Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse

Three ken square, and finished better than its neighbour

Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse (奥村家住宅道具蔵, Okumurake Jūtaku Dōgugura) is a Meiji-era storehouse at 395 Higashikoken in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 23 August 1999. It stands immediately west of the rice storehouse in the inner zone of the Okumura plot, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the Meiji period, 1868 to 1911.

The plan is three ken square, a ken being roughly 1.8 metres, and the building area is 31 square metres over two mud-walled storeys under a tiled gable roof. The ridge runs north to south and entry is tsumairi, through the gable end, with the door set on the north face a little west of centre.

Square plan, gable entry, thick plastered walls. So far this is a conventional urban storehouse, and if the Okumura family had built nothing else nearby there would be little to say about it. What makes the building interesting is that they did build something else nearby, thirty years earlier, and the two can be compared.

Where the difference in rank shows

The Agency's record for Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse notes two things that read as small until you look for them. The building's tachi, its overall height, is greater than the rice storehouse next door. And the roof carries onigawara, the moulded ridge-end tiles, fitted with torifusuma, the rounded tile that caps the ridge behind the onigawara and finishes the joint cleanly.

The record's conclusion is that the tool storehouse is of finer construction than the rice storehouse. That is an odd result on the face of it. A grain store holds a household's food and its convertible wealth; a tool store holds tools. Yet the later building is the taller and better-detailed one.

The explanation is chronology rather than contents. The rice storehouse went up in the late Edo period as a working building in a working compound. By the Meiji years the Okumura household was long established and building for a second time on the same site, and the standard had moved. Torifusuma on a storehouse ridge is a detail nobody needs and everybody who has money notices.

Registration number 23-0028 was granted under the criterion for structures serving as a model of their type, the same basis as the rice storehouse and the detached wing. The Agency reads the three together as the principal elements of the inner zone at the centre of the plot.

What to look at

Start with the ridge ends. The onigawara with their torifusuma sit at the north and south terminations of the roof, and against the plain tiling of the rice storehouse beside it the difference in finish is legible from the ground without any special knowledge. Two storehouses, ten metres apart, built by the same family for the same compound, and one of them got the good tiles.

Then look at where the two roofs sit relative to each other. Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse rises higher, which in a compound of this kind is never accidental. Height in a row of storehouses is a statement about which building the household wanted read first.

The door on the north face, offset west of centre, is worth noticing too. It opens toward the passage that runs back from the inner gate, so the storehouse is entered from the circulation route rather than from the open ground in front of the rice store. The detached wing abuts the west wall, which is why nothing opens on that side.

Visiting Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse

The plot is in private ownership and operates as a restaurant and event venue under the name French Okumuratei. Okumura Family Residence Tool Storehouse stands in the inner zone, well back from the highway, so it is not visible from the public road. Seeing it means entering the property as a guest with a booking, and the operator notes that the garden can be walked after a meal.

There is no admission ticket, no published tour of the individual buildings, and no fixed viewing arrangement for the storehouses. What the operator publishes are trading details: 11:00 to 21:00, closed Tuesdays except when Tuesday is a public holiday, bookings preferred at lunch and required in the evening, with a telephone call advised beforehand because the site may be shut when no reservations are held. Checked 30 August 2026.

The walk from Meitetsu Inuyama Station takes about five minutes eastward along the old road. Parking is at the Yosaka junction corner and the street outside is one-way. Photography in the grounds is best cleared with the staff, since parts of the site are used for private functions.