Miyagino Natto Factory Natto and Natto Bacteria Production Building

The Office and the Workroom, Side by Side

The Miyagino Natto Factory Natto and Natto Bacteria Production Building (宮城野納豆製造所納豆及び納豆菌製造棟, Miyagino Nattō Seizōsho Nattō oyobi Nattōkin Seizōtō) is a factory building of about 1934 at the centre of the Miyagino Natto Factory in Ichomachi, Miyagino-ku, Sendai, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on September 10, 2019. Both the natto and the bacterial culture that ferments it are made here.

The building faces south and joins two quite different blocks. The east wing is a single-storey Kirizuma-zukuri workroom where the beans are processed. The west wing is a two-storey Yosemune-zukuri block that held the office and the family's living quarters, and its front door serves as the entrance to the whole factory.

It is timber-framed, single-storey with a 2-storey section, roofed in metal sheet, and covers a building area of 331 square metres. It was enlarged in the decade after it went up and renovated in 2017.

Why It Was Registered

Registered under number 04-168 along with six neighbouring buildings, it was listed for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as an office-cum-factory that conveys what an early Showa neighbourhood works looked like.

The arrangement tells the story on its own. Management and family lived and kept the books in the two-storey block, and production happened next door under the same name. There is no separate headquarters, just a desk a few steps from the cooking pots.

The workroom is also still doing its original job. According to Sendai's Board of Education, boiled soybeans are inoculated with natto bacteria and packed in the east wing today, which is rarer among registered industrial buildings than you might expect.

What to Look For

Inside the east wing is one open space. A timber truss carries the roof so that no posts interrupt the floor, and the company says this frame has come through two major earthquakes. Outside, the Shitami-itabari clapboard lays thin horizontal shadow lines across the walls.

The key piece of equipment is a rotating cooker. Spun under pressure, it heats the beans evenly; once the bacteria go in, it keeps turning to coat every bean. The company credits the second-generation head, Miura Kazuo, with developing the pressurised rotary cooker after production resumed after the war.

Packing happens two ways. Triangular packets are wrapped by hand in shavings of linden wood called kyogi, while square tubs are filled by machine. The finished packs are loaded onto a rail trolley dating from the early Showa period and pushed along a track into the Aging Building next door, the physical link between the two structures.

Visiting

The Miyagino Natto Factory Natto and Natto Bacteria Production Building is a working production space and its interior is not open to the public. The site is walled and cannot be entered. The company's factory pages and video show the cooker and the hand-wrapping.

No notice on photography was found. If you photograph the site from outside, be mindful that this is an active factory in a residential area. Directions and contact details for enquiries are on the Miyagino Natto Factory page.