The claim
A beer hall on the ground floor of the old Dai-Nippon Beer head office in Ginza, finished in 1934 and hardly altered: tiled walls, square columns and a glass mosaic of the barley harvest across the end wall. The building was registered as a cultural property in 2022, on a recommendation that called the hall a masterpiece of its kind. Draught beer is poured from half past eleven until eleven at night.
What the records show
Japan's Council for Cultural Affairs recommended this building for registration on 19 November 2021, and its papers date it to Shōwa 9 — 1934 — describing a six-storey commercial block in Ginza 7-chome whose ground-floor beer hall, with tiled walls, beam-shaped ornament and a glass mosaic mural, it calls a masterpiece among the country's beer halls, trading since before the war. The Tokyo Shimbun reported on 15 April 2022 that the registration had followed that February. Chuo City's own account of the building, a column by the curator Masuyama Kazunari of the ward's board of education printed in its newsletter of 21 October 2022, agrees on the year and adds the rest: built in 1934 as Dai-Nippon Beer's head office to the design of Sugawara Eizō and by the contractor Takenaka Kōmuten, altered on a large scale in 1939 and 1979 and strengthened with seismic walls in 2003, at 7-9-20 Ginza. The column describes the ground-floor Beer Hall Lion as part of the building's design, with glazed tiles from the Tsubaki kiln and twelve glass mosaics drawn up by Sugawara and made by the glass artist Ōtsuka Kizō, and says the hall is held to have been used almost as built after the occupation forces requisitioned it in 1945, as a beer hall for them alone. It gives no opening day. Japanese Wikipedia, drawing on Sapporo Beer's own published history, records that the head office was finished on 8 April 1934 on the site of the Ginza beer hall burnt in the Kantō earthquake, and that the beer hall reopened as a tenant of the new building and has been in the same room since. The room is dated by the state and by the ward, and the trade in it is dated by the brewer's history to the same year, which is why this is an A. The company counts its own founding from Japan's first beer hall, the Yebisu of 1899, which stood at Ginza 8-chome and is gone.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1934 | Claimed founding | Local history |
| c.1934 | Present building | https://www.bunka.go.jp/koho_hodo_oshirase/hodohappyo/93558001.html |
| 1934 | First record of a drinking house here | Agency for Cultural Affairs |
What to look for inside
- A glass mosaic mural of the barley harvest fills the end wall of the hall
- Built as the head office of Dai-Nippon Beer, the brewer that became both Sapporo and Asahi
Visiting
Ginza Lion Beer Hall is in Tokyo, Japan, at Ginza Lion Building, 7-9-20 Ginza, Chūō, Tokyo. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- www.bunka.go.jp/koho_hodo_oshirase/hodohappyo/93558001.html
- ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%83%E3%83%9D%E3%83%AD%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%82%AA%E3%83%B3
- www.ginzalion.jp/
- www.city.chuo.lg.jp/a0052/bunkakankou/rekishi/kunibunkazai/041021.html
- www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/171832
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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