Nagano Meijo South Storehouse

The Brewery's Bottling House

The Nagano Meijo South Storehouse (長野銘醸南蔵, Nagano Meijō Minami-gura) is a two-storey storehouse built in 1921 in the southeast of the Nagano Meijo sake brewery in Yahata, Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 19, 2014.

A Dozo-zukuri building under a tiled roof, it covers 298 square metres, making it one of the larger buildings on the site, and comes with a brick chimney. It stands east of the storage cellar. The registration number is 20-0469.

Twelve of the brewery's buildings were registered together in 2014; the South Storehouse is a Taisho-era addition among them, built to handle bottling.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Nagano Meijo South Storehouse as the building that originally took charge of bottling, and as evidence of how the sake industry developed in the modern era.

For most of its history sake left the brewery in casks and was sold by measure. In the modern period bottled sake spread, and bottling brought its own tasks, washing, filling and capping, that needed a dedicated space. A bottling house of this size, set among storehouses dating back to the Edo period, shows a traditional brewer adapting to new ways of selling its product. The formal criterion for registration is contribution to the historic landscape.

What to Look For

An L-Shaped Plan Around a Brick Chimney

The Nagano Meijo South Storehouse bends at a right angle, its L-shaped plan wrapping around a brick chimney. Folding a plastered storehouse around a chimney is unusual, and it makes this corner of the compound easy to pick out. The chimney carries the katakana letters for Obasute, echoing the brewery's flagship brand, Obasute Masamune. What the chimney originally served is not stated in the published sources.

A Roof That Sits on Top

The roof is of the okiyane type: a separate roof frame set over a clay-sealed storehouse body, leaving an air gap between. If the roof burned, the plastered core could survive, and the gap also keeps summer heat off the storage space.

Log Beams for a Wide Span

Inside, the roof frame combines a traditional Wagoya of round logs used as posts and beams with noboribari, rafters-cum-beams that climb with the roof pitch. Together they span a large, relatively open interior, which is exactly what a bottling line needed.

Visiting the Nagano Meijo South Storehouse

The Nagano Meijo South Storehouse stands deep in the southeast of the compound, so you need to be inside the grounds to take it in. The interior is not listed as open.

Directions to the brewery and the arrangements for tours, open days and photography are covered on the Nagano Meijo page.