Suzuki Family Residence Storehouse

The oldest building on the plot, finished in 1879

The Suzuki Family Residence Storehouse (鈴木家住宅蔵, Suzuki-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse of 1879 at Suicho in Aisai City, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties on 7 March 2008.

The date is the first thing to register. Of the four structures registered on this plot, the Suzuki Family Residence Storehouse is the oldest. The main house it adjoins dates from 1890, eleven years later. The family built the container for their wealth before they rebuilt the place they lived in, which tells you something about the priorities of a landowning household in the early Meiji countryside.

The storehouse joins the main house on its west side and faces south. Its gabled roof is laid with pantiles. It runs four ken along the ridge and two and a half ken across, giving a floor area of 57 square metres, the smallest of the four registered structures here.

The kuramae: a roofed space that is not quite indoors

A lower skirt roof on the south face creates what the Japanese call a kuramae, the forespace of a storehouse. It is one bay deep, roofed but not walled in on all sides.

The device is common on Japanese storehouses and does two jobs at once. Practically, it keeps rain and direct sun out of the interior during the minutes when the heavy doors stand open, and it gives you a working floor for moving goods in and out. What went into a dozo was rice, tools, scrolls and paintings, all of them hostile to damp, so a roof projecting in front of the doors earns its keep.

Visually, it gives the wall depth. The official description credits the kuramae with lending the building its weight of appearance. A plain box and a box with a band of shadow across its front are not the same object to the eye.

The entrance sits towards the eastern end of the south face rather than at the centre, with double-leaf doors, a placement that follows the path of movement between the storehouse and the main house. Windows with small pent roofs open in the gable ends.

Board floors and vertical planking inside

Inside the Suzuki Family Residence Storehouse the floor is boarded and the walls are lined with vertical planking. The thick clay and lime plaster that makes a dozo fireproof is never left exposed on the inside face. Planking holds a layer of air between the stored goods and the earth wall, so that the wall can go on absorbing and releasing moisture with the seasons while nothing in the store ever touches it.

This building was registered under the criterion concerning contribution to the historic landscape of the country, rather than the design criterion applied to the main house next door. The judgement is about the storehouse as part of a scene: a compact earthen box standing shoulder to shoulder with the dwelling, making the estate legible as an estate.

One point of confusion is worth heading off. There is a second storehouse on this plot, registered separately as the rice storehouse, and the two are different buildings. The storehouse adjoins the main house on the west. The rice storehouse stands well to the south, behind the gate.

Visiting

The Suzuki Family Residence Storehouse stands on private land and is not open on a regular basis. No opening hours or admission fee exist. It can be seen only on the occasional open days arranged by the unincorporated association that manages the property, and at events the association hosts; dates appear on its website.

Photography rules are set by the organisers for each occasion, so ask before you go.

Saya Station on the Meitetsu Bisai Line is the nearest, about a fifteen-minute walk. Through trains from Meitetsu Nagoya run via the Tsushima Line and reach Saya in roughly thirty minutes. There is no parking on site and the lanes nearby are narrow, so drivers should use a coin park in the area.