Machiya Club (Former Nishikatsu Sake Brewery)

A Sake Brewer's Compound on Suwai-chō Street

Machiya Club (Former Nishikatsu Sake Brewery) (まちや倶楽部（旧西勝酒造）) is a group of former sake brewery buildings in Suwaichō Naka, Omihachiman, Shiga Prefecture, whose nine structures, the oldest a document storehouse of 1741, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 February 2022.

The compound turns its face east to Suwai-chō Street (仲屋町通り, written with characters that most readers would take as Nakaya-chō). The brewer's family lived in the main house on the street. Behind it the document storehouse and a train of brewing sheds run back into the lot, west and then north, in the order the work once moved through them.

Nobody seems to know exactly when Nishikatsu began brewing. The city's tourism association and Machiya Club, which looks after the buildings, both say the business was founded in the Edo period; the inn's own website narrows that to the late Edo period. No primary record of a founding year turned up in our research.

According to the inn's website, sake was made here until 2010, and it was the last working brewery in Omihachiman. Machiya Club took up the site in 2012 with a simple brief: keep the old townhouses and storehouses standing by giving them new jobs. The main house became a small inn, the storehouses became shops and rental halls, and ten years later the whole set was registered by the national government.

Why Nine Buildings Were Registered Together

The nine structures are the main house, the document storehouse, the rice washing house, the koji storehouse, the yeast starter storehouse, the south brewing storehouse with its attached passage storehouse, the north brewing storehouse, the pressing storehouse and the central storehouse. The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended them together on 19 November 2021, all under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

What the Agency for Cultural Affairs singled out was not any one building but the full sequence. Each stage of sake making had its own room: washing and steaming the rice, growing koji mold, raising the yeast starter, fermenting the mash, pressing it, bottling the result. At the Machiya Club site all of those rooms still stand on one lot, which the Agency summed up as a group of buildings that calls up the scene of brewing.

The dates span more than two centuries. The document storehouse goes back to 1741. The main house, the rice washing house, the yeast starter storehouse and the south brewing storehouse belong to the early Meiji period (1868 to 1882). The pressing storehouse followed in 1911, the koji storehouse in the mid Showa period, and the north brewing storehouse in 1959, its ground floor cast in reinforced concrete under a trussed roof.

That last building matters. Set beside earth-walled Dozo-zukuri storehouses from the nineteenth century, a mortar-faced concrete shed from the postwar years shows a brewer expanding output rather than preserving a look. The compound records growth as well as tradition.

Walking the Brewing Sequence

Pieced together from the Agency's descriptions, the layout reads roughly like this. The document storehouse sits directly behind the main house, and the rice washing house stands to its west, easy to spot for its board-clad walls and the raised ventilating ridge on its roof.

After the rice was washed and steamed, it went to the koji storehouse, where mold was grown on it, and then to the yeast starter storehouse to build up the culture that would drive fermentation. The two stand side by side, the koji storehouse on the west, both with wooden floors. North of them is the south brewing storehouse and passage storehouse, and north again the bulk of the north brewing storehouse. Finished mash was pressed in the pressing storehouse on the outer edge of the site, an earthen storehouse with a trussed roof.

Bottling came last, in the central storehouse southwest of the main house. It grew by stages, with lower sections added to the west, until it became one long building, as the Agency puts it.

Construction details, measurements and current uses are on each building's own page. For the compound as a whole, start at the street facade of the main house, then walk into the lot and compare the walls as you go: lime plaster, timber boarding, mortar. The change in surface tracks the change in century.

Names and Spellings

The Agency's register uses two spellings. The south brewing storehouse, the north brewing storehouse and the pressing storehouse are listed under 旧西勝酒蔵, the other six under 旧西勝酒造. Both carry the same reading, kyū Nishikatsu shuzō, and refer to the same brewery.

The characters 西勝 are read Nishikatsu; the romanization Seishō that appears in some databases is a misreading. The street and district name 仲屋町 is read Suwai-chō in Omihachiman, a reading the Agency's report spells out. The venue name is sometimes printed with the variant character 俱 (まちや俱楽部). The inn traded as MACHIYA INN Omihachiman until 2021 and now calls itself Omihachiman Machiya Club.

Visiting and Getting There

The Machiya Club site doubles as a public footpath between the former Hachiman Post Office and the Andrews Memorial Hall, and anyone may walk through. Machiya Club counts the lane as part of the Omihachiman Vories Street, a route linking the town's buildings by the architect William Merrell Vories. There is no admission charge.

Access to interiors depends on the building. The main house is the inn's main wing and open only to overnight guests. The document storehouse is a craft shop anyone can enter during opening hours. The pressing storehouse and the yeast starter storehouse are rental halls booked in advance. Other tenants keep their own days and hours. The main Machiya Club number is 0748-32-4654.

Machiya Club has published no photography policy. Shooting the exteriors from the lane should be unproblematic, but ask before photographing inside shops or guest rooms.

From JR Omi-Hachiman Station on the Biwako Line, take an Ohmi Railway bus bound for Chomeiji, about 7 minutes, and get off at Hachimanbori (Ōsugi-chō) Hachimanyama Ropeway-guchi, then walk about 5 minutes. By car it is about 25 minutes from the Ryuo interchange on the Meishin Expressway. There is no dedicated parking; use the paid lots nearby. Details checked on 25 September 2026.