Kayashima Sake Brewery (formerly Muromae)

An 1894 Store Built for Cooling Koji

Kayashima Shuzo Kyu-Muromae (萱島酒造旧ムロマエ, also written Kayashima Shuzō Kyū-Muromae), a single-storey timber building put up in 1894 at the Kayashima sake brewery in Tsunai, Kunisaki City, Oita Prefecture, was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 16 January 1998. It stands on the southern part of the brewery compound, its ridge running at right angles to the long store known as the Nakagura.

The name takes some unpacking. A muro is the warm, humid room where brewers cultivate koji, the mould culture (Aspergillus oryzae) that converts rice starch into fermentable sugar. Muromae means the space in front of that room. Koji leaves the muro hot and alive, and it cannot go straight into the fermentation mash at that temperature. This building existed to receive it and let it cool.

So the structure documents a step in sake production that no visitor ever sees on a tour and that most written accounts skip over.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record gives its footprint as 79 square metres, with a plan of five ken along the ridge by four and a half ken across, roughly nine metres by eight. The roof frame is a wagoya, the traditional Japanese arrangement of beams and short posts, rather than the imported trusses used in the larger stores built two decades later. Outside walls are finished in white lime plaster.

Kayashima Shuzo itself dates to 1873, when Kayashima Arakichi began brewing here. The house brand, Nishinoseki, was named in the 1890s by the second-generation head Yonesaburo: nishi for western Japan, seki from the top rank in sumo, a statement of what he intended the sake to become. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Kyu-Muromae as the oldest building in the brewery and valuable for understanding how the business grew.

Registered, Not Designated: What That Distinction Means

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting buildings, and the difference matters for how this one is used today.

Designation (shitei) as a National Treasure or Important Cultural Property is the older and heavier instrument. It applies to a small number of buildings of outstanding value, and the owner must obtain permission before altering them. Registration (toroku) came later, introduced by the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. It covers a much wider field of buildings roughly fifty years old or more, and it asks owners to notify the authorities of significant changes rather than seek approval in advance.

That lighter obligation was designed for exactly this situation: a working commercial site where the historic fabric is also the plant. Twelve structures bearing the Kayashima Shuzo name were registered together on 16 January 1998, in the eighth round of registrations, with the notification published on 12 February. The adjacent Kayashima family house and its detached wing were registered at the same time, bringing the total on and around the compound to fourteen.

The Kyu-Muromae carries registration number 44-0024. The stated ground for registration is the standard formula for the category: that the building contributes to the historic character of the national landscape.

Read across the whole group, the registration produces something more useful than a list of individual buildings. The dates run from 1894 through 1935, so the group records a family firm expanding in stages, adding capacity as demand for its sake grew. The Kyu-Muromae sits at the beginning of that sequence.

What to Look For on the Ground

Set your expectations before you arrive. This is a functioning brewery, not a museum, and the Kyu-Muromae is a low, plain, plastered box that gives away little from the street. Its interest is contextual: you are looking at the point from which everything else on the site grew outward.

Two things reward attention. The first is the roof. Compare the modest wagoya framing implied by the Kyu-Muromae's small span with the trussed roofs of the Shikomigura of 1914 and the Nakagura of 1915. Within twenty years the brewery had switched from carpentry inherited from the Edo period to structural systems learned from Western engineering, and the buildings sit side by side to show it.

The second is orientation. The Kyu-Muromae's ridge crosses the Nakagura's at ninety degrees, which is not an aesthetic decision. Koji had to move from the muro to the mash by the shortest practical route, so the buildings were arranged around the flow of work.

Above all this rises the octagonal brick chimney of 1914, registered in its own right, and the easiest landmark for finding the brewery at all.

For visitors, the practical anchor is SAKE GALLERY Tohzai, the brewery's shop, open from 9:00 to 16:00 with irregular closing days. It occupies a converted building that once housed the rice-polishing operation, and it is where you can taste the sake and ask questions. The brewery's other buildings, including the Kyu-Muromae, remain in commercial use and are not open for interior visits as a matter of course; if you want to see more than the exteriors, telephone 0978-72-1181 in advance and ask what is possible. Photography of the exteriors from the public road is unproblematic, though a word at the shop before pointing a camera into the yard is the courteous approach.

Getting here is easy by car and awkward without one. Oita Airport is about ten minutes away, which makes the brewery a plausible first or last stop on a Kyushu trip. From the Kyushu Expressway network, Hayami interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway is about forty minutes. The Kunisaki Peninsula around the brewery is worth the detour on its own account, with the Rokugo Manzan temples in the interior and a coastline of small fishing harbours.