Kayashima Sake Brewery Wooden Wall

Sixty-Five Metres of Boundary

Kayashima Shuzo Mokubei (萱島酒造木塀, also written Kayashima Shuzō Mokubei, the timber fence), a roofed boundary wall of 1935 running along the southern edge of 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 extends for sixty-five metres and is classified not as a building but as a structure of another kind, the category the register uses for walls, chimneys, bridges and gates.

Its construction is layered in a way that repays a close look. The lower portion is brick, laid up to form a plinth. On top of that sits a timber fence carrying its own roof, sheeted in iron. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes the timber section as posts set at intervals of one ken, roughly 1.8 metres, with a horizontal rail running between them and two further courses of light horizontal members, one above the rail and one below.

Sixty-five metres at one ken per bay means something close to thirty-six repetitions of the same simple frame.

The record calls the arrangement plain, and it is. There are no panels, no decorative caps, no attempt at anything beyond keeping a line and shedding water. A roofed fence, yanebei, earns its roof for a practical reason: rain running down an unprotected timber fence rots the tops of the posts first, and a narrow roof over the whole run keeps the water off the end grain.

Kayashima Shuzo was founded in 1873 by Kayashima Arakichi and has brewed here ever since under the name Nishinoseki, coined in the 1890s by his son Yonesaburo from nishi, western Japan, and seki, the highest rank in sumo.

Why a Fence Was Worth Registering

The question is a fair one, and answering it explains what the register is for.

Every entry in this category cites a ground for registration, and for all twelve Kayashima Shuzo structures the ground given is the same: that the item contributes to the historic character of the national landscape. For a fermentation hall that phrase is a slightly loose fit, since the hall's interest is largely internal. For a sixty-five metre wall it is precise. The Mokubei is the thing that makes the brewery an object in the street rather than a collection of separate roofs. It holds the southern edge, it establishes where the private ground begins, and it is what a passer-by reads before noticing anything else at ground level.

The registration scheme itself was created by the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. It differs from designation as an Important Cultural Property in reach and in obligation: it takes in a broad field of items around fifty years old or more, and it asks owners to notify the authorities of major alterations rather than to obtain permission beforehand. That distinction is what allows a boundary wall on a commercial site to be protected without freezing the site.

Twelve Kayashima Shuzo structures were registered together on 16 January 1998, in the eighth round, with notification published on 12 February. Two more entries cover the Kayashima family house and its detached wing, giving fourteen for the site. The Mokubei's registration number is 44-0031, the last in the brewery's own sequence.

Its date is worth noticing too. At 1935 the Mokubei is the youngest of the group, which runs back to 1894. Read chronologically, the buildings record forty years of a family firm adding capacity, and the wall comes at the end of that: the point at which the compound had reached the extent it was going to reach and could be given a finished edge.

Reading the Materials

Of the twelve registered structures, the Mokubei is the one you can examine most freely, because it faces outward by definition. Walk its length and three material decisions become legible.

The brick plinth comes first. Brick at the base of a timber fence solves the problem that destroys such fences: ground moisture wicking up into the posts. Raising the timber clear of the earth on masonry buys decades. Brick also connects the wall to the rest of the compound, where the octagonal chimney of 1914 and the store behind it are brick as well, so the material was already familiar to the builders and probably already on site.

The iron sheeting on the roof comes second, and it dates the wall as clearly as any inscription. Tiled roofs cover every building here. The fence gets iron sheet, which by 1935 was cheap, light, and quick to fix over a long thin run where the weight of tile would have called for a heavier frame.

The timber framing is third, and its interest is its economy. Posts at one ken, a rail between them, two courses of light horizontal members above and below. That is the whole system, repeated three dozen times.

For visiting, the wall is the easy part. It stands on the southern boundary and can be seen and photographed from public ground without arrangement. SAKE GALLERY Tohzai, the brewery's shop, opens 9:00 to 16:00 with irregular closing days and occupies a converted building that once housed the rice-polishing plant; it sells the full range of Nishinoseki and offers tasting. The registered buildings inside the compound stay in production and are not open for interior visits as a matter of course, so telephone 0978-72-1181 if you hope for more than exteriors.

Oita Airport is about ten minutes away by car and the Hayami interchange on the Higashi-Kyushu Expressway about forty. Public transport along this coast is sparse. Inland, the Rokugo Manzan temple complexes and the peninsula's rock-cut Buddhist figures make the Kunisaki interior worth a day of its own.