Kayashima Sake Brewery's Entrance Warehouse

A Gateway with a Storeroom Attached

Kayashima Shuzo Monguchi Soko (萱島酒造門口倉庫, also written Kayashima Shuzō Monguchi Sōko, the gateway storehouse), a single-storey timber building of 1916 adjoining the rice store 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. At 50 square metres it is the smallest of the twelve registered structures on the compound, and it does two jobs at once.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record sets out the arrangement precisely. The building butts onto the Komegura, the earthen-walled rice store of the same year. On the side towards that store, a width of one and a half ken, something under three metres, is given over to the gateway itself. The rest is the storeroom: three ken of frontage by two of depth, small by any measure.

Its construction is shinkabe, the method in which the timber posts stay visible on the wall surface rather than being plastered over, with boarding applied along the lower part of the wall as a wainscot. Plain work, in other words, and the record says so, describing the building as an ancillary facility within a brewery that forms a single unit with the family residence.

That last phrase is the useful one. Kayashima Shuzo, founded in 1873 by Kayashima Arakichi, was never a factory separate from a household. The family lived on the ground where the sake was made, and the registered group includes the Kayashima family house of 1933 and its detached wing. A building that is half gate and half storeroom belongs to that kind of place: you pass through it to get in, and you put things in it because the space was there.

The Shutter, and What Registration Actually Requires

One line in the official record deserves attention. Where the gate doors once hung, there is now a roller shutter.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs states this plainly, without complaint. It is a small thing and it goes to the heart of what the registration system is.

Japan protects buildings under two schemes. Designation as a National Treasure or Important Cultural Property is the older and stricter one, reserved for a small number of buildings of outstanding value, and the owner must obtain permission before altering them. Registration was created by the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties for a much wider field of buildings roughly fifty years old or more that remain in ordinary use, and it asks owners to notify the authorities of major alterations rather than to seek approval in advance.

Under the stricter scheme a roller shutter in a 1916 gateway would be a problem to be corrected. Under registration it is simply part of the building's history, recorded and left alone. A brewery still moving goods in and out needs a door that works, and the register accommodates that. Anyone who wants to understand why Japan built a second, lighter system in 1996 can look at this doorway.

Twelve structures bearing the Kayashima Shuzo name were registered together on 16 January 1998, in the eighth round of registrations, with notification published on 12 February. Adding the family house and its detached wing brings the site total to fourteen. The Monguchi Soko carries registration number 44-0023, and the ground given, as for all the others, is contribution to the historic character of the national landscape.

For a subordinate building of 50 square metres, that ground is doing something specific. Registered on its own the storehouse would mean little. Registered as part of a group whose dates run from 1894 to 1935, it supplies the connective tissue: the small structures that show how a working compound was actually organised, as against the large ones that show how much sake it could make.

Where to Find It

Most people who visit the brewery pass this building without registering that it is protected. It stands at the entry, attached to the Komegura on the prefectural road, which makes it one of the easiest of the twelve to see and also the easiest to walk straight past.

Slow down at the doorway. The opening of one and a half ken tells you what had to fit through it: not a lorry, but a cart, or men carrying rice sacks and barrels. That dimension is a measurement of how a brewery of 1916 moved its material.

Then look at the wall beside it. In shinkabe construction the posts read as vertical lines on the surface, and the spacing between them tells you the structural grid without any need for a drawing. The boarding along the lower wall is there because that is the height at which a wall gets kicked, scraped by loads, and splashed by rain off the ground.

Then look up, past the tiled roof of this modest building, at the octagonal brick chimney of 1914 behind. The contrast between the two is the whole point of the group: the chimney announces the brewery to the district, the storehouse handles the daily traffic through the gate.

SAKE GALLERY Tohzai is the brewery's shop and the part of the site set up for visitors, open 9:00 to 16:00 with irregular closing days, in a converted building that once housed the rice-polishing plant. Tasting and purchase are both available, and the staff can advise on what is currently viewable. The registered buildings remain production space, so interior visits are not routinely offered; telephone 0978-72-1181 to ask about anything beyond exteriors. Photographing the Monguchi Soko from the road is unproblematic, but ask at the shop before pointing a camera through the gateway into the yard.

Oita Airport is about ten minutes by car and the Hayami interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway about forty, which makes the brewery a workable stop on the way to or from a flight. Local public transport is thin. Inland lie the Rokugo Manzan temple complexes and the rock-cut Buddhist figures for which the Kunisaki Peninsula is known.