Sakai Meishu Keio Brewery

A storehouse divided between malt and steam

The Keiō-gura was built to do two jobs at once. Its western half was a kōji-muro, the warm, enclosed room where steamed rice is inoculated with mould to make the malt that drives sake fermentation. Its eastern half, on the side facing the main house, was the kamaba, the hearth area where rice was steamed in a great kettle. You can read that division from the outside: the roof over the kamaba drops a step lower than the roof over the malt room, a small raised monitor roof sits at the centre of the ridge to let heat and steam escape, and a chimney stands near the eastern gable.

The building belongs to the Sakai Meijō brewery in Shimo-Togura, a former post town on the Hokkoku Kaidō, the old highway through the mountains of northern Shinano, in what is now Chikuma City, Nagano. It is a single-story dozō, an earthen-walled storehouse with thick plastered walls, roofed with pantiles, covering about 165 square metres. Its name comes from the Keiō era of the late 1860s, and the national record dates it to the closing decades of the Edo period, between 1830 and 1867.

The Keiō-gura does not stand alone. It sits between two older storehouses, the Hōreki-gura and the Kansei-gura, within a brewery compound whose buildings are named for the eras in which they went up: Hōreki, Kansei, Keiō, Meiji, Taishō. Together they record more than two centuries of a working sake business adding space as it grew.

A Registered Tangible Cultural Property

The Keiō-gura was entered in the national register on January 31, 2003, with the official notice following on February 26. It is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, a category created in 1996 for buildings worth preserving that fall outside the stricter system of Important Cultural Properties. Registration is a lighter touch: it recognizes structures that contribute to the country's historic landscape while leaving owners freer to keep using them. The Keiō-gura qualified on exactly that ground.

What gives the storehouse its value is less any single feature than its survival as part of a whole. The Sakai family brewed here for generations, producing on the order of two thousand koku of sake, and the compound preserves the full working sequence of an Edo-to-modern brewery, from the rice-washing and steaming to fermentation, pressing, and storage, each stage housed in its own storehouse. The thatched main house, rebuilt after a great fire in 1760, still anchors the group along the old road.

The brewery also kept company with artists. The haiku poet Kaya Shirao, of the Bashō tradition, stayed here for long stretches, and the painter Takehisa Yumeji left works during his visits to the nearby Togura-Kamiyamada hot spring. Material connected to both is preserved on site.

Visiting

Unlike many registered buildings, this one is open. The Sakai Meijō compound now operates as the Sake Brewing Collection, a small museum spread through the old storehouses, with rooms devoted to brewing tools and process, to Kaya Shirao, to Takehisa Yumeji's paintings, and to the history of the Hokkoku Kaidō. Walking the storehouses gives a direct sense of how the spaces were used, the Keiō-gura's malt room and hearth among them.

The thatched main house serves as a soba restaurant and tasting room where the brewery's labels can be sampled and bought. The site sits close to Togura Station on the Shinano Railway, an easy stop on the way to or from the Togura-Kamiyamada hot-spring district. Opening days and hours change with the season, so confirm them before setting out.