Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse

The Largest of the Seven, Built in 1906

The Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse (矢野酒造中蔵, Yano Shuzō Nakagura) is a two-storey earthen storehouse of 1906 at Yano Sake Brewery in Takatsuhara, Kashima City, Saga Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on August 3, 2006. With a building area of 389 square meters, it is the biggest of the brewery's seven listed buildings.

It stands west of the east storehouse with its ridge running north to south. Built as a brewing storehouse, it is now used for storage. The Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse connects with the east storehouse through a doorway and shares a wall with the west storehouse.

A Storehouse 14 Ken Long

The Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse measures 14 Ken by 6 ken, about 25.5 by 10.9 meters if one ken is 1.82 meters. It has a gabled pantiled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri, Sangawara-buki) and white lime-plastered walls (Shikkui).

At 6 ken across it is one ken wider than the east storehouse next door, which spans 5 ken. In both length and width it outstrips every other storehouse on the site, and its great roof runs north to south through the middle of the plot.

A Postwar Extension and an Iron-Clad Gable

The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that 2 ken were added to the south end of the Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse between 1945 and 1954. As first built it would therefore have been 12 ken, about 21.8 meters, long.

The south gable wall is sheathed in iron sheet, so the end that grew in the extension is finished differently from the plastered flanks. The description does not say why the extension was made or when the iron was applied.

A Brewing Storehouse from a Year of Change

The Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse was built for brewing, where mash ferments in rows of large vats that need a broad, open floor. Today it serves as a storage building.

Its date of 1906 is the year Yano Kazuyoshi became the fifth head of the family, a man the brewery remembers for enlarging the business. No source shows how the planning of the storehouse relates to his taking charge.

It is registration number 41-0057, listed for contributing to the historic landscape of the nation.

Seeing the Middle Storehouse

The Yano Sake Brewery Middle Storehouse stands in the middle of the plot between the east and west storehouses and is hard to see from the old road behind the main house and annex. It is in use for storage, and no public access to the interior is announced.

The brewery directs visitors to Tatsumi no Kura in the former rice mill. Whether booked brewery tours enter this storehouse is not published, so ask when you book and confirm the rules on photography.