Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse

Fourteen square metres, built to be seen

Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse (奥村家住宅金庫蔵, Okumurake Jūtaku Kinkogura) is a Meiji-era strongroom 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 Main House on the same street frontage, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the Meiji period, between 1868 and 1911.

The footprint is 14 square metres. That is the smallest of the nine registered structures on the Okumura plot, roughly the area of a single generous room, and yet the building carries as much of the street's character as anything else on the site.

Construction is dozō-zukuri, the thick mud-walled method used for Japanese storehouses, in two storeys under a tiled gable roof. The ridge runs east to west, parallel to the Main House ridge and to the road. Entry is tsumairi, through the gable end rather than the long side, and on the east face, the side turned toward the Main House, there is a kuramae: a small covered forecourt in front of the storehouse door where goods could be handled out of the weather.

A storehouse designed for the view from the west

The registration record for Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse says something unusual for a utility building. It notes that eaves canopies of tile were carried around the north and west faces out of consideration for how the site would look when approached from the western end of the highway.

That is a statement about sightlines, not about storage. A storehouse needs walls thick enough to survive a fire and a door heavy enough to matter; it does not need decorative tiled canopies wrapping two elevations. The Okumura family paid for them because those are the two faces a traveller coming up the road from the castle town would see first.

The same logic governs the finish. The upper wall is packed in black lime plaster, matching the front of the Main House second storey, so that the two buildings read as one composition rather than as a house with a shed beside it. The height was adjusted as well: the storehouse rises higher at the eaves than the Main House does. A smaller building placed to the west of a larger one would ordinarily disappear, and raising the eaves is how the Okumura family stopped that happening.

Registration number 23-0025 was granted under the criterion covering structures difficult to reproduce, and the Agency files the building under tertiary industry, the same classification as the Main House. Both are read as parts of a merchant's business premises.

What to look at

Approach from the west if you can. That is the angle the building was designed around, and the tiled canopies on the north and west walls resolve into a deliberate stepped profile only from that side. From directly in front, they read as ordinary eaves.

Then compare the two black surfaces. The Main House upper storey and Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse share the same black plaster treatment, but the storehouse wall is thicker, its corners are rounded where the plaster turns, and the openings are far smaller. Same colour, different building type, and the contrast is easier to see when the two are side by side than it would ever be in isolation.

The kuramae on the east face is worth a moment. It faces the Main House across a narrow gap, which means the storehouse was worked from the house side, in private, while the north and west faces did the public work of holding up the streetscape.

Visiting Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse

The building is privately owned. Since the Okumura property was converted for restaurant use under the name French Okumuratei, the interior of the safe storehouse has served as a small private dining room, listed by the operator as a six-seat space on the ground floor of the main building. Seeing it therefore means booking a table; there is no admission ticket and no separate building tour.

The exterior needs no arrangement at all. Okumura Family Residence Safe Storehouse sits directly on the street frontage west of the Main House and can be looked at from the public road at any hour, which is the way the building was meant to be seen in the first place.

The operator publishes hours of 11:00 to 21:00 and closes on Tuesdays, trading instead when a Tuesday falls on a public holiday. Lunch bookings are preferred and dinner bookings required, and visitors are asked to telephone ahead because the building may be shut on days with no reservations. These details were checked on 30 August 2026.

From Meitetsu Inuyama Station the walk east along the old road takes about five minutes. Parking is at the Yosaka junction corner, and the street outside is one-way. Photographing the exterior from the road is unrestricted; inside, ask the staff, since the room is in use by other guests.