Kayashima Sake Brewery Rice Storehouse

The Rice Store That Faces the Road

Kayashima Shuzo Komegura (萱島酒造米蔵, also written Kayashima Shuzō Komegura), a two-storey earthen-walled rice store built in 1916 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. Of the twelve registered structures on the compound, this is the one most people actually see, because it stands directly on the prefectural road.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as dozo-zukuri, two storeys, tiled roof, with a footprint of 171 square metres.

Dozo-zukuri deserves a moment. The technique builds up thick walls of earth over a timber frame and finishes them in lime plaster, producing a store that resists fire and holds a steady internal temperature. Merchant towns across Japan used it for anything whose loss would ruin the owner. For a brewer, that meant the rice. Sake begins as polished rice bought in bulk before the brewing season, and a fire or a damp winter in the store would end the year's production before it started.

The building is plain by intention. Its plaster carries no decorative moulding, and the openings are few.

What gives the elevation its character is the cladding. Vertical boards run up the outside walls as far as the second-floor windows, sheathing the plaster where driving rain would otherwise wash it. The windows themselves sit inside simple frames and close with single boarded shutters that slide to one side. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes that the Komegura, together with the chimney rising from the brick store behind it, has become the pair of forms by which local people recognise the brewery.

Kayashima Shuzo has brewed here since 1873. Its sake is sold under the name Nishinoseki, chosen in the 1890s by the founder's son Yonesaburo, who took nishi for western Japan and seki from the highest rank in sumo.

Why a Working Store Was Registered

Registration as a Tangible Cultural Property is not the same thing as designation as an Important Cultural Property, and the Komegura shows why the difference was invented.

The registration scheme dates from the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. It was framed for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that are still in daily use, and it substitutes a duty to notify the authorities of major alterations for the prior permission that designation demands. Designation suits a temple hall that has become a monument. Registration suits a rice store that still holds rice.

Twelve structures carrying the Kayashima Shuzo name went onto the register 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 next door were registered on the same date, so fourteen entries cover the site as a whole. The Komegura's registration number is 44-0022. The ground cited is the standard one for the category: contribution to the historic character of the national landscape.

That phrase is doing real work in this case. A single earthen store, taken alone, would be an unremarkable example of a common building type. Its value lies in position and in company. It holds the street line, it is legible from a passing car, and it fronts a group of structures dated between 1894 and 1935 that record a family firm growing by increments over four decades.

Note also which year it belongs to. The Komegura of 1916 arrived after the two large stores of 1914 and 1915. Capacity for fermenting and pressing came first, and storage for raw material followed. The sequence is a small piece of evidence about how the business expanded under pressure of demand.

Looking at It, and What Else Is There

Because the Komegura sits on the road, you can study it without setting foot on private ground. Stand back far enough to take in the whole elevation and three details come forward.

Start with the line where the vertical boarding stops. It ends at the second-floor window sills, and above that the white plaster is exposed. That boundary is not decorative. It marks how high the builders judged that wind-driven rain would reach.

Then look at a window. The sliding boarded shutter is a single plank panel in a bare frame, the cheapest weathertight closure available in 1916, and it survives on a building that has been repaired continuously for over a century. Sash windows would have been available. They were not used, because nothing about a rice store called for them.

Then look up and behind, to the octagonal brick chimney of 1914. It is registered separately and it is the tallest thing on the site.

Visitors have a proper destination here. SAKE GALLERY Tohzai, the brewery's shop, opens from 9:00 to 16:00 with irregular closing days, and occupies a converted building that formerly housed the rice-polishing plant, which keeps the shop thematically next door to the Komegura's own function. Tasting and purchase are both possible, and the staff are the right people to ask about what can be seen on any given day. The registered buildings themselves stay in production use, so interior visits are not part of the normal offer; telephone 0978-72-1181 if you hope for more. Photographing the Komegura from the road presents no problem at all.

Oita Airport is about ten minutes away by car, and the Hayami interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway about forty. Local buses along the Kunisaki coast are infrequent, so drive if you can. The peninsula rewards a longer stay, with the Rokugo Manzan temple complexes inland and stone Buddhist carving of a kind found nowhere else in Japan.