Fussa Sake Brewery Walk: Day Trip from Tachikawa, Water and History

A day trip from Tachikawa to Fussa’s two Edo-era sake breweries, to find where their water really comes from. Hint: not the river next door.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

How many breweries make sake in Tokyo? An encyclopedia describes Tamura Shuzojo as one of ten sake makers that keep up the tradition in Tokyo. Of those ten, two are in Fussa (福生), a single city of fewer than 60,000 people. And both have been going since the Edo period (1603–1868). The Fussa City Tourism Association describes them as two sake breweries that have continued since Edo times.

Say “Fussa” and most people picture the base and the American scenery along Route 16. I did too. Fussa is home to Yokota Air Base, the US Air Force base in western Tokyo. But head down to the western side of the same city, towards the Tama River, and black board fences, white-walled storehouses and zelkova trees several hundred years old appear. Ishikawa Brewery’s sightseeing guide describes Fussa as a city where you can enjoy two areas: the “Japanese tradition area,” with its two sake breweries, and the “American area” around Route 16 and Yokota Air Base. One city with the faces of two countries.

It is often said that sake is decided by its water. Fussa’s two breweries stand beside the Tama River and the Tamagawa Aqueduct. So Fussa’s sake must be made with Tama River water, I assumed, as I began my research. Then I read the two breweries’ official guides, and found that my assumption was half wrong in each case. Where does the water for Fussa’s sake come from? I took the Ome Line from Tachikawa to trace its story.

A Fussa sake brewery walk, from Tachikawa on the Ome Line

From Tachikawa Station, take the JR Ome Line. According to Ishikawa Brewery, it is about 12 minutes from Tachikawa to Haijima Station by rapid train. At Kumagawa 1-banchi, Fussa, is Ishikawa Brewery (石川酒造, Ishikawa Shuzo). From Haijima Station it is about 8 minutes by taxi or about 20 minutes on foot. The other brewery, Tamura Shuzojo (田村酒造場), is about 10 minutes’ walk from Fussa Station. According to the tourism association, it makes its sake beside the Tamagawa Aqueduct.

The City of Fussa describes its landform like this. From the east side of the city, where Yokota Air Base is, river terraces step gently down towards the Tama River; along the edges of the terraces run escarpments called hake, from whose slopes groundwater seeps out, so springs can be seen in many places. The ground is mostly Kanto loam (a reddish soil of old volcanic ash), and the Tama River lowland is alluvial soil. The Tama River flows along the city’s western edge, and the Tamagawa Aqueduct runs through its middle. Walk from east to west, stepping down the plateau one terrace at a time, and the sense of water grows stronger.

Tachikawa, too, is a city on the terraces of the same Tama River. The Tama River, having flowed past Fussa, passes through Akishima and then flows along the south of Tachikawa. Some of the Tama River water that people in Tachikawa look at beyond the Negawa Greenway was, a little earlier, washing the riverbed at Fussa. The same goes for the Tamagawa Aqueduct (玉川上水), the canal dug in the 1650s to carry water to Edo (old Tokyo). According to the tourism association, the aqueduct runs from its intake at Hamura through Hamura, Fussa, Akishima and Tachikawa, nine cities and four wards in all. Water that flows past Fussa’s breweries goes on through Sunagawa in Tachikawa and further east. Tachikawa and Fussa are linked by the same two waters.

So is the sake made from that water? First, I visit the older brewery.

Tamura Shuzojo, founded in 1822 by a village headman, and “Kasen”

According to Tamura Shuzojo’s official history, the Tamura family have lived for generations in Fussa Village in the Tama District of Musashi Province; in the oldest documents, an ancestor named “Hanjuro Toyozane” appears in the late 1600s. The family were probably one of the old households that opened up Fussa Village, the brewery writes. In the Edo period, Fussa Village was land ruled directly by the shogunate, and the Tamuras served as village officials such as nanushi, the village headman.

The man who began brewing was the ninth head of the family, Kanjiro, whose pen name was Kenshin. He became headman at 28, and in 1822, at the age of 46, he founded the sake business. The brewery explains the background like this. In the flourishing years of Edo culture in the early nineteenth century, demand for food and drink grew in Edo, and as an alternative to the kudarizake, the “sake sent down” from the Kyoto–Osaka region that had dominated until then, the shogunate encouraged the production of “Edo jimawari-zake,” sake brewed near Edo. Fussa’s sake began when a village headman, at 46, answered the shogunate’s call to make more local sake for Edo. I find the decision of a man who added a new family business at the halfway point of his life a little encouraging.

The sake is called Kasen (嘉泉). According to the brewery, the Tamura family named it Kasen out of joy at finding, in a well on their land, Chichibu–Okutama underground water of medium hardness, ideal for brewing. Ka means “auspicious, joyful,” sen means “spring”: the joyful spring. The delight of “we’ve struck good water” became, just as it was, the name of two hundred years of sake. The encyclopedia says the name comes from a spring that welled up at the foot of a great zelkova when wells were dug in various places on the land, and that the well water has been used for brewing since the business was founded.

Here my first assumption goes half wrong. The water for Tamura Shuzojo’s sake is not drawn from the Tama River. It is underground water — rain that fell on the mountains of Chichibu and Okutama and travelled beneath the earth — drawn from a well on the brewery’s land. Not river water, but water that flowed under the river.

Still, the Tamura family have another tie with the Tamagawa Aqueduct. According to the brewery’s history, the Tamura branch channel that runs through the family’s estate took water from the neighbouring aqueduct and was used for the area’s household water and to irrigate paddies and fields. Water for sake from the well; water for daily life and the fields from the aqueduct. The headman’s family used two waters for two purposes.

Kanjiro was ahead of his time in how he built his business, too. The brewery writes that, much like a chain store today, he formed “tenuchi” partnerships with nearby brewers and sake shops and, as the head shop, supplied them with know-how in brewing and management. These partner breweries numbered 24 across the old Bushu region, from the Tama area to parts of Kanagawa and Saitama. The family mark, “Kanejuu,” was used as the mark of the group. A record survives saying there was not a single loss-making year from the founding until the end of the shogunate. No losses until the end of the Edo period. You would want to put it in a business textbook — but, sadly, the secret has been summed up in a single line of family motto: “Brew with care, sell with care.”

Under this motto, while there are breweries producing on a large scale, Tamura Shuzojo has kept its output to around 1,500 koku, small enough to keep an eye on everything. According to the encyclopedia, 1,500 koku is about 270,000 litres. In standard 1.8-litre isshobin bottles, that is about 150,000 bottles. Is that a lot or a little? I could not quite picture it. Then I worked out that drinking one bottle a day would take more than four hundred years, and could picture it even less.

Water from 150 metres down: Ishikawa Brewery at Kumagawa No. 1

Fussa’s other brewery, Ishikawa Brewery, began about forty years after Tamura Shuzojo. According to the brewery’s official account, its history begins on the first day of the ninth month of 1863 (by the old lunar calendar). The first sake was brewed not in Fussa but by the thirteenth head of the family, Wakichi, in a brewhouse he rented from the Morita brewery in the village of Ogawa, across the Tama River in what is now Akiruno. Because it was a sister to Morita’s “Yaegiku,” the founding brand was called “Yaezakura.” In 1919 it became “Yaeume,” and since 1933 it has been called “Tamajiman” (多満自慢, roughly “the pride of Tama”).

The brewery was built in Kumagawa in 1880. According to the brewery’s tour guide, the main brewhouse, which still brews Tamajiman today, dates from that year. It measures about 25 by 28 metres, stands about 13 metres high, and has a tiled roof of 300 tsubo (about 1,000 square metres). Ishikawa Brewery has six buildings registered as national Tangible Cultural Properties.

And then, the water. Ishikawa Brewery’s tour guide is quite clear about its brewing water: “At our brewery we use natural underground water (medium-hard) drawn up from 150 m below ground, from the lower part of the Higashi-Kurume Formation of the Kazusa Group.”

One hundred and fifty metres down. Not the Tama River, and not the Tamagawa Aqueduct. Seen from the river on the surface, it is water far below, inside ancient layers of rock. Tamura Shuzojo uses underground water that has travelled beneath the river; Ishikawa Brewery uses water from deep strata. My assumption that “Fussa’s sake is Tama River water” was neatly wrong at both breweries.

That it was wrong is what makes it interesting. Right beside the Tama River and the Tamagawa Aqueduct, two of the great waterways of Tokyo, both breweries have chosen water from further down, beneath their own feet. The river is water you can see; the sake water is water you cannot. Why underground water rather than the river right next door? The clue to the answer, surprisingly, lay in how short of water Kumagawa, the place where Ishikawa Brewery stands, used to be.

Kumagawa, the village short of water, and its branch channel

A village with a sake brewery must have been blessed with water. That would be the normal assumption. But “The Origins of the Kumagawa Branch Channel,” compiled by the Fussa City Tourism Association, says the opposite: the Kumagawa branch channel was the greatest water source for the people of Kumagawa, an area on high ground with few wells and little water.

The association quotes a “Copy of the Petition for a Branch Channel for Kumagawa Village,” a copy of a petition submitted to the governor of Tokyo Prefecture of the day. Its opening reportedly runs like this: Kumagawa Village is on high ground beside the Tama River, where even digging a well is not easy, so drinking water is scarce. Nor can water be drawn from the main stream of the Tama because of the lie of the land. The Tamagawa Aqueduct runs through the middle of the village, but the houses are at the southern edge, far from the place where water can be drawn. Year after year there are droughts, and the shortage of water is severe.

The aqueduct ran through the middle of the village, yet its water did not reach the villagers’ mouths. Water bound for Edo flowed straight past in front of them. What the people of Kumagawa felt as they looked at that stream every day, we can only imagine.

The branch channel was finally dug only in the Meiji era (1868–1912). According to Ishikawa Brewery’s tour guide, the Kumagawa branch channel was drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct as household water between 1886 and 1890, and the people of Kumagawa Village, led by the Ishikawa family, took part in the work. The line of the channel still runs beside the brewery grounds today, near the old well once used for brewing, beneath the sacred zelkova.

In its account of the Kumagawa channel, the association lists the dates for neighbouring villages. Sunagawa Village in 1657, Haijima Village in 1740 and Fussa in 1866 all had branch channels for drinking water.

Sunagawa Village is the northern part of today’s Tachikawa. Water began to flow along the Tamagawa Aqueduct to Edo in 1654, so Sunagawa had its own branch channel just three years later. Kumagawa got its channel almost 230 years after that. On the same single aqueduct, upstream Kumagawa was kept waiting until the Meiji era, while Tachikawa’s Sunagawa, downstream, got water first of all. Being upstream does not always mean being watered first. I walked Sunagawa’s long, narrow strip-shaped plots and its straight-running channels in our Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa article. Seen from Fussa’s side, that channel came astonishingly early.

Why was it so hard to dig wells in Kumagawa? One answer is carved into the name of a park in Kumagawa.

Mizukuraido: where the Tamagawa Aqueduct vanished into the ground

Mizukuraido Park. In Japanese characters, 水喰土: mizu (water), kurai (devouring), do (earth). Earth that devours water.

The Fussa City Tourism Association explains the origin of the name based on Fussa Rekishi Monogatari (Fussa History Stories) by the Fussa Board of Education. According to “Josui Kigen” (The Origin of the Aqueduct), written in 1803 by Kojima Bunpei, a member of the Hachioji Sennin Doshin (a corps of samurai-farmers based in Hachioji), the Tamagawa brothers who built the aqueduct first started digging from Aoyagi Village beside the Hino ferry, but when they had dug towards Fuchu they failed, perhaps having misjudged the difference in height, and decided to draw water in from Fussa Village instead. But when the channel was completed as far as Yotsuya and water was let in, around what is now the park in Kumagawa Village every drop of it was sucked into the ground. So they surveyed again, moved the intake to present-day Hamura, and finally completed the aqueduct.

The latter half of this story — the alternative account of how the whole aqueduct was dug — I touched on in the article that followed the aqueduct from Tachikawa’s side. Read from Fussa’s side, the story narrows to a single point: the water was sucked into the ground. The association explains the mechanism like this. The mizukurai phenomenon, in which the water “sank into the ground and did not flow,” is thought to mean that a gently sloping channel with a gradient of less than one in a thousand passed through a gravel layer with extremely high permeability, so that a large amount of water drained down to the terrace below, and the channel’s supply capacity fell drastically.

Under the ground in Kumagawa there is a layer of gravel that lets water through easily. Even the aqueduct’s water vanished when it passed through it. Among local elders, the association says, there were areas that called this place mizukureedo or horikeedo. The hardship of villagers drafted into re-digging a stretch about a kilometre long turned into the name “mizukureedo,” which eventually spread as a place name, the association writes. The place name itself is a record of a failed construction project. A far harder record to erase than anything in an official document.

Of the old dug channel, about a kilometre long, the 40 metres inside Mizukuraido Park and about 60 metres between the Ome Line and the Itsukaichi Line keep largely their original shape. They are a designated historic site of the City of Fussa. It is also one of the “Ten Views of Fussa,” and the association writes that it has “an atmosphere in which you feel you might glimpse the Edo period beyond the path.”

A gravel layer that swallows water. A village on high ground where wells were hard to dig. And a brewery that draws its water from 150 metres underground. Put the three facts side by side, and I begin to feel that in Kumagawa, the only way to get good water may have been to go a long way down. This is my own guess; the brewery does not say so. But the simple fact that there is a brewery that has made sake on top of water-devouring earth, while honouring the god of water, is quite interesting enough for me.

At the foot of Ishikawa Brewery’s sacred tree, the brewery writes, are enshrined Daikokuten, the god of rice, and Benzaiten, the goddess of water. The two deities are, it says, the ideal couple of sake-making. A brewery on land that struggled for water takes good care of the water goddess, alongside the god of rice.

Fussa’s breweries in numbers

• 1822 — the year Tamura Shuzojo was founded. The ninth head of the family started it at 46.
• 1863 — the year Ishikawa Brewery’s history began. Its first sake was brewed in someone else’s brewhouse, rented in a village across the river.
• 150 — metres. The depth from which Ishikawa Brewery draws its brewing water. Far below the surface of the Tama River.
• 24 — the number of partner breweries in “tenuchi” relationships with the Tamura family in the Edo period. Something like a chain store today, the brewery writes.
• 6 — the number of buildings registered as national Tangible Cultural Properties on Ishikawa Brewery’s grounds.
• 4.48 — metres. The trunk circumference of the Ishikawa family’s zelkova. According to the brewery, it takes three adults to link arms around it.

A wayfarer’s quiz

In 1887, Ishikawa Brewery went into brewing beer and sold it under the name “Nippon Bakushu” (with an English label reading JAPAN BEER) in Tokyo and Yokohama too. But in 1890 it sold off its brewing equipment. Which of these is the reason the brewery gives?

1. It could not get barley
2. There was no crown-cap technology yet, and the bottles tended to burst
3. The sake brewers objected

The answer is at the end of this article.