Nanami Paper Store No. 5 Warehouse

Naba Kamiten Warehouse No. 5: The Number Is All That Survives of the Row

The name is a fossil. Warehouse No. 5 was built in 1938 as one of several similar warehouses standing in a line on this ground, and it is the only one left. Akita Prefecture's registration report records that the firm still calls it by its old number even though there is nothing left to number it against.

It stands diagonally opposite the shop and main house, across the street and to the southwest, running east to west: 14.6 metres along the ridge, 7.6 metres across, 111 square metres of ground, two timber storeys under a gabled iron sheet roof. On 25 April 2014 it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, number 05-0199, the last of the five Naba Kamiten buildings registered that day.

A Different Century of Building

Four of the five registered buildings at Naba Kamiten are Meiji-era work. Earthen storehouse construction, plaster over lath, roof frames assembled in the wagoya manner with beams stacked on struts. This one is none of those things, and the gap between it and its neighbours is the reason to pay it attention.

Start with the roof. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records that the frame is a king post truss.

A truss is a Western import, and it works on a principle the wagoya tradition does not use. Where Japanese roof framing stacks beams and struts so that loads travel downward in compression through a series of horizontal members, a truss ties the feet of the rafters together with a horizontal member held in tension, so the whole assembly behaves as a single rigid triangle and can span further with less timber. The king post is the vertical member at the centre, hanging from the apex rather than propping it. Japanese carpenters learned truss framing during the Meiji period, largely through government-sponsored building, and by the 1930s it was ordinary practice for anything needing a clear span. In this warehouse, that span buys uninterrupted floor 7.6 metres across.

The walls are mortar rather than plaster. The prefectural report specifies coloured mortar on every face except the east.

The East Gable

The east end is where the entrance is, and where the building spends its money.

The prefectural report calls this face kanban-kenchiku, signboard architecture, a term from the 1920s and 1930s for buildings that present a flat, decorated facade to the street while the structure behind it remains conventional timber. The style is usually associated with the shopfronts thrown up across Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake, and finding it on a warehouse in Akita is a reminder of how thoroughly the idea travelled.

The finish here is granite arai-dashi. The technique involves mixing crushed stone into a mortar render, then washing the surface with water before it fully cures so that the aggregate is exposed. Done well, the wall reads as stone at a distance and costs a fraction of stone to build. It was a favourite of the interwar decades for precisely that reason.

The Agency's citation adds detail on the composition: the gable wall is raised, and pilaster forms are expressed on its surface. Raising a gable wall above the roofline is the signature move of signboard architecture, since it converts a pitched building into something that reads flat and vertical from the pavement. The pilasters do the rest, giving the face a rhythm of verticals that owes nothing to what is holding up the roof behind them.

A warehouse did not need any of this. Somebody decided it should have it anyway, and the Agency's assessors, describing the elevation, noted that the design had been worked at.

Why It Was Registered

The registration criterion is the same for all five buildings: contributing to the historical landscape of the nation. Registration, introduced in 1996, differs from designation in both reach and weight. Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures are designated, in small numbers, under strict controls. Registered properties are recorded in larger numbers, changed by notification rather than permission, and expected to stay in use. Warehouse No. 5 belongs to a working paper merchant on a commercial street. The lighter system is what allows it to be both protected and useful.

Considered on its own, a 1938 timber warehouse is unremarkable. Considered as one of five buildings on adjacent plots spanning from the middle Meiji period to the late 1930s, it completes something: a merchant family's premises recorded across two generations of building technology, from earthen walls and stacked beams to trusses and washed granite render. That, more than any single feature, is what the register is holding on to.

Visiting

Warehouse No. 5 is private and there is no interior access. The east gable, the face that was designed to be looked at, faces the street and can be seen from the public pavement. Look for the raised gable wall with pilasters and the stone-like washed finish, set against the coloured mortar of the flanking walls.

The shop across the way trades Monday through Friday from 9:30 to 17:30 and Saturday from 9:00 to 17:00, closed Sundays, public holidays, Obon, and New Year, and is the only one of the five buildings that visitors can enter. Four parking spaces serve customers.

Akita Station is about fifteen to eighteen minutes away on foot. If the Meiji storehouses and this warehouse are seen in one walk, the sequence takes perhaps twenty minutes and covers a century of how one family built.