Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate

What the Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate is

The Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate (萱島酒造裏門, Kayashima Shuzō Uramon) is a gate built in 1914 at the rear of Kayashima Sake Brewery in Tsunai, Kunisaki City, Oita Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on January 16, 1998. The national database describes it as brick and timber with a tiled roof and classes it as an "other structure" rather than a building.

If the rice storehouse and gate storehouse on the prefectural road are the brewery's public face, the Kayashima Back Gate is the working entrance at the back, the way in for the brewery itself rather than for visitors.

A pair of brick gateposts

What survives from 1914 is a pair of brick gateposts, and the official description singles them out as the reason the gate matters.

The date is telling. 1914 is the year the brewery raised its largest building, the brewing storehouse, and its octagonal brick chimney. In the same year of expansion the back entrance was given brick posts to match. Brick turns up again in the base of the wooden wall built along the south boundary in 1935, so along that side of the site it is the common material of the brewery's frontage.

Gateposts carry most of a gate's character. Choosing laid brick over timber posts was a modern gesture for a rural brewery in the 1910s, and it is the detail worth looking at here.

Why a much-altered gate was registered

The Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate is not a pristine survivor. According to the official description, the iron gate leaves are later replacements; the gate stands up against a Geya lean-to on the south side of the brewing storehouse; it has acquired a gabled tile roof; and a roller shutter has been fitted.

It was registered anyway, for contributing to the historic landscape of the country and as a gate that says something about the brewery's history. That is the honest reading of it: 1914 brick posts with a century of working-yard adjustments layered on top, which is exactly what a gate in daily use at a brewery looks like.

Seeing the Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate

The Kayashima Sake Brewery Back Gate is a service entrance at the rear of the site, south of the brewing storehouse, and appears to remain in use. Vehicles may come and go, so do not linger or park in front of it. Whether you can see it from inside the grounds is a question for SAKE GALLERY Tohzai or the brewery (+81-978-72-1181).

Look at the two brick posts first, then compare their bond and color with the later iron leaves, roof and shutter. It makes the 1914 fabric easy to pick out.