Sakai Meishuu Main House

A Thatched Landmark on the Old North Road

Step off the train at Togura Station, walk five minutes toward the highway, and a vast thatched roof rises at the corner where the modern road meets the line of an older one. This is the main house of Sakai Meijo, a sake brewer whose family has worked this ground in the former post town of Shimo-Togura for some four centuries. The house faces east onto what was once the Hokkoku Kaido, the North Country Road that carried travelers, daimyo processions, and pilgrims bound for the great temple of Zenko-ji across the mountains of Shinano. Its frontage runs about 28 meters along the street, a width that announces the standing of the family who built it.

The building you see today went up after disaster. In the seventh month of 1760 a great fire swept through the town, and the Sakai rebuilt their home soon after. More than two and a half centuries later it still stands, its kaya thatch renewed by hand over the generations.

Registered, Not Designated

Sakai Meijo's main house carries the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property, entered on the national register on January 31, 2003 under registration number 20-0112. Japan keeps two parallel systems for built heritage, and the difference is worth knowing. The older and stricter route is designation (shitei), which produces Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures and brings tight controls on any change. Registration (toroku), introduced in 1996, is a lighter touch aimed at the enormous stock of buildings from the late Edo period onward that give Japanese towns their character. It encourages owners to keep using and maintaining their properties rather than freezing them in place. A working sake house that still serves customers fits that intent closely.

The register describes the house as wooden, single-storied with a partial upper floor, roofed in thatch, with a building area of 437 square meters. Its value lies less in any single rare feature than in how fully it preserves the form of a prosperous rural merchant and headman's residence, and in the way it anchors the historic streetscape of the old post town.

Reading the House

The plan repays a slow look. At the southern, lower end of the building sits the doma, a packed-earth work floor that ran the daily business of a farming and brewing household. From the rear center a reception wing pushes outward in an L-shaped projection called a kakuya, holding the formal tatami rooms where guests were received. On the northern, upper side stands a shikidai, a low formal entrance step two ken (about 3.6 meters) wide, marking the approach reserved for important visitors. That detail is not decoration. The Sakai served as nanushi, the village headman, and the breadth of the shikidai was a visible measure of the rank a household was entitled to claim.

Nine of the interior reception rooms, once used for entertaining, were restored from old documents in 1994 and now form the dining space of a soba restaurant called Kaya. You can sit on the same boards where the headman's guests once gathered and order the local specialty, oshibori soba, eaten with the sharp juice of pungent radish grown in nearby Sakaki.

Brewery, Museum, and a Poet's Lodging

Behind the house stretches a yard of storehouses raised over three centuries as the brewery grew, each known by the era of its building: the Horeki, Kansei, Keio, Meiji, and Taisho kura. Several now hold the Shuzo Collection, an open museum of brewing where you can climb a ladder to peer into a great cedar fermentation vat and handle the wooden tools of the craft. Admission is free.

The Sakai were patrons as much as brewers. The haiku poet Kaya Shirao, a leading figure in the Basho tradition, is said to have lodged with the family for long stretches, and the painter Takehisa Yumeji left works here during his stays at the nearby hot springs. Those connections survive in dedicated rooms on the grounds, including a hall given over to Shirao and another to Yumeji's pictures.

Around the Site

The house sits within easy reach of Togura-Kamiyamada Onsen, a hot-spring resort strung along the Chikuma River, which makes it a natural stop before or after a soak. The wider district belongs to the Japan Heritage story of the "moon capital," centered on the famous moon-viewing terraces of Obasute a short way up the valley, where flooded rice paddies on the hillside catch the reflected moon. Linking the brewery, a bowl of soba, and an evening at Obasute makes for a full and unhurried day in this corner of northern Shinano.