White plaster walls the length of a narrow street. This is Hamanaka-cho in Kashima, a post station on the old road to Nagasaki, and when the country listed the district for preservation it was listed not as a post town but as a brewing town. No other protected district in the country is designated on those terms.

Two neighbouring districts were listed on the same day in 2006, one as a port and market quarter and this one as a brewing quarter. Only a handful of the buildings are still brewing, and one of the disused ones has reopened as a place to taste and to look around. The rest of the buildings have become shops, or an inn, or simply stand there with their shutters down. The walls are white, the eaves are low, and the street is still the width it was when horses were using it.

The sake made here has always been described as rich and sweet. Through the decades when dry was the fashion that was a liability, and breweries elsewhere spent considerable effort moving away from sweetness. Kashima did not, or could not, and the description has stopped functioning as an apology.

Since June 2021 the name of the prefecture may be used on the bottle as a protected indication of origin, the first sake in Kyushu to be given that protection. The street was here first by roughly two centuries, and the name has only lately caught up with it.