Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse

A black-plastered storehouse of 1918

The Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse (三井家住宅蔵, Mitsuike Jūtaku Kura) is a two-storey clay-walled storehouse built in 1918 at Higashi-koken in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, and entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties in 2004 under the number 23-0145.

It stands at the west end of the Mitsui plot, joined to the main house of 1889 through the kuramae, the working room that occupies the lower-roofed bay between the two. The construction is dozo-zukuri, thick earthen walls raised around a timber frame and finished in plaster. The building measures 5 ken along the ridge, about 9.1 meters, and 3 ken across, about 5.5 meters, for a footprint of 50 square meters.

The roof is a gable, kirizuma-zukuri, laid with sangawara pantiles, and it is turned so that the gable end, not the eaves side, addresses the lane. That single decision separates the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse visually from the house beside it, which presents its long eaves side to the same street.

Why the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse is on the register

The registration criterion applied here covers structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. A storehouse qualifies on the strength of its street face rather than its contents, and this one has an unusually complete street face for its type.

Inuyama City has used the registration system heavily. Counting the buildings put forward in 2025, the city holds 158 registered structures, close to 27 percent of the 580 registered across Aichi Prefecture. Within that group the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse is filed under tertiary industry rather than housing, the same classification given to the main house, which records the plot as a place of business.

The date is worth pausing on. The main house went up in 1889 and the storehouse in 1918, a gap of 29 years. Storehouses in a merchant town were built when there was something to store and money to protect it with, so the 1918 date fixes a moment in the household's fortunes rather than the moment the family arrived. Fireproof construction of this kind had a wider currency in Inuyama: the city's own survey of the castle town notes that the storehouses built to hold the lacquered floats of the Inuyama Festival were traditionally raised as clay-walled buildings, for the sake of humidity as much as fire.

Reading the gable from the lane

The wall is black. Shikkui plaster is usually left white, and the dark finish on the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse turns the building into a flat silhouette against the timber tones of its neighbours. Look at where the black stops. The lower band of wall, the dado, is worked as namako-kabe: square tiles set on the diagonal with the plaster joints raised between them in rounded ridges. The grid catches light that the plaster above absorbs.

A tiled pent roof runs across the ground floor of the street face. It is carried on mochiokuri, carved brackets stepping out from the wall, and small windows are set in the shadow beneath it. Raise your eyes and the upper floor repeats the idea at a smaller scale. Its windows close with a pair of hinged clay doors finished in the same black plaster as the wall, and each has its own little tiled hood.

Everything on this face is doing two jobs. The pent roofs throw rain off the earthen wall, which would erode without them. The clay doors seal the openings against fire. The result is a building whose ornament is entirely a by-product of keeping water and flame out, which is what makes the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse worth standing in front of for a few minutes.

Visiting the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse

The building is privately owned. Inuyama City's list of registered properties records the owner as a private individual, and there is no interior access, no admission charge and no opening hours. The gable face is fully visible from the public lane, which is the part that carries the registration.

Photographing the exterior from the street is fine. Do not enter the plot and do not treat the doorway as a backdrop; this is a working building attached to an occupied house.

From Meitetsu Inuyama Station, leave by the west exit and walk about 13 minutes north into the castle town. Inuyama Castle lies roughly 600 meters further north. To see the interior of a storehouse of this construction, walk about 200 meters south to the former Isobe Family Residence on Honmachi-dori, where the city opens a storehouse of the Meiji era without charge from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Overcast weather suits the Mitsui Family Residence Storehouse. Direct sun flattens the black plaster into a hole in the streetscape, while diffused light lets the raised joints of the namako-kabe register as texture.