Tsurumiso Namikura Minamito

The Largest of the Row

Tsurumiso Namikura Minamito (鹤味噯並倉南棟, also written Tsurumiso Namikura Minamitō, the South Building of the Namikura) is a single-storey brick storehouse at 216 Ekimagari, Mitsuhashi-machi, Yanagawa City, Fukuoka Prefecture, dated to around 1906 with an extension of 1918, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 December 2000.

At 70 square metres of floor area it is the biggest of the three buildings that form the Namikura, ahead of the north building's 62 and the middle building's 45. By the dates the Agency for Cultural Affairs holds, it is also the oldest. The Agency's commentary on the middle building complicates that, repeating a local tradition that the middle one was the first raised in brick, and the owner's website offers yet another sequence: 1906 for the south, 1910 for the middle, 1918 for the north. The three versions have never been reconciled, and readers should treat any single date as provisional.

The buildings belong to Tsurumiso Jozo, a miso brewery working this ground since 1870. They were built as koji muro, the heated rooms where mould culture is raised on steamed rice and barley before the grain goes into the mash. Warmth had to be held for days at a stretch, and holding it in a wooden shed meant open braziers and real fire risk. Brick answered both problems at once.

A Western Truss and a Wall in the Gap

Registration number 40-0018 was granted in the twenty-seventh round of registrations, announced on 20 December 2000, under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country.

The roof frame here is a king post truss, the imported Western carpentry that came into Japan alongside brick construction and was taught through Meiji technical schools. The middle building next door does something else entirely: a wagoya, a Japanese frame with inclined beams carried on a central post. Two structural systems roughly ten metres apart, in a row that reads from the canal as a single work.

The detail that explains how the row was made one is the gap. Where the south building meets the middle, the space between them is covered by a small gabled roof and closed with a brick wall raised inside it. Across that wall, and continuing along the eaves line of the main structure, runs a corbelled cornice worked in sawtooth brick. The north building carries the same moulding. The three were built across roughly a decade by different hands, yet the cornice runs as one line from the south gable to the north.

That continuity is what the Agency's own note picks out: three brick gable ends turned toward the canal, shaping the historic landscape of the water town of Yanagawa. Fifteen years after registration the point was made again at a higher level. On 10 March 2015 the Namikura was written into Suikyo Yanagawa, a nationally designated Place of Scenic Beauty covering 184,291.88 square metres of the old castle town: its canals, the birth house of the poet Kitahara Hakushu, and the shrine precincts that recur in his verse. Hakushu himself wrote about the row, though in his lines it is a soy sauce namikura rather than a miso one.

The exterior is not the whole of it. Older residents recall a water-drawing station once attached to the works, taking canal water directly into the brewery. That fixture has gone, but it explains why the buildings face the water at all.

Where to Stand

The Namikura is a working factory, closed to the public. The brick rooms have been fitted out as chilled and warmed storage and are still in production. Tsurumiso Jozo accepts factory visits and miso-making workshops by prior booking, and that arrangement is the only way past the gate.

Nishitetsu Yanagawa Station is roughly fifty minutes by limited express from Nishitetsu Fukuoka (Tenjin) on the Tenjin Omuta Line. Canal cruise landings sit within a five to ten minute walk of the station. A standard one-way course covers about three kilometres in an hour at 2,000 yen for adults and 1,000 yen for children aged five through primary school, and the Namikura comes up some twenty minutes along, at the point where the inner and outer moat routes divide.

Timing deserves a note. In mid to late February the canals are drained for cleaning, a period called mizuochi, and boat operators cut back to shortened routes. The dates move each year, so check before booking a February trip.

On foot, make for Danpei-bashi. The old wooden bridge stands beside the works and has been used for film shoots. From its deck the south building shows its long flank and the sawtooth cornice runs away northward across all three gables. No admission is charged, and photography from the bridge or the public bank is unrestricted. Go in the last hours of daylight, when the western sun loads the brick with colour and the canal holds a second version of it.

One clarification on the name: Namikura in this context means the Tsurumiso row in Yanagawa specifically, not any similarly named warehouse group elsewhere. Ask a boatman for the Tsurumiso Namikura and there will be no confusion.