Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House

About the Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House

The Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House (旧宮崎酒造店舗兼主屋, Kyū Miyazaki Shuzō Tenpo-ken-shuoku) is a late Edo period Machiya facing south onto the old Hokuriku Kaidō highway in Sewamachi, Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, and was entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on April 28, 2010. A timber building of 2 storeys with a 14 m street frontage, it held the brewer's shop and the family's home under one roof.

The house is said to have been rebuilt immediately after a fire in 1866 swept the district. Its builders were Koizumiya, a merchant house that sold medicines and brewed sake; the Miyazaki family bought it in 1875 and kept using it as shop and residence. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the end of the Edo period and records alterations in the early Meiji and early Shōwa periods and in 2009. The building area is 376 m².

Why the Main House Was Registered

The Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House was registered as a model of its type. The three storehouses registered with it on the same day were listed for their contribution to the landscape, so the main house is the only one of the four registered on this criterion.

The Agency's description credits it with keeping the typical features of a large merchant house in this area. The gabled roof, laid with interlocking pan tiles, runs east to west, so the long side faces the street in the Hirairi manner, and a lean-to roof and eaves project across the front. Inside, a Toriniwa runs the full depth of the house on the west side, and the shop room and formal rooms sit in two rows to its east. A Toyama Prefecture listing puts the width of that passage at 3 ken, roughly 5.5 m.

The feature the Agency singles out is the wakunouchi (枠の内), a framing system found in Toyama townhouses in which heavy beams are stacked in several tiers, crossing one another above the earthen floor and main room. In the Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House it survives over the oe (also written oi), the main living room, and over the passage.

Restoring the Meiji Street Front

What you see from the street today is the result of work in 2008 and 2009 that returned the front of the Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House to its Meiji appearance. Soon after buying the house, the Miyazaki family remodelled the oi and shop areas to suit brewing, and in the late Taishō or early Shōwa period a tiled roof was laid over the old shingled one. More changes followed after the war. According to the Toyama Location Office, the restorers worked from a photograph taken in 1909, physical traces in the building, original fittings such as the big front doors, memories of the Miyazaki family head and design drawings among the Iwaki family papers.

From the road, look at the lean-to roof and eaves that run the whole 14 m of the frontage. They were set out from that Meiji photograph, and the survival of doors like the large front ones gave the restorers something solid to work to.

If you get inside, stand in the passage and look up. The wakunouchi beams pile up above an earthen floor 3 ken wide, and the scale of the space makes clear how much traffic in people and goods once ran from the highway back to the storehouses.

Visiting the Shop and Main House

The front of the Former Miyazaki Sake Brewery Shop and Main House can be seen from the old highway at any time. The property is privately owned and the interior is not open on a regular basis; the passage and rooms are mainly accessible on days when the building hosts events such as the hina doll display or the Namerikawa Lantern Festival (checked October 2026).

At times a café or restaurant has operated upstairs, but tenants have changed over the years, so check before going. No official guidance on photographing the exterior from the street could be found. Cars use the road, so take care when stepping back to fit the whole frontage into a picture.