Satake Glass Melting Plant

The Building That Holds the Furnace

The Satake Glass Melting Plant (佐竹ガラス溶解場, Satake Garasu Yokaijo) is a single-storey timber factory building of the early Showa period in Saiwai 2-chome, Izumi City, Osaka Prefecture, equipped with a glass-melting furnace and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 24, 2001.

It stands northwest of the office on the premises of Satake Glass, a maker of colored craft-glass rods founded in 1927. The roof is a tiled Irimoya-zukuri hip-and-gable form in Sangawara-buki pantiles, and the building covers 295 square metres. The workshop adjoins it on the east and the mixing factory on the north, which puts the Satake Glass Melting Plant at the hinge of the whole works.

Raw materials blended next door are melted here into the glass that becomes rods. This is the heart of the factory, and it is also the building that shows the street most plainly that a factory is here at all.

Why It Was Registered

The Satake Glass Melting Plant was listed as a building that contributes to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that its unmistakably small-factory appearance has made it a familiar sight for local residents.

The main house and office give the property a domestic face; behind them the melting plant supplies the industrial one. If you want to understand at a glance that this is a home and a working factory on one lot, this is the building that tells you.

The structure hides a second story, in the other sense. In its entry for the workshop, the official description says that, as in the other factory buildings, posts braced with diagonal struts on all four sides carry a King post truss roof, which indicates the melting plant is framed the same way. Outside, a Japanese tiled roof; inside, a Western truss.

What to Look For

From the street, the Satake Glass Melting Plant presents a broad gable end clad in Shitami-itabari, overlapping horizontal weatherboards that rise under the peak of the roof. It is the single most memorable face of the site.

Then look at the ridge. Roughly midway along it sits a koshi-yane, a raised clerestory roof perched on top of the main roof to vent heat and fumes from the furnace. A piece of working equipment has become the building's signature.

The mixing factory to the north carries a raised vent roof of its own. Compare the two ridges and you can see the same device repeated down the line of factory buildings.

Visiting the Satake Glass Melting Plant

The weatherboarded gable and the raised vent roof can be seen from the road in front of the property. The interior of the Satake Glass Melting Plant is a working factory floor and is not open for casual entry.

Satake Glass offers factory tours by reservation, and the Kansai Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry notes that visitors can watch the rod-making process. Some days, though, a cracked furnace pot or the mixing and melting schedule means there is nothing to see. The area around the furnace is hot, so follow your guide's instructions closely, and ask about photography when you book.