Kobayashi Sake Brewery No. 4

The Fourth Warehouse, Built of Sapporo Soft Stone

Moving west along the warehouse row at the Kobayashi Brewery in Kuriyama, Hokkaido, the material underfoot changes character. The Fourth Warehouse, or Yonban-gura, is older than the brick buildings to its east, dating to 1900 (Meiji 33), and it is built in a different way. Its walls are timber-framed and clad in stone, a method known in Japanese as mokkotsu sekizo, using the pale welded tuff called Sapporo soft stone that gives so much Hokkaido architecture its weight and warmth.

The building runs north to south, about 24.5 meters along the ridge and roughly eight meters across, covering 263 square meters over two floors. It is the only warehouse in the row roofed in clay pantiles rather than sheet iron, which marks it out at a distance. A brick lean-to extends along the west side. Step inside, where guided visits allow, and the interior is striking for what is absent: neither the ground floor nor the upper floor carries any freestanding columns.

Kobayashi Brewery began in Sapporo in 1878 (Meiji 11) and settled in Kuriyama in 1901 to draw on the Yubari River. The Fourth Warehouse, raised the year before that move was complete, belongs to the earliest layer of building on the site.

Why This Building Is a Registered Cultural Property

The Fourth Warehouse was placed on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on October 18, 2006. Registration, as the term is used in Japan, differs from designation. Where National Treasure or Important Cultural Property status marks out the rarest works, registration offers a lighter protection to buildings roughly fifty years old or more that strengthen the historic feel of a place. The criterion recorded here was that the building contributes to the country's historic landscape.

This stone warehouse helps anchor that landscape. It belongs to the group of thirteen storehouses on the grounds registered together in 2006, and within that group it represents the earlier, stone-built phase that preceded the Taisho brick warehouses. The contrast between the two materials, read across the row, is a record of how building practice shifted over a single generation of the brewery's growth.

The craft is concentrated in the masonry. The stone is laid in a staggered coursing pattern, and the eaves cornice and the raking verge along the gable are themselves built up in stone rather than wood or plaster. The result is a heavy, deliberate exterior that the lighter brick buildings do not attempt.

What to Look For When You Visit

The pantile roof is the quickest way to pick the Fourth Warehouse out of the row from a distance. Closer in, look at how the stone blocks are stacked in offset courses and how the cornice and verge are carried in the same material, so the whole shell reads as one continuous mass of stone. The brick lean-to on the west side shows the brewery patching one material onto another as needs changed.

Exteriors across the grounds are open to visitors. The Kita no Nishiki Memorial Hall, in the former 1944 office building, displays around five thousand brewing tools and runs a shop and a tasting counter. Interiors of the cellars are shown to groups of ten or more by reservation, and the columns-free interior of this warehouse is one of the more memorable spaces if a tour or the April brewery festival takes you in.