Naruko Family Residence

A Brewing Family at Home

The Naruko Family Residence (成子家住宅, Naruko-ke Jūtaku) in Ozaki, Hannan City, Osaka Prefecture, is the home and working compound of the family behind the Naniwa Shuzo sake brewery, and ten of its buildings, led by a main house dated to 1916, were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 12 October 2001. According to the Hannan Tourism Bureau, they were the first registered cultural properties in the city.

Naniwa Shuzo traces its founding to 1716 and bills itself as the oldest sake brewery in Osaka Prefecture. Its flagship label is Naniwa Masamune. The brewery says it has drawn its brewing water from wells fed by groundwater off the Izumi Mountains since its earliest days, and the current head is the eleventh generation. The Naruko Family Residence is therefore two things at once: a private house, and a brewery that still makes sake every winter.

The street in front is the Hama Kaido, also called the Kyoshigoe Kaido, a coastal road that leaves the main Kishu Kaido near Tsuruhara in Izumisano and runs south along Osaka Bay. The long front of the main house, the wall and gate, and the gable of a brewhouse turned toward the road make up a good stretch of old Ozaki's streetscape.

A note on names: the explanatory text in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database writes the company as 浪速酒造, but the company's own name is 浪花酒造有限会社 (Naniwa Sake Brewery Co., Ltd.). This site follows the company's spelling.

Brewhouses Wrapped Around a House

The ten registered structures are the main house, an annex, two storehouses, four sake brewhouses, a front gate and a wall. They carry consecutive registration numbers, 27-0144 through 27-0153, and all were listed on the same day under the same criterion: contributing to the historic landscape of the nation.

Read the agency's short descriptions side by side and the plan of the compound emerges. Facing the front street are the main house, 11 bays wide, the wall running off to its right, and the gate set into that wall. From the southeast corner of the main house a single-storey annex turns at a right angle, and the forecourt behind the gate leads to it. Behind main house and annex lies a courtyard. Across it, facing the main house, stands the small Storehouse No. 1; in the northeast corner, its ridge in line with the annex, stands Storehouse No. 2.

The four brewhouses form an outer ring. Brewhouses No. 1 and No. 2, in the northeast and north, share an eave line along a back lane running northwest. No. 3 closes the northwest edge of the site, and No. 4 closes the southwest, turning its gable end to the front street. The living and reception rooms sit inside; the brewing buildings enclose them.

The agency classifies the house, annex, storehouses, gate and wall as residential, and the four brewhouses as industrial. The gate and wall count as structures rather than buildings. Shop, family rooms, guest rooms, storage, brewing and the boundary with the street are all represented, which is the real value of the set: it registers a working brewer's household in full rather than a single fine building.

Two Accounts of When It Was Built

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the main house to 1916 and the other nine structures to the Taisho era. Naniwa Shuzo's own history, however, says the main house and its formal rooms were built in 1904, and the brewery describes its brewhouses as timber buildings more than two centuries old.

Nothing in the published record settles the difference. The individual building pages on this site use the agency's dates, since those are the basis of registration, and give the brewery's account alongside as the brewery's account.

Visiting and Getting There

The residence doubles as the company's head office, and a direct sales shop operates on site. It opens 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekends and public holidays, with irregular closing days marked on a calendar on the brewery's website.

To see inside the buildings you need to join a paid brewery tour, booked in advance through the brewery's online reservation page or by phone (072-472-0032). Same-day requests are generally turned down. A tour takes about 60 minutes: the formal rooms, Western-style room and tea room of the residence, then the brewhouses, then tasting and shopping. The brewery says the president or the head of production leads the tour. The Hannan Tourism Bureau lists the adult fee as 2,000 yen, including a souvenir and a 500-yen voucher for the shop, with children free. The brewery's page for tour operators says tours are normally not accepted in December, the busiest month of the brewing season. In the winter brewing months, work goes on right in front of visitors.

No published rule on photography turned up. The interiors are still a family home, so ask your guide what may be photographed. The exteriors of the main house, wall, gate and brewhouses can be viewed freely from the front street and the back lane.

By train, get off at Ozaki Station on the Nankai Main Line. The walk is about 3 minutes by the tourism bureau's reckoning and 5 minutes by the brewery's. From Nankai Namba, the limited express Southern or an express bound for Wakayamashi takes 40 to 45 minutes. From Kansai Airport, take a Nankai train to Izumisano and change to an express or limited express heading toward Wakayamashi.

By car, leave the Hanshin Expressway Wangan Line at the Izumisano-minami exit and drive about 8.5 kilometres on local roads. There is no further exit before Kansai Airport, so do not miss it. The brewery car park holds 7 cars and 1 large bus; turn off Osaka prefectural road 250 onto the lane opposite the Hannan Suido Kogyosho waterworks office and continue straight.