Takagi Family Residence Storehouse

An earthen-walled storehouse behind an Inuyama merchant house

The Takagi Family Residence Storehouse (髙木家住宅蔵, Takagi-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a two-story Dozo-zukuri storehouse of the early Taishō era, between 1912 and 1925, standing on the east side of the rear garden of the Takagi house on Honmachi Street in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on 23 July 2004. It covers 33 square meters under a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki tiles.

The plan runs three bays long by two bays deep, with the ridge oriented east to west. The main house of 1913 presents its long side to the street; the storehouse behind it turns its ridge through a right angle and sits deep in the plot.

The walls are finished in white lime plaster, and the lower band is treated as Namako-kabe. Flat tiles are fixed to the wall face and the joints between them are built up in plaster into rounded ridges, which thickens and protects the zone most exposed to rain and to water thrown up from the ground.

The doorway opens in the west gable end, under a tiled canopy, and a pair of double-leaf earthen doors is hung there. Those doors are finished in black lime plaster, so a dark pair of leaves sits at the center of a white wall. The second-floor window has a single-leaf plastered earthen shutter, again with a small tiled hood above it.

The Takagi family brewed sake here under the shop name Watazen. Selling took place at the front of the plot; keeping was the work of this building at the back.

Why the storehouse carries a national listing

The Takagi Family Residence Storehouse was registered under the criterion that a building contributes to the historic landscape of the country, the same ground used for the main house. The tea house in the same garden was registered on a different criterion, as a model of design.

Landscape here means more than a street elevation. Merchant plots in the Inuyama castle town are narrow at the front and long toward the back, and they were filled in a set order: main house, reception rooms, garden, storehouse. Goods and household valuables went into the building at the far end. That sequence is itself part of what the castle town looks like, and this property still holds every element of it.

Dozo-zukuri construction means a timber frame packed and coated with thick layers of earth and lime, with the openings closed by earthen doors rather than wooden ones. The purpose is to keep sparks out. In a town where wooden houses stood eave to eave along the street, what a family could put inside its storehouse decided how much it stood to lose. Inuyama City's list of registered properties records storehouse after storehouse alongside the main houses they served.

Details worth knowing in the construction

Look first at the color scheme. White plaster above, tiled Namako-kabe below, black plaster on the doors. One material, lime plaster, is finished three ways, and the differences track how much weather each part has to take rather than serving decoration alone.

The small hoods are the next thing. One tiled canopy over the doorway, another over the upper window. Earth walls and earthen doors do badly in rain, and each hood is a component placed to cover that weakness, giving the elevation a stepped rhythm.

Then consider the weight of the doors. An earthen door is a wooden core built up with layers of earth and plaster until it is thick and heavy. Closed, the two leaves make the opening continuous with the wall around it, and the single upper shutter works on the same principle. Making the opening disappear when shut is the point of the whole method.

None of this is visible from the street. The Takagi Family Residence Storehouse stands behind the main house, and photographs published on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and on Cultural Heritage Online are the practical way to see it.

Visiting the Takagi Family Residence Storehouse

The building belongs to a private residence and is not open. There are no opening days, no hours and no admission fee, and the interior cannot be entered. Because it sits in the rear garden, there is also no point on a public road from which the exterior can be seen.

Photography is therefore not possible from any public vantage point, and entering the grounds is not permitted.

To locate the property, walk north from Meitetsu Inuyama Station along Honmachi Street for about 10 minutes. The point where the Takagi main house faces west onto the street is the front of the plot on which the storehouse stands at the rear. Trains from Meitetsu Nagoya Station reach Inuyama in about 25 minutes.

Anyone who wants to walk inside a castle town storehouse can do so nearby. At number 72 on the same street, Inuyama City keeps the former Isobe Family Residence open without charge, and its two storehouses can be entered. The arrangement of buildings on that plot matches the one described here.