Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney

What the Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney Is

The Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney (旧西中共同製糖場煙突, Kyū-Nishinaka Kyōdō Seitōjō Entotsu) is a brick chimney built in 1942 at Nishizatosoe in the Gusukube district of Miyakojima City, Okinawa Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 21 June 2013. It rises 13 metres from a base 2.7 metres square and stands alone in a field of sugar cane.

The chimney is what remains of the Nishinaka cooperative sugar mill, set up in 1942 by farmers from the surrounding hamlets. Miyakojima City records that the mill ran for only two or three seasons. The Japanese army then requisitioned it during the Pacific War, production stopped, and the plant was never used again after the war.

According to the city, there were originally two chimneys. Only this one survives, together with a water tank beside it that cooled the boiler. Broken bricks that once lay scattered around the site were gathered up when the fields were levelled and now lie half-buried along the edge of the plot.

Why the Nishinaka Sugar Factory Chimney Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney (registration no. 47-0081) as a structure that contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Its commentary describes it as a symbol of sugar making, the traditional industry of Miyako Island, and as a rare surviving piece of an early Shōwa-period sugar factory in Okinawa Prefecture.

The chimney nearly disappeared. Around 1960, Miyakojima City relates, local people proposed taking it down because wartime damage had left it unsafe. The decision went the other way: it was kept as a memorial to Nakamura Seiichirō, who had worked hard to get the factory built. The land around it is now protected separately by Miyakojima City as a municipal historic site, the Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Site.

A local broadcaster reported at the time of the registration that the chimney had been damaged by American air attacks and typhoons, and that what stands today is roughly two-thirds of its original height. That would put the first chimney at around 20 metres, a figure handed down locally rather than a measured one.

What to Look for at the Nishinaka Chimney

Walk round the base first. The bricks are laid in English bond, so every other course shows the short ends of the bricks. The pattern is easy to read here because the lower courses are at eye level.

On the east and west faces, at the foot of the shaft, you can see a low opening topped by a shallow, segmental brick arch. These are the flues where hot gas from the boiler entered the chimney, and the Agency's description notes that both survive.

Then step back to the edge of the field. Seen across the cane, the Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney makes sense of the landscape around it: the factory was built here because the crop was here. Look for the boiler water tank next to it, and notice where the shaft now ends, short of its former height.

Visiting the Nishinaka Sugar Factory Chimney

The chimney stands in open farmland with no gate, opening hours or admission fee. View it from the farm road and do not walk into the cane, which is a working crop on private land. No photography restrictions are published for the exterior.

The site lies in the eastern part of Miyako Island, about 7.5 kilometres east-southeast of Miyako Airport and about 10 kilometres from the centre of Hirara, both measured in a straight line. We could not confirm a bus service that stops nearby, so a rental car or taxi is the practical way to reach the Former Nishinaka Cooperative Sugar Factory Chimney. No visitor parking is advertised, so leave your car where it does not block the farm road.