Nagano Meijo Office

The Brewery's Front Office

The Nagano Meijo Office (長野銘醸事務所, Nagano Meijō Jimusho) is a two-storey timber building in the modern Japanese style, built in 1916 on the east side 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 has a tiled roof, covers 198 square metres and faces south. Its registration number, 20-0466, is the first in the consecutive run given to the brewery's twelve buildings.

Every other registered building here is a clay-walled Dozo-zukuri storehouse; the Nagano Meijo Office alone is built of timber. Its ground floor holds the business rooms and a shop that still serves customers.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out two things: the formal entrance porch on the front, and the fittings upstairs. The porch roof is a gable with a gently convex curve. On the upper floor the walls are finished mainly in grey plaster, the rooms are divided by transoms of fine vertical slats, and the large display alcove uses a single board of zelkova. The description calls it a lavishly fitted example of modern Japanese-style architecture.

It was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape. Set among Edo-period storehouses, a Taisho-era reception building shows that a brewery was a place of business and hospitality as well as production.

What to Look For

The Curved Porch Gable

A shikidai is a raised formal entrance where important guests were received. At the Nagano Meijo Office it is topped by a Kirizuma-zukuri gable with mukuri, a roof surface that swells gently upward, the opposite of the upswept curve seen on temples. Stand in front and the soft line of that gable is what gives the building its face.

Grey Plaster and Slatted Transoms

Grey nezumi plaster is Shikkui tinted with soot, quieter than white. The osa-ranma transoms, closely spaced vertical slats like the reed of a loom, let light and air pass between rooms. Both were favourite details in reception rooms of the Taisho era.

A Single Zelkova Board

The alcove floor is one wide board of zelkova without a join. Timber of that width is hard to find, and it signals a client who did not stint.

Visiting the Nagano Meijo Office

The ground floor of the Nagano Meijo Office houses the brewery shop, which receives customers. The upstairs rooms are not listed as open. The porch is on the south side, seen from the east part of the grounds. Shop days and hours could not be confirmed from published information, so check before you go.

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