Nakashima Sake Brewery Brewing Storehouse

Two Storehouses Opened into One Hall

Nakashima Sake Brewery Brewing Storehouse (中島酒造場仕込蔵, Nakashima Shuzōjō Shikomigura) is a mid-Meiji fermentation hall at a sake brewery in Hamamachi, Kashima City, Saga Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 3 August 2006. It is a 2-storey Dozo-zukuri storehouse with a building area of 409 square metres, standing directly behind the brewery's Main House and joined to it through the rice-steaming room.

Shikomi is the stage at which steamed rice, koji and water are combined in vats and left to ferment into the mash, or moromi. It takes more floor space than anything else in a brewery, and the Nakashima Sake Brewery Brewing Storehouse is the largest of the four registered storehouses on the site.

How It Is Built, and Why It Was Registered

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the building consists of two parallel north-south blocks, each with a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles. Measured in Ken, the traditional bay of roughly six feet, the west block is 11 and a half by 4 and a half bays and the east block 11 by 4 bays. The wall between them has been taken out so that the two work as a single room.

From outside you see two roofs side by side; inside there is one hall. That mismatch between what the building looks like and how it was used is the key to reading it.

Along the south face runs a tiled pent roof, continuous with the one on the Koji Room next door. At both the north and south ends of the west block stand brick chimneys, and the Agency's record explicitly notes the building as having chimneys.

Registration came under the criterion for contribution to the historic landscape. A long white storehouse with brick stacks rising from it is exactly the kind of mass that shaped the skyline of this brewing town.

What to Look For

Look first at that tiled pent roof on the south side. The Nakashima Sake Brewery Brewing Storehouse and the Koji Room are separate buildings with separate registrations, yet one unbroken line of tiles ties them together, and the room that made the koji sits immediately east of the hall where it was used.

Then find the chimneys. Brick against white plaster, and vertical against the long horizontal of the storehouse, they are the one element of the building that breaks its outline.

To the north the hall meets the Main House by way of the steaming room. Shop, steaming room and fermentation hall form a single north-south line, with the Brewing Storehouse at the centre of the plot.

Visiting the Brewing Storehouse

The Nakashima Sake Brewery Brewing Storehouse stands inside the property behind the Main House, and its interior is not open. There is no announcement of tours from the shop into the storehouses, so what can be seen is limited to whatever is visible from outside the property. It helps to know that the chimneys stand at the north and south ends.

No posted rule on photography was found. Stay on public ground and do not enter the yard. Opening hours and directions for the whole brewery are gathered on the Nakashima Sake Brewery page.