Inoue Family Residence

Inoue Family Residence Storehouse

The townhouse lots of Inuyama's castle town are famously deep, and to understand one you have to follow it all the way to the back. On the Inoue property, that means crossing the rear garden behind the main house to reach the western end of the lot, where a small two-story storehouse stands with its ridge running north to south. It is the quiet terminal point of a long, narrow plot, the place where a merchant household kept what mattered most.

The storehouse dates to the early Meiji period, between 1868 and 1911, the same era as the main house at the front. It is a dozo, a storehouse built with thick earthen walls for protection against fire and theft, here only about 31 square meters in footprint: three bays along the ridge and two across. Small as it is, it was the strongbox of the household.

How it is built

Beneath its outer skin the storehouse is true dozo construction, with heavy mud-plastered walls of the kind that could shrug off a fire sweeping the timber houses around it. To shield those earthen walls from rain, the whole exterior is clad in battened weatherboarding, the wooden overcoat commonly given to storehouses in this region. A pent roof shelters the east face, and the main roof above is gabled and tiled.

On the upper floor, windows open on both the gable ends and the long sides, and the gable windows are given their own little pent roofs to throw off the rain. These openings let air move through the upper level, important for keeping stored goods dry in a building whose thick walls were otherwise designed to stay sealed.

Why it carries protection

The storehouse was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in July 2004, listed together with the Inoue main house and an annex on the same lot. The registration describes it plainly as an element of the property, and the governing criterion is the familiar one: it contributes to the historic landscape of the nation.

That phrasing is the key to its value. The storehouse matters less as a solo monument than as the rear anchor of a complete townhouse plot. House at the street, garden in the middle, kura at the back: the sequence is the classic shape of a castle-town merchant's holding, and this storehouse lets the whole pattern be read on the ground.

What to look for

The most rewarding way to take in the storehouse is to grasp the depth of the lot it ends. The Inoue main house at the front is in daily use as a pickle shop and tearoom, open to visitors, and from its interior the long pull of the plot toward the rear becomes clear. The kura sits at the far western end, beyond the garden.

Look, where you can see it, for the contrast between the boarded exterior and the heavy form it conceals, and for the small pent roofs over the upper gable windows. The storehouse is part of a working private property rather than a museum, so treat it as the back chapter of the Inoue compound, best understood once you have stepped into the house at the street and felt how far back the lot runs.