Miyazaki Honten Office

What Is the Miyazaki Honten Office?

The Miyazaki Honten Office (宮崎本店事務所, Miyazaki Honten Jimusho) is a 2-storey timber office building from the early Showa period, standing inside the Miyazaki Honten sake and shochu works in Minamigomitsuka, Kusu-cho, Yokkaichi City, Mie Prefecture; it was registered as a national Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 20, 1996.

It is a timber frame finished on the outside in mortar render, under a tiled roof. With a building area of 66 square metres, it is the smallest of the five registered buildings at Miyazaki Honten.

Everything around it is a black-walled warehouse or storage building, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Miyazaki Honten Office as the only Western-style building on the works. The Agency's own entry for the Storage House locates it as "opposite the head office", which shows how the office serves as the reference point on the site.

Why the Miyazaki Honten Office Was Registered

The Miyazaki Honten Office was chosen in the first round of the registration system in 1996. It carries registration number 24-0002, the second number issued for a registered building in Mie Prefecture, and it was listed for contributing to the historic landscape.

The Agency's note opens by describing Kusu as a place long known for brewing with underground water from the Suzuka River, and Miyazaki Honten as one of its old-established houses, before turning to the office itself. A single house-like, Western-style office set among brewery storehouses is part of what gives this early Showa factory its look.

The Gable Ornament and Upper-Floor Tiles of the Miyazaki Honten Office

The first place to look on the Miyazaki Honten Office is the top of the front gable. The Agency singles out an ornamental motif fixed there as the building's distinguishing feature, though it does not describe the design, so it is worth seeing for yourself.

The second is the upper storey. Most of the walls are rendered in mortar, but part of the upper-floor wall is clad in tiles instead. Changing the material on the upper level makes the building read more like a home than a works office, and the Agency uses exactly that word, house-like, to describe it.

The Agency dates the Miyazaki Honten Office only to the early Showa period, and no exact completion year is published. The company timeline notes that a continuous still was imported from Germany in 1930, but we found no source linking that investment to the construction of the office.

Visiting the Miyazaki Honten Office

The Miyazaki Honten Office stands inside a working factory and there is no public access to its interior. We could not confirm from published sources how the building is used today. Anyone hoping to see it should contact Miyazaki Honten in advance, and ask at the same time whether photography is allowed on the site.

The works is about 9 minutes on foot from Kusu Station on the Kintetsu Nagoya Line.