Nanpo Tometaro Shoten/Windows of the Smokehouse | Series

Nanpo Tometaro Shoten
/Windows of the Smokehouse

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory (Tokyo Institute of Technology)

03 Feb 2021

Noriaki Nanpo’s Smokery in Yoichi, Hokkaido Prefecture. The facility mainly smokes shrimp, Indian salmon, scallops, and herring. There are generally three types of smoking techniques with different temperatures: hot smoking, warm smoking, and cool smoking. This smokery uses the “cool smoking” method, in which food is smoked for 1 to 3 weeks at a temperature of about 20°C to produce a delicious scent and a golden color. The smoking is done with a sawdust blend consisting of the distinctive Hokkaido timbers of birch and oak. The temperature inside the smoking house is held constant by adjusting three mechanisms: a rooft monitor with batten—whose lower section is opened and closed by pulling a string—a small hinged panel at the foot of the wooden sliding door to the smoking room, and a small ventilation window on the opposite side. The sliding door also has an observation window for checking inside the room.

Nanpo Tometaro Shoten
(Seafood smokery / Yoichi, Hokkaido Prefecture)

This article is an excerpt from “Window Workology,” a joint research project concerning windows and the behaviors around them done in collaboration with Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Yoshiharu Tsukamoto Laboratory.