Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A

What Is the Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A?

The Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A (佐藤家住宅石造倉庫Ａ, Satō-ke Jūtaku Sekizō Sōko A) is a 2-storey stone storehouse believed to date from the early Meiji period, in Nishidomari-cho, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on November 5, 1997. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 26 square meters.

Stone Warehouse A stands west of the main house, right on a T-junction where a north-south lane runs into an east-west street. It holds the most conspicuous corner of the Sato Family Residence, and, with the Wooden Detached Building, it belongs to the older phase of building on the site.

Sandstone Walls, Brick Cornice

The walls of the Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A are built of laid sandstone. At the top, though, the builders switched material: the Nokijabara, the projecting cornice below the eaves, and the gable walls are made of brick.

These are konnyaku bricks, a thin, flat type named after the slabs of konnyaku jelly they resemble. The rough sandstone of the main walls and the finely coursed thin brick of the cornice and gables differ in texture and joint spacing, and from the junction you can clearly see the line where one gives way to the other.

The Konnyaku Bricks of Sato Stone Warehouse A

According to Nagasaki City, konnyaku bricks were fired in Nagasaki for a limited period around the Meiji Restoration. Production began under Hendrik Hardes, a Dutch naval engineer who arrived in 1857, which is why they are also called Hardes bricks. The trigger was the Nagasaki ironworks at Akunoura, completed in 1861, whose chimneys and walls needed bricks by the tens of thousands.

An ordinary brick is about 6 centimeters thick; a konnyaku brick is only about 4 centimeters. Why they were made so thin is debated, and one explanation is that kilns of the day could not reach high enough temperatures for thicker bricks.

What makes Sato Stone Warehouse A interesting is that this distinctively local brick turns up not in a government works but on a private family's storehouse. It suggests how brickmaking, begun for the ironworks on Nagasaki Harbor, spread into the everyday buildings of the town.

Why Sato Stone Warehouse A Was Registered

The Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A was listed as a registered tangible cultural property under the criterion of being difficult to reproduce, as number 42-0005.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs highlights it as one of only a few outbuildings of a private house to use konnyaku bricks. Stone Warehouse B on the same property is built in a very similar way, but Warehouse A is considered the older of the two.

Seeing Sato Stone Warehouse A

The Sato Family Residence Stone Warehouse A belongs to a private home, and its interior is not open to the public (checked September 2026). Standing on the T-junction, it is the easiest of the five Sato buildings to see from outside, and both the sandstone walls and the konnyaku brick cornice and gables can be picked out from the road. There is no official guidance on photography; please be considerate of the residents. Directions are on the Sato Family Residence (Nagasaki) page.