Nagano Meijo East Barn

Miso, Retirement and a Western Roof

The Nagano Meijo East Barn (長野銘醸東納屋, Nagano Meijō Higashi-naya) is a two-storey storehouse built in 1907 on the eastern edge of the Nagano Meijo sake brewery in Yahata, Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on December 19, 2014.

It is a Dozo-zukuri building with thick plastered clay walls and a tiled roof, 87 square metres in area, its ridge running north to south along the middle of the compound's east side. An open lean-to, a Geya carried on posts alone, runs along the west face. The registration number is 20-0472.

Twelve of the brewery's buildings were registered on the same day in 2014. The East Barn is one of the later ones, put up in the last years of the Meiji era.

Why It Was Registered

The official description divides the Nagano Meijo East Barn into two halves: storage to the north, living quarters to the south. The storage end is said to have been the miso room, and the rooms at the other end served either as retirement quarters for an elder of the family or as lodgings for maids.

A brewing household often made its own miso as well as its sake, and the paste needed a cool, stable room to mature. Here that room shared a building, and a wall, with the space where a retired head of the house or live-in staff slept. It is a small window onto how daily life fitted around the edges of a working brewery.

The registration criterion is contribution to the historic landscape; the description credits the building with giving definition to the east side of the compound.

What to Look For

The Only Western Truss on Site

What sets the Nagano Meijo East Barn apart is hidden in the roof. Traditional Japanese carpentry supports a roof on heavy horizontal beams with short posts stacked on them, the system called Wagoya. This building instead uses a yogoya, a Western-style truss in which members are braced into triangles, letting slimmer timbers span the width. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles this out as different from the other buildings at the brewery.

A construction date of 1907 fits a period when Western framing techniques, introduced through railways and government buildings, were filtering into private rural work. Why the brewery chose it for this one building is not recorded in the sources consulted.

The Open Lean-To

On the west side, facing into the yard, the lean-to has no walls, only posts under its roof. It provided sheltered space for setting down loads or working out of the rain.

Visiting the Nagano Meijo East Barn

The Nagano Meijo East Barn lines the east side of the compound, and its lean-to faces inward, so you need to be inside the grounds to see it well. 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.