Nawa Paper Store Library

Naba Kamiten Bunkogura: The Storehouse That Was Moved, Then Swallowed by a Roof

Most storehouses in Japan stand apart. Fire was the reason: a dozo, built of thick earthen walls over a timber frame, was the fireproof box in which a merchant kept what he could not afford to lose, and separating it from the timber house was half the point. The Bunkogura at Naba Kamiten does the opposite. It sits directly behind the shop, and its roof runs continuously into the roof of the main house, so that the two read from the street as one building.

This arrangement has a name in Japanese architectural vocabulary. It is an uchigura, an internal storehouse, reached without stepping outdoors.

The Bunkogura measures 7.3 metres along the ridge and 5.2 metres across, occupying 106 square metres of ground. It has two storeys, earthen-walled construction, and a steel sheet roof. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the fabric to the middle Meiji period, between 1883 and 1897, and records that it was moved to this position in 1908.

A Building With Two Dates

That 1908 relocation is the detail that separates this storehouse from its neighbours on the same plot, and it is worth pausing over.

Moving an earthen storehouse is not like moving a timber house. The walls are the structure's mass, built up in layers of clay over a lattice of bamboo and lashed timber, and they cannot simply be lifted. A relocation of this kind means dismantling and rebuilding, and the fact that the Naba family thought it worth the labour in 1908 says something about what the building held. Bunko means archive or library. This was where documents and valuables went.

Akita Prefecture's registration report does not mention the move at all, dating the building only to the middle Meiji period. The national database is the more authoritative record, and its 1908 date is followed here, but readers should know the two sources differ in what they say.

The prefectural report places the storehouse on the northeast side of the plot and describes how it is reached: the toori, the earthen passage running through the shop, bends and continues to a second earthen floor in front of the storehouses, and the Bunkogura opens off the far end of it. Goods, ledgers, and people moved along that line without ever touching the street.

Why It Was Registered

The Bunkogura was registered on 25 April 2014 as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, number 05-0196, in the seventy-seventh round, under the criterion of contributing to the historical landscape of the nation. Four other buildings belonging to the same firm were registered on the same day.

Registration is not the same as designation. The system, created in 1996, was built for exactly this kind of property: a working building on a working plot, valuable as part of a townscape rather than as an isolated monument, and better served by light-touch notification requirements than by the strict controls that govern an Important Cultural Property. The owner can keep using the storehouse. That is the intent.

What the Agency's citation emphasises is the roofing arrangement and the finish. The storehouse carries an okiyane, a separate protective roof set over the earthen structure beneath, and this roof is run as one continuous surface with the roof of the main house. Plastered walls carry a hachimaki, a raised band circling the building below the eaves. On the west face, the doorway is hung with a kakeko-nuri door of high quality, and black plaster is used at key points to tighten the composition.

Reading the Details

The kakeko-nuri door deserves a sentence of explanation, because it is a piece of craft that most visitors will never have reason to notice.

A storehouse door has to seal. In a fire, the smallest gap around the frame will draw flame inside and the contents are lost. Kakeko-nuri solves this by cutting the door and its frame in stepped, interlocking profiles, so that closing the door engages a series of overlapping shoulders rather than a single flat joint. Each step is then plastered. Getting the tolerances right across a heavy plastered door is difficult work, and the Agency's description of this one as joshitsu, high quality, is a judgement about the plasterer's hand.

The black plaster is doing two things at once. Kuro-shikkui, mixed with pine soot, is harder and more water-resistant than white lime plaster, so it goes where weather bites hardest. It is also, plainly, a decision about how the building looks. White walls, black edges.

Inside, according to the prefectural report, the floors are boarded, the ceilings are neda-tenjo with the joists left exposed, and the wall bays are braced with nuki, horizontal tie members passing through the posts. The roof structure is where a regional habit shows. On the gable ends, three struts carry a beam that receives the ridge directly. Along the centre of the building, a beam is laid straight onto the great beam beneath it, and a shikibari on top of that takes the ridgepole without any strut at all. Akita carpenters built this way often. Strutless roof framing is one of the signatures of the district.

None of this is visible from the street. That is the ordinary condition of an internal storehouse, and it is worth understanding rather than regretting.

Visiting

The Bunkogura is private and closed to visitors. The shop in front of it is open during business hours, 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 from inside the shop you can at least stand at the head of the passage that leads back toward the storehouses.

From the street, look for the continuous roofline running back from the shop. That single unbroken plane is the storehouse and the house together, and it is the clearest evidence available to a passing visitor that the uchigura arrangement is at work here.

In 1983 the Nihonkai-Chubu earthquake brought down the walls of two of the firm's earthen storehouses, and repairs followed. The company's own history records the event without identifying which two, so it cannot be said with certainty whether this building was among them.

Akita Station is about fifteen to eighteen minutes away on foot.