Hirata Dairoku Family Residence

A Sake-Brewing Household Since the Genroku Era

The Hirata Dairoku Family Residence (平田大六家住宅, Hirata Dairoku-ke Jūtaku) is the estate of a sake-brewing family in Omi, Sekikawa Village, Niigata Prefecture, where six buildings dating from an 1835 storehouse to a main house completed in 1921 were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 14 October 1999.

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Hirata family is thought to have settled here at the start of the early modern period and was brewing sake by the Genroku era, around the turn of the eighteenth century. The family kept home and brewery on a single broad plot: the main house in the middle, brewing sheds and storehouses around it.

The six registrations cover the main house, the sake brewery, a storehouse, a sake starter storehouse, a chimney, and one building partitioned into a miso store and a rice store. Their registration numbers run consecutively from 15-0034 to 15-0039, and all six were listed under the same criterion: buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

Nobody brews here any more. The agency describes the sake buildings in the past tense, as they were used "while the family ran its brewery." When production stopped is not stated in any published source found for this page.

How the Buildings Follow the Brewing Process

The main house sits at the center, a large dwelling with a footprint of 504 square metres. Directly north of it, and parallel to it, runs the long east-west block of the sake brewery. Wedged between the two stands a small storehouse from 1835, the oldest dated building on the estate.

Northeast of the main house, toward the back of the plot, is the narrow sake starter storehouse. Between it and the main house rises a squat brick chimney, marking the spot where a building once stood for washing rice, steaming it, and pressing the finished sake. On the opposite side, in the southeast corner south of the main house, is the combined miso and rice storehouse.

Read against the steps of brewing, the layout makes sense. Rice was washed and steamed beside the chimney, the yeast starter (shubo, or moto) was cultivated in its own storehouse, fermentation and storage happened in the brewery, and the sake was pressed back at the chimney building. The chimney probably served the rice-steaming boiler, though the agency does not say so.

The buildings were not all raised at once. The storehouse is from 1835 and the eastern five bays of the brewery from 1845, while the western four bays were added around the early Meiji period. The agency dates the starter storehouse to "early Meiji or before," the chimney to late Meiji, and the miso and rice storehouse to the Taisho era, close in time to the main house. An Edo-period core, a Meiji extension and brick chimney, and finally the big 1921 house: that is the order in which the Hirata Dairoku Family Residence took its present shape.

Visiting and Getting There

No public opening of the Hirata Dairoku Family Residence has been announced. The tourism pages of Sekikawa Village and its tourism association list open sites such as the Watanabe residence and Tokeien, but not this estate (checked 25 September 2026). The national database gives no owner name. Treat the house and grounds as closed to visitors; how much can be seen from the road has not been confirmed.

The address is 237 Omi, about 1.7 kilometres north-northwest in a straight line from Echigo-Shimoseki Station on the JR Yonesaka Line. Heavy rain in August 2022 cut the line between Imaizumi and Sakamachi, a stretch that includes Echigo-Shimoseki, and replacement buses run in place of trains.

To see the inside of a comparable house in the village, go to the Watanabe residence near Echigo-Shimoseki Station. The Watanabe family also grew rich partly through sake brewing and coastal shipping, and its nationally designated main house and storehouses are normally open 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with shorter winter hours and a closure from December 29 to January 3.