Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse

A storehouse that turns its gable to the road

The Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse (森川家住宅土蔵, Morikawa-ke Jūtaku Dozō) is an early Showa period Dozo-zukuri storehouse of two storeys in the Kariyasuka district of Ichinomiya, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 July 2008. It measures 7.6 metres by 4.7 metres under a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki tiles, with a building area of 51 square metres. It stands at the northwest corner of the compound and joins the west face of the main house through a covered forecourt.

Construction is placed in the early Showa period, meaning the late 1920s or the 1930s. That makes it the third and youngest of the three registered buildings here, after the main house of 1855 and the study wing of about 1902. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database shows a span of 1926 to 1988 in its calendar-year field, but that figure is the range of the Showa era itself rather than a date of construction.

The Morikawa family were substantial landholders in Kariyasuka village and ran a sake brewery from the Tenpo era of the 1830s until the end of the Meiji period. The Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse went up after that business had wound down. No public record states what it was built to hold, though the sequence is clear enough: house first, reception wing second, storehouse last.

Registered for the street it makes

The criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The registration number is 23-0307, issued in the sixtieth round of registrations, with gazette notice on 23 July 2008, the same day as the main house (23-0305) and the study wing (23-0306).

The case for listing rests less on the building alone than on what it does beside its neighbour. The main house is Hirairi, entered on its long side, so it shows the road a low horizontal eave running the width of the plot. The Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse does the opposite, presenting its gable end to the road on the north, where the roof rises into a triangle. Horizontal against vertical, tiled slope against white plaster: that pairing is what a walker on the Junken Kaido actually registers.

Registration is a lighter instrument than designation. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated; the register, introduced in 1996, works by notification and takes contribution to the landscape as one of its criteria. It is well suited to buildings that are unremarkable alone and effective in company, which describes this one precisely.

Walls, openings and roof frame

The wall is finished differently top and bottom. A stone plinth carries the base; above it the ground floor is sheathed in Shitami-itabari, horizontal boarding that climbs unusually high; the upper storey is finished in white Shikkui plaster. Boarding the lower wall of a storehouse protects the earthen core from splashing rain and from knocks during loading. Because the boarding runs so high here, the building reads from a distance as roughly half white and half dark brown.

There are two ways in. On the east, the doorway on the long side adjoins the main house and opens into the boarded floor of the forecourt, a covered space between house and store used for moving goods and for shelter while doing so. The second opening is a window with its own small eave, set in the south gable.

Inside, each floor is a single undivided room, which is what a storehouse wants: volume without obstruction. The roof frame uses rafter beams pitched from ridge to eaves rather than the more common arrangement of horizontal beams with struts stacked on them. Nothing of that frame is visible from outside the Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse, but it is among the features the register records.

Visiting

This is an outbuilding of a private, occupied house, and the interior is closed. There are no open days or bookable visits. It is, however, the most visible of the three registered buildings, since it stands hard against the road at the northwest corner of the plot. From the Junken Kaido you can look straight at the gable wall and the high boarded skirt.

Photography from the public road is fine. Do not step onto the property, avoid framing residents, and stay off the carriageway; the road is narrow and carries local traffic.

The nearest station is Kariyasuka on the Meitetsu Bisai Line, about 600 metres southwest of the compound, roughly 8 minutes on foot. From Meitetsu Ichinomiya it is the second stop, after Kannonji. The station is unstaffed with no information counter. Enquiries about the property go to the museum administration section of Ichinomiya City on 0586-46-3215.

Approach from the east if you can. Walking west along the road, you pass the long front of the main house first, and the gable of the Morikawa Family Residence Storehouse arrives afterwards. Taken in that order, the phrase about contributing to the historic landscape stops being abstract.