Tanaka Sake Brewery

A Brewery on the Old Inaba Road

Tanaka Sake Brewery (田中酒造場) is a sake works in Furumachi, Mimasaka City, Okayama Prefecture, said to have been founded in 1885 in the old Inaba Kaidō post town of Ōhara-juku; five of its buildings were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on October 27, 2017.

It is the only brewery still making sake within Mimasaka City. The town around it grew up as a stop on the Inaba Kaidō, the road that linked Tottori with Himeji. In the Edo period the lords of the Tottori domain, the Ikeda family, broke their journeys here on the way to and back from Edo, and the town was given an official inn for the lord (honjin) and a secondary inn for his retinue (waki-honjin). Both survive near the center of Furumachi, lined by townhouses of the late Edo, Meiji and Taishō years, and the district is now managed as the Furumachi Townscape Preservation Area.

The Tanaka family compound sits roughly halfway along the old road, on its east side. The brewery gives 1885 as its founding year, though the same company profile also says sake-making began in the first years of the Meiji era. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the main house, the main storehouse and the storage warehouse to around 1885, so the buildings at least agree that the works took its present shape then.

Cold winters in the Chūgoku Mountains and chilly groundwater suit slow fermentation. The brewery still presses its mash in a fune, a traditional wooden press in which cloth bags of mash are laid in rows and squeezed over many hours. Its oldest label is Ōhara Shiraume; another, Musashi no Sato, refers to the claim that the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi was born nearby.

How the Compound Is Laid Out

The five registered buildings split into a public front and a working back. On the street stand the Tanaka Sake Brewery Main House and, just north of it, the Shop Storehouse, the two buildings that handled trade and family life. Behind them are the Brewing Storehouse, the Storage Warehouse and the Main Storehouse, where sake was brewed, aged and kept alongside rice and tools.

The main house, a two-storey timber building of around 1885, occupies the middle of the street frontage. The shop storehouse, a fireproof earthen-walled Dozo-zukuri building of the Taishō era (1912–1926), runs parallel to it, and its door opens into the narrow gap between the two.

At the back, the brewing storehouse stretches north to south along the southern half of the east boundary. The storage warehouse stands against its west wall. Both are 21.1 meters long; the storage warehouse dates to 1885 and the brewing storehouse to the Taishō era. Closing the south end of the working yard is the two-storey main storehouse.

The effect is a ring of buildings. The two street buildings shape the view along the old road, and the three rear buildings define the east and south edges of the property, so each one can be seen both from inside the compound and from the lanes outside it.

Why All Five Were Registered

All five buildings were registered on the same day, under consecutive numbers 33-286 through 33-290, and all on the same criterion: that each contributes to the historic landscape of the nation.

A merchant house and an earthen storehouse are not rare in an old post town. What made Tanaka Sake Brewery worth registering as a set is that the whole sequence of the trade survives on one plot in Meiji and Taishō buildings: selling at the front, storing rice and finished sake, then fermenting and pressing at the back. The brewing storehouse even keeps a koji room on its upper floor and a pressing room at the south end of its ground floor, so the brewing process can be followed room by room.

The walls tie the group together. The main house, the shop storehouse and the main storehouse all pair white Shikkui plaster with Namako-kabe, a grid of square tiles pointed in raised white joints, on their lower walls. Built decades apart, they still read as one property from the road and from the back lanes alike.

Visiting and Getting There

All five buildings can be seen from the outside, from the old road and the lanes around the compound. The main house and shop storehouse face the street directly; the three rear buildings are hard to see from the road, and their roofs and walls come into view as you work around to the back and south side. This is a working brewery, and the interiors are not regularly open.

The brewery says it has accepted tour bookings for small groups of up to about 10 people, arranged in advance and generally not between November and March, when brewing is under way. Mimasaka City lists tours by reservation between April and October. The company profile, however, also carries a notice that tours are currently being declined and that tastings are suspended, so call ahead (0868-78-2059) to check before planning a visit around the inside.

The shop is at the brewery entrance on the old road, open 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. with irregular closing days. No published photography rules turned up; outside shots from the street are part of ordinary townscape photography, but on the property follow the staff's lead.

By train, get off at Ōhara Station on the Chizu Express Chizu Line; the Furumachi streets are about a five-minute walk. By car, the Ōhara interchange on the Tottori Expressway is a few minutes away. Mimasaka City notes free parking at the brewery, and the prefectural tourism site suggests the Ōhara branch office lot or the space in front of the Furumachi community hall for walking the whole district.