Tsuji Honten Sake Brewery

Tsuji Honten Sake Brewery: A Brewer on the Old Izumo Road in Katsuyama

Tsuji Honten Sake Brewery (辻本店, Tsuji Honten) is a sake maker on the old Izumo Kaidō road in Katsuyama, Maniwa City, Okayama Prefecture, that has brewed on the same site since 1804, and nine of its buildings were entered on the register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 April 2014. The company name is read Tsuji Honten, and the house is best known for its Gozenshu (御前酒) label.

Katsuyama was the castle town of the Miura clan, lords of a modest 23,000-koku domain, and a post town on the road to Izumo. According to the brewery, Tsuji Honten supplied sake to the domain lords from its early years and received the name "Gozenshu" (sake for the lord's table) as a result. Locals knew its everyday brand as Man'etsu.

Brewing water is drawn from underground flow beside the Asahi River, which runs just behind the brewery. Production follows the cold-season calendar, from November through the following April, and in those months the smell of steamed rice sometimes reaches the street.

How the Tsuji Honten Site Is Laid Out

The Tsuji Honten buildings sit on both sides of the old road, which runs north to south. The east side holds the family home and the business; the west side holds the earthen storehouses once used for maturing sake. Reading the Agency for Cultural Affairs descriptions together gives this arrangement:

• On the east side, the Shop and Main House faces the street. The Office is attached to its south end and the Clothing Storehouse to its north.
• Farther north stands the Rear Parlor, a detached guest wing. The Front Gate and Wall sit on the street directly west of the parlor's formal entrance.
• A garden lies east of the Rear Parlor. The Garden Wall closes its north and east sides and runs on to the East Storehouse, which is not registered. The small Household Shrine stands toward the garden's southeast corner.
• Across the road on the west side are the West Storehouse, now home to the brewery shop and a restaurant, and the Warehouse just north of it.

Walk the road northward and the east side unfolds as office, shop and house, clothing storehouse, then gate and wall, while the west side shows the West Storehouse and then the Warehouse. On this stretch white plaster and the diagonal grid of Namako-kabe tiling close in on both sides of the street. The Rear Parlor, Garden Wall and Household Shrine are tucked behind the gate on private ground and are barely visible from the road.

The Nine Registered Buildings of Tsuji Honten

All nine Tsuji Honten structures were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Structures) on 25 April 2014, under consecutive numbers 33-0257 through 33-0265. The oldest is the Shop and Main House, dated to the late Edo period; the youngest is the Garden Wall, built in the early Showa period.

• Shop and Main House: late Edo period; 2-storey timber building; 336 square meters
• Office: final years of the Edo period; single-storey earthen-walled building with a partial upper floor; 148 square meters
• Clothing Storehouse: mid-Meiji period; 2-storey storehouse; 58 square meters
• Rear Parlor: mid-Meiji period; single-storey timber wing; 121 square meters
• Household Shrine: mid-Meiji period; timber; 0.2 square meters
• Front Gate and Wall: mid-Meiji period; gate 1.7 meters wide, walls 25 meters in total length
• Garden Wall: early Showa period; 47 meters long
• West Storehouse: mid-Meiji period; 2-storey storehouse; 136 square meters
• Warehouse: Meiji period; 2-storey storehouse; 223 square meters

Eight of the nine were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the nation; the Clothing Storehouse alone was registered as a structure that would be difficult to reproduce. The brewery's own account stresses that the complete working and living quarters of an old sake house survive together and are still in use. The brewery's website dates the registration to November 2013, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs database records 25 April 2014, and this page follows the Agency.

Visiting Tsuji Honten

Tsuji Honten is about a 15-minute walk from Chūgoku-Katsuyama Station on the JR Kishin Line. By car it is about 30 minutes from the Ochiai interchange of the Chugoku Expressway, or about 20 minutes from the Kuse interchange of the Yonago Expressway. The brewery has parking for 5 cars, and a free public car park for sightseers is close by, according to the Okayama prefectural tourism site.

The brewery keeps hours of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Its shop inside the West Storehouse opens 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and the business closes on Thursdays and over the New Year holidays. The restaurant keeps its own schedule, so check the official website before you go.

Brewery tours require a reservation. The "Good Plan" (a talk and a tasting) costs 1,500 yen per person, and the "SURPRISING Plan" adds a walk through the brewery for 5,000 yen per person. Groups of 1 to 40 are accepted, bookings close 2 days ahead, times are set by the brewery, and tours in languages other than Japanese run only on designated days.

The street fronts of the Shop and Main House, Office, Clothing Storehouse, Front Gate and Wall, West Storehouse and Warehouse can be seen from the public road at any time. The Rear Parlor, Garden Wall and Household Shrine stand on private ground with no public opening announced. Please stay out of the living quarters, and ask the staff before taking photographs indoors.

Tsuji Honten and the Katsuyama Townscape

The street around Tsuji Honten is lined with white-walled merchant houses, latticed windows and tile-patterned storehouses, and in 1985 it became the first townscape preservation district named by Okayama Prefecture. Almost every house hangs a plant-dyed noren curtain whose motif hints at the trade inside. Tsuji Honten's curtain shows a tsunodaru, the horned lacquer cask carried to weddings and celebrations.

The brewery writes that in 1989 it converted one of its former sake storehouses into a restaurant, and that the building became a base for community projects in the town. The way Tsuji Honten kept its old buildings working on both sides of the street is, in large part, how Katsuyama's streetscape came to look the way it does today.