Former Minatoya Store and Main House

What the Former Minatoya Store and Main House Is

The Former Minatoya Store and Main House (旧湊屋店舗兼主屋, Kyū-Minatoya Tenpo-ken-shuoku) is a large early Meiji merchant Machiya in Tsutsumicho, Okoshi, in the city of Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2010. It measures 13.1 metres along the street front and 12.4 metres in depth, with a floor area of 156 square metres.

The building is timber framed with a low Tsushi-nikai upper floor, roofed in Kirizuma-zukuri form with Sangawara-buki pantiles, and set Hirairi so that the long side of the roof faces the road.

That road is the old Mino Road, a secondary highway of the Edo period linking Miya-juku at Atsuta on the Tōkaidō with Tarui-juku on the Nakasendō. Halfway along it lay Okoshi, a post town positioned just short of the Kiso River crossing. The house occupies the southwest corner of its plot, presenting two faces to two streets.

In the Edo period the highway turned west at this corner and ran down to the licensed ferry landing on the Kiso. According to the group that now looks after the property, the road that today passes north along the west side of the building did not yet exist. Everyone and everything bound for the river crossing went past this door.

The House of a Ferry Overseer

Aichi Prefecture's registration file identifies the property, on the evidence of an 1860 post-town plot map, as the residence of Minatoya Bun'emon, a rural merchant. His family held the post of funakata kimoiri, a ferry overseer working under the funa-shōya who directed the licensed crossing boats on the Kiso River. Alongside that duty the family traded over long distances, including with the Hokuriku region on the Japan Sea coast.

The volunteer group that runs the building today records that by the Kansei era, roughly 1789 to 1801, the Minatoya business had expanded into wholesaling striped cotton cloth. Thread came in from Maruoka in Echizen, went out to local weavers, and the finished cloth was shipped across the country. The commercial network that would later turn this part of Aichi into a wool-weaving district has one of its origins here.

The Nōbi earthquake of October 1891 flattened most of Okoshi. The Former Minatoya Store and Main House is counted among the few buildings in the post town that stayed up.

The sources disagree about when it was built. Local accounts often place it in the closing years of the Edo period. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database and the prefectural file both date it to the early Meiji era, between 1868 and 1881, describing it as a building that carried on the layout of a late Edo merchant compound. The custodians add that no ridge tablet giving a construction date has turned up in the main house, and that the floor plan does not match the one drawn on an 1864 map of the property, which points to a date after 1864. This article follows the national database.

Why It Was Registered

The Former Minatoya Store and Main House was registered under the criterion that covers buildings contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a large townhouse that conveys the prosperity of the merchants who lined this old highway. The value recognised here lies less in any single rare detail than in the building's part in shaping the street.

Registration assumes that the owner will keep using the building rather than preserving it as a monument. A house that is still privately owned and still in daily use fits that assumption exactly.

The Former Minatoya Storehouse, at the northwest corner of the same plot, was registered separately on the same day. Read together, the street-front house and the storehouse behind it show how a merchant household of the late Edo period arranged its ground.

What to Look at

From the street the eye goes first to the deep eaves and to the stack of horizontal lines beneath them. The front and rear bays project half a ken as a lower pentroof, and beneath that pentroof stands a projecting lattice screen. The upper storey above is kept deliberately low, its lattice windows fixed shut. Rails known as Nageshi run above and below the lattice, so that the facade reads as a series of parallel bands.

A Tsushi-nikai is a low half-storey close under the roof, and it was not originally living space. The prefectural commentary notes that a central row of rooms up there is now floored in tatami, and that the area above the old earth-floored passage has been converted into an eight-mat room, a corridor and storage, apart from a two-by-two-ken block at the rear. The low lattice you see from the road belongs to the earlier arrangement.

The west gable wall is clad in horizontal boarding. The verge of the gable roof above it, by contrast, is sealed in white lime plaster. The line where bare timber meets plaster is worth a moment on the way past.

Inside, the ground floor divides into an earth-floored working area on the east and a six-room living block. The working area originally held a Toriniwa, a passage of beaten earth running from the great front door straight through to the rear. The plan was set out on the chukyo-ma module, using mats six shaku long and three shaku wide, a proportion particular to this part of central Japan and different from both the Kyoto and the Edo standards.

A renovation followed in 1959. What stands on the corner today is an early Meiji frame carrying a layer of Shōwa alteration and, more recently, a working reuse.

Visiting

The building is privately owned, but part of it is open. The entrance hall, living room and kitchen were converted into a teahouse called Chaten Minatoya, which opened in May 2011. It operates on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., with last orders at 3 p.m., and closes around the New Year period. Information current as of 1 September 2026. There is no admission charge for looking at the Former Minatoya Store and Main House, and drinks at the teahouse start at around 400 yen.

Seating is spread through rooms that have kept their old household names: mise, nakanoma, misezashiki, butsuma and zashiki, along with chairs in the living room. The ceiling over what used to be the through passage has been returned to its original exposed joist construction.

The exterior can be photographed freely from the public road. Inside, during opening hours, a quiet word with the staff is the courteous approach, and other customers should be kept out of frame. Opening days shift when events are held, so a phone call ahead is sensible if you are travelling any distance.

By public transport, start at Owari-Ichinomiya Station on the JR Tōkaidō Line or Meitetsu Ichinomiya Station on the Meitetsu Nagoya Line. From bay 2 of the bus terminal on the west side of the station, take the Meitetsu bus bound for Okoshi. The ride takes about 20 minutes; from the Okoshi terminus it is about 8 minutes on foot to the north. Parking is available near the site for those arriving by car.