Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse

The Storehouse That Completes the Estate

The Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse (間瀬家住宅（作右衛門屋敷）土蔵, also written Mase-ke Jūtaku Dozō) is a family storehouse of the middle Meiji period in the Kamezaki district of Handa City, Aichi Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 6, 2024.

Kamezaki is a port town on the eastern shore of the Chita Peninsula that grew wealthy from brewing and coastal shipping. The Mase family, whose house faces the Morozaki Kaidō road, worked as shipping agents and timber merchants, and each head of the household took the name Sakuemon. The storehouse held the family's goods, furnishings and tools.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the building to the middle Meiji period, between 1883 and 1897. That places it not long after the Main House of 1884, so the storehouse belongs to the years when the estate was taking its final shape.

It is a timber building of 2 storeys with a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles, its ridge running east to west like that of the Main House. The floor area is 35 square meters. The Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse joins the Main House on the west through a connecting corridor, so the family could reach it without stepping outside.

Why It Was Listed: Contribution to the Historic Landscape

Buildings enter Japan's registration system under one of three criteria. The Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape, while the Main House was registered as a model of design. Two structures on the same estate, listed on the same day, were valued for different things.

The criterion here is less about the storehouse as an object than about what it does in the street. Handa City describes the building as having few windows and a heavy exterior, and as forming the estate front of an old merchant family. The point is that neither building carries the character of the place alone; the Registered Tangible Cultural Property listing recognises the pair standing together.

Kamezaki was once a town of storehouses. As a centre of brewing and shipping it lined its roads with white-walled kura, and most of them are gone. Where the Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse still stands with the house it was built to serve, the arrangement of the buildings tells you how the town worked.

What to Look For

The north side gives the better view of the exterior. Seen from the car park, the wall runs unbroken up to the eaves, plastered over the whole surface, with almost nothing to interrupt it. There is one window, on the east gable end. A storehouse existed to keep fire and thieves away from a family's property, and the form states that purpose without decoration.

The doorway is on the east, hung with a kakeko-nuri door finished in Shikkui lime plaster. In this method the meeting edges of door and frame are built up in overlapping steps, so that flame and smoke cannot find a way through the joint during a fire. Closed, the door reads as part of the wall. The care taken over this detail has long been used as a measure of how well a storehouse was built.

Inside, each floor is a single board-floored room, with the stair set in the southeast corner. It is plain working space, but looking up at the centre of the upper floor reveals beams doubled one above the other. Two beams stacked in this way carry the roof load across a narrow frontage while leaving the floor clear, and the national database photographs this detail head on.

In the parlour of the Main House, transom and shutter box were given the refinements of the tea room. Here the same family stripped ornament away entirely. Seeing the two buildings in succession makes plain what a Meiji merchant asked of each.

Visiting

The Mase Family Residence (Sakuemon Yashiki) Storehouse is privately owned. It opens to the public during exhibitions as the Kura Hall of Sakuemon Yashiki, the annex of the neighbouring Tachikawa Art Museum (6-81 Kamezakicho, Handa City). Because it is used as an exhibition room, visitors can go inside and see the board floors and beam framing at close range.

Opening hours are 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with last admission at 4:30 p.m., and the annex closes on Wednesdays. Admission is set for each exhibition; 500 yen for adults and 200 yen for elementary and junior high school students is the usual rate, and a combined ticket with the Tachikawa Art Museum costs 800 yen. For access between exhibitions, call the museum on 0569-29-5897, and note that longer closures are sometimes set in summer.

Photography rules vary with the exhibition, so ask at the reception desk.

Kamezaki Station on the JR Taketoyo Line is about a 10-minute walk away. By car it is about 16 minutes from the Agui interchange of the Chita Peninsula Road by way of Prefectural Route 46, and the museum has a car park.

Look at the junction with the Main House while you are there. The corridor that links the two survives, and with it the daily route between the living quarters and the store of family property. The Main House is covered in its own article.