Ito Family Residence Storehouse

The storehouse at the back of the plot

The Ito Family Residence Storehouse (伊藤家住宅蔵, Itō-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a late Edo period Dozo-zukuri storehouse at 677 Higashikoken, Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Structures) on 9 February 2005. It stands two storeys high in Dozo-zukuri mud-walled construction, with a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles, and covers 59 square metres.

Position tells much of the story. The building sits east of and behind the main house, at the deepest point of a long narrow plot running back from Honmachi. Townhouse lots in the Inuyama castle town were laid out narrow at the street and long to the rear, and the usual sequence from front to back went shop, living quarters, storehouse. The Ito Family Residence Storehouse occupies that final position, reached by a covered corridor leaving the north side of the main house.

It measures four and a half Ken along the ridge and two and a half across, roughly 8.2 metres by 4.5 metres at about 1.8 metres to the ken. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the late Edo period, between about 1830 and 1867.

A decision not to decorate

What stands out about the Ito Family Residence Storehouse is how little was done to it. A dozo exists to keep fire away from a family's goods, but across Japan these buildings also became displays of wealth, finished with banded plaster courses or the raised lattice of Namako-kabe tilework. This one takes almost none of that.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes plain work: mud plaster taken over the eave soffit, the gable bargeboards and the exposed purlin ends, and nothing beyond. That is the minimum a fire-resistant building requires, since bare timber is what burns. The posts are round logs left as they came, which points the same way. Squaring them would have looked tidier without making the frame any sounder.

Yet this is not a small building. The record calls it comparatively large, with low eaves and a heavy, settled stance. The dignity comes out of proportion rather than ornament, which is a different way of building status into a structure. How you read the plain exterior decides what you think of the whole thing.

Why it is on the register, and what the wide eave is for

The Ito Family Residence Storehouse was registered under the criterion for buildings contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Its register number is 23-0182, following 23-0181 given to the main house on the same day, and the gazette notice appeared on 28 February 2005. The consecutive numbers show the two buildings being treated as one holding.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs files this storehouse under housing, while the street-facing main house is filed under tertiary industry. The division of a merchant plot into a commercial front and a domestic rear survives even in how the register sorts the two.

Structurally the thing worth crossing a garden for is the eave on the west side. It projects across the whole width of the Tomae, the doorway zone of a storehouse, and reaches out one and a half ken, close to 2.7 metres. The thick doors and their frames are finished in mud plaster, and plaster that takes rain directly begins to fail. A deep eave keeps water off the most vulnerable surface of the building. It also creates a sheltered working area where goods can be moved in and out with the doors standing open.

In a building this sparing elsewhere, that projection is where the material and the labour went. The choices about what to skip and what to pay for are still legible from outside.

Visiting

The Ito Family Residence Storehouse is privately owned and closed. There is no interior opening, no admission scheme and no fee.

Because it stands at the very back of the lot, almost nothing of it can be seen from Honmachi. Looking through the frontage of the main house gets you a dark view down the earth-floored passage, and the storehouse sits beyond that. The realistic option is to visit the leather goods shop trading from the ground floor of the main house and see what the depth of the plot allows, on the shop's terms. The shop opens 10:00 to 19:00 and closes Wednesdays. The storehouse is not part of the shop premises, so do not ask to go through to it.

The building is on private land, so avoid photographing it without permission. Photographing the streetscape from Honmachi carries no restriction.

To reach the site, leave Meitetsu Inuyama Station by the west exit, walk west and turn north onto Honmachi, about ten minutes on foot. The Ito Family Residence Storehouse shares the address 677 with the main house and the two stand only about 30 metres apart. The keep of Inuyama Castle lies roughly 600 metres to the north.