it weight in cultural and industrial history as well. The great merchant houses of Uomachi traded far away in Edo; Kojiya Tarobei Shoten supplied the kitchens and breweries of its own town.

Visiting Kojiya Tarobei Shoten

Kojiya Tarobei Shoten is in Uomachi, about a 10-minute walk west of Matsusaka Station on the JR and Kintetsu lines, roughly 500 meters in a straight line. The Matsusaka Tourist Association gives the same 10 minutes on foot for the Former Hasegawa Jirobei Residence in Uomachi, so the two make an easy walk together. For drivers, the association's page for that residence gives about 10 minutes from the Matsusaka interchange on the Ise Expressway and points visitors to the Matsusaka city parking lot.

Kojiya Tarobei Shoten is privately owned and still a working koji shop, not a museum, so there is no admission desk and no fee. You are free to look at the street front, but the three storehouse buildings stand inside the plot and we found no notice of them being opened to the public (checked September 2026). We also could not find published opening hours or closing days, so if you plan to buy koji, check with the shop before you go.

When photographing from the street, stand to the side so you do not block the shop entrance or passers-by, and ask before taking pictures inside the shop.