Kayashima Sake Brewery Nakagura (pressing Area)

Four Bays Wide, Twenty-Six Deep

Kayashima Shuzo Nakagura (萱島酒造中蔵（搾り場）, also written Kayashima Shuzō Nakagura, the middle store or pressing hall), a two-storey timber building of 1915 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. Its proportions are the first thing worth knowing: the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes a frontage of four ken against a depth of twenty-six, which puts the long axis at something near forty-seven metres.

The building runs north to south, ridge along its length, under a hipped tiled roof. The recorded building area is 687 square metres. That figure does not reconcile with a simple multiplication of the frontage and depth, so it presumably takes in lean-to sections or later additions along the flanks.

The subtitle in the official name, shiboriba, explains the shape. Pressing is the moment sake becomes sake. After weeks of fermentation the mash is a thick suspension of liquid and spent rice solids, and it has to be pressed to separate the clear sake from the lees. In a brewery of this period that meant moving the mash along a line: in at one end, through the press, out the other side towards storage. A long narrow hall is what a linear process asks for.

Kayashima Shuzo has brewed on this ground since 1873 and sells under the name Nishinoseki, coined in the 1890s by the second-generation head Yonesaburo from nishi, western Japan, and seki, the top rank in sumo. In 1963 the brewery is said to have put a ginjo sake on general sale as a reserve bottling, at a time when such sake was made mainly for judging competitions, and the move is remembered as an early step towards the wider market for premium sake that followed.

The Roof That Gives It Away

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record singles out two features, and both concern how the building was put together rather than how it looks.

The first is the roof frame: a plain king-post truss, with the posts either side formed as paired members that sandwich the rafter. A king-post truss is the most basic of the imported roof systems, a triangle with a single vertical member hung from the apex to carry the tie beam below. There is nothing ambitious about it. That is the point. A brewery ordering a forty-seven metre hall in 1915 wanted a frame its own carpenters could repeat bay after bay without difficulty, and the paired struts are a carpenter's solution: two smaller pieces clamped either side of the member they support, easier to obtain and to fix than one large one.

The second is the wall surface. The record notes that the Nakagura and the Shikomigura of 1914 are the two buildings in the group finished in boarding, and that the resulting scale of the elevations makes them stand out among the rest. Elsewhere on the compound the walls are lime plaster, white and closed. Board cladding reads differently: horizontal or vertical lines running the length of a very long building, drawing the eye along it.

Registration recognises exactly this sort of thing. The scheme dates from the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties and sits alongside, not within, the older system of designation. Designation as an Important Cultural Property applies to a small number of buildings of the highest value and requires the owner to seek permission before alteration. Registration reaches a far wider field of buildings around fifty years old or more, and asks only for notification of major changes. A pressing hall in seasonal use needs the second arrangement, not the first.

Twelve structures under the Kayashima Shuzo name were registered together on 16 January 1998, in the eighth round of registrations, with notification published on 12 February. The Kayashima family house and its detached wing were registered at the same time, giving fourteen entries for the site. The Nakagura's number is 44-0027, and the ground given is the standard one for the category: contribution to the historic character of the national landscape.

What You Can Actually See

A building forty-seven metres long inside a working compound is easier to sense than to inspect. Look for the roofline rather than the walls. Because the ridge runs north to south, the Nakagura presents its short end towards the front of the site and its length disappears backwards, so from the road you get the narrow gable-end proportion and very little idea of the depth behind it. Move along the road and the roof plane keeps going, which is the moment the scale registers.

Set it against the Shikomigura, the fermentation hall of 1914 immediately alongside. That building is broad and squarish; this one is a corridor. Two buildings, two shapes, two processes. Fermentation wants area for vessels standing still; pressing wants a run for material moving through.

The octagonal brick chimney of 1914 stands above both and is the landmark to steer by.

SAKE GALLERY Tohzai, the brewery shop, is the one part of the compound arranged for visitors, open 9:00 to 16:00 with irregular closing days, in a converted building that formerly held the rice-polishing plant. You can taste, buy, and ask. The registered buildings including the Nakagura are production space and interior visits are not routinely offered; pressing in particular happens in season, from roughly late autumn into spring, when the hall is at its busiest. Telephone 0978-72-1181 for anything beyond the shop. Exterior photography from the public road raises no issue; ask at the shop before photographing inside the gate.

Oita Airport is about ten minutes by car and the Hayami interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway about forty. Rail does not serve this coast usefully. Drivers can pair the brewery with the Rokugo Manzan temples inland, where the peninsula's stone-carved Buddhist figures are the regional speciality.