Sakai Meishu Bunko

An Eighty-Three-Square-Metre Document Storehouse on the Station-Front Street

Walk out of Togura Station in Chikuma City and one of the first old buildings you meet is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse standing with its long side to the street, its eaves and even its exposed rafters smoothed over with plaster. This is the bunko-gura, the document storehouse, of the Sakai Meijo sake brewery, and at about eighty-three square metres of floor area it is a substantial structure for a building whose original job was simply to keep paper safe.

It sits to the north-west of the brewery's main house, turning its north face toward the prefectural road that runs to the station, a street laid out at right angles to the old Hokkoku Kaido highway. The building runs east to west under a gabled roof of pantiles, entered from the long side in the hira-iri manner. At the centre of the south face a lean-to roof reaches out to form a kura-mae, a sheltered working space in front of the storehouse door.

The careful plastering of the eaves and rafters is the detail that matters. Sealing those timbers under render was slow, skilled work, done partly for fire resistance and partly for finish, and it marks this out as a storehouse built with unusual care rather than as plain utility.

The Brewery and Its Designation

Sakai Meijo has brewed sake here for more than four centuries, on the site of Shimo-Togura, one of the post towns, or shukuba, strung along the Hokkoku Kaido that linked the Zenko-ji plain to the Japan Sea coast. The document storehouse was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2003, listed under the criterion that it contributes to the historic character of the national landscape.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is a lighter designation than Important Cultural Property, created in 1996 to protect the broad stock of buildings inherited from the more recent past. The storehouse itself is dated to the late Edo period, the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century, and stands within a compound whose buildings span a remarkable run of eras.

The brewery's main house was rebuilt after a great fire of 1760 and was originally thatched. Around it the family raised a sequence of storehouses that can almost be read as a calendar of the trade: a Horeki-era store of 1761, a Kansei-era store of 1800, a Keio-era store of 1866, and later Meiji and Taisho additions. The document storehouse belongs to this same working landscape of dated kura.

What to Look For

The compound is open to visitors as a sake-brewing museum, with several exhibition rooms set among the old buildings, so the document storehouse can be seen as part of a living complex rather than in isolation. Take in the cluster of storehouses together and notice how their construction dates ladder up across two centuries, then return to the document storehouse and look closely at the plastered eaves and the lean-to kura-mae on its south side.

The brewery also keeps a literary memory. The Edo-period haiku poet Kaya Shirao stayed here, and materials relating to him were rediscovered on the premises in 1982, leading to the opening of a small memorial hall in his name the following year. The early twentieth-century artist Takehisa Yumeji, known for his wistful portraits of women, also lodged at the brewery. Checking current opening hours before a visit is sensible.

Around the Brewery

Togura sits in the southern part of Chikuma City, in the valley of the Chikuma River, and the brewery is only a couple of minutes on foot from Togura Station on the Shinano Railway. The setting is the old highway country south of Nagano, where post towns and farming villages line the routes through the river plain.

A short way off lies Togura-Kamiyamada Onsen, one of the larger hot-spring resorts in the prefecture, with rows of inns along the river. A visit that pairs the brewery's storehouses with an evening at the springs follows the old logic of the post road, where travellers stopped, drank, and rested before moving on.