Nawa Paper Store and Main Building

Naba Kamiten Shop and Main House: Where Akita Still Sells Paper Across a Dirt Floor

The shop opens at 9:30 on weekday mornings, and anyone can walk in. That fact does more to explain this building than any list of its features. Registered by the national government in 2014 as a Tangible Cultural Property, the Naba Kamiten Shop and Main House is not a museum piece behind rope barriers. It is the working front of Naba Ishiro Shoten, a washi paper dealer that has traded on this same plot of Omachi since 1878.

The structure covers 463 square metres, timber-framed, single-storey with a partial second floor, roofed in iron sheet. It faces west, standing on ground that lies southwest of where Kubota Castle once commanded the town. Akita's merchants were placed here deliberately. When Satake Yoshinobu built his castle in the early 1600s, he divided the settlement along the Asahi River: samurai in the Uchimachi to the east, townspeople in the Tomachi to the west. Merchants from the port of Tsuchizaki were relocated into the new quarter, and specific streets received monopoly rights over specific goods.

Omachi and the neighbouring Chamachi held those licences for tea, sugar, paper, tatami, and household wares. The first Naba Ishiro broke away from Naba Shoten, a purveyor to the Akita domain, and set up on his own in 1878 under the shop name Masui, selling tea and sugar.

Fire, Then Rebuilding

On the night of 30 April 1886, a fire broke out in Kawabata 4-chome. A southeasterly gale was blowing at nearly 22 metres per second. By seven the next morning, when the flames were finally beaten down, more than 3,500 houses had burned, seventeen people were dead, and 186 were injured. Akita remembers it as the Tawaraya Fire, named for the merchant whose property the blaze started beside. The Tomachi was, in the words of contemporary accounts, reduced to open ground.

Naba Kamiten burned with everything else.

What the family did next is preserved in their own company history rather than in the national record, so it carries the weight of tradition rather than documented fact: they are said to have dismantled a shipping inn at Tsuchizaki port and re-erected the timbers here. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the present building to the middle Meiji period, between 1883 and 1897, which sits comfortably alongside that account without confirming it.

Around the same time, the business changed direction. Tea and sugar gave way to paper, and the Naba family has dealt in paper ever since.

Why It Was Registered

Japan's registration system for cultural properties, introduced in 1996, works differently from the older designation system that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Designation imposes strict controls and is reserved for objects of the highest historical rank. Registration asks less: it recognises buildings that contribute to the historical landscape of the country, and it leaves owners free to keep using and adapting them. For a shop that still needs to serve customers, sell stock, and repair its own roof, this lighter touch is the point.

The Shop and Main House was registered on 25 April 2014 under registration number 05-0195, in the seventy-seventh round of registrations, on the single criterion of contributing to the nation's historical landscape.

The Agency's assessment centres on typology. Its citation notes the gabled roof with the entrance in the gable end, the lean-to running around the southwest face, the beams and struts of the gable wall exposed as finished decorative timber, and a plan in which the earthen-floored passage runs along the south side with the oe living room and kitchen ranged beside it, while the butsuma altar room and formal reception rooms project toward the rear in an L. The citation also singles out surviving traces of the komise, the projecting eaves canopy that once sheltered pedestrians along Akita's merchant streets.

Looking at the Building

Start from across the street, if traffic allows.

The roof is the detail that rewards attention. Akita Prefecture's own registration report makes a comparison worth carrying with you: the pitch of the upper roof here is gentler than that of neighbouring townhouses built in the Meiji era, and the eaves sit lower. The report reads this as an inheritance from Edo-period townhouse practice rather than a Meiji fashion. If the Tsuchizaki inn tradition holds, that would explain the archaism, though the connection remains unproven.

Look next at the gable wall facing the street. The horizontal beams and the short vertical struts above them are not hidden behind plaster. They are dressed, planed, and presented as ornament. This treatment, keshobari and keshozuka, turns structure into facade, and it is one of the markers by which the Agency identifies a local Akita townhouse.

Inside, the doma passage called the toori runs the depth of the building on the south side and continues to a second earthen floor in front of the storehouses at the rear. This is not incidental circulation. In a merchant house of this type, the passage is the spine, connecting street to storage, and it is how goods moved through the property. Company records describe how business was once conducted: customers sat on tatami, only samples were displayed, and the actual stock was carried out from the storehouses and unrolled on the mats. Fixed shelving replaced that arrangement around 1976.

North of the toori sit the heya and the butsuma. East of the altar room, a Taisho-era extension added a new zashiki, an antechamber, and a room for hairdressing, a reminder that these buildings absorbed changes in domestic life as readily as changes in commerce.

Above the entrance hangs a keyaki-wood signboard carved with the characters for washi and yoshi, Japanese paper and Western paper. It went up around 1947, replacing the first proprietor's smaller board.

Visiting

The shop trades Monday through Friday from 9:30 to 17:30, and on Saturdays from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes Sundays, public holidays, the Obon period in August, and over the New Year. Four parking spaces are available, and the shop offers a small parking voucher to customers who use nearby coin lots when those spaces are full.

Only the shop interior is open. The storehouses behind and across the street are private working property, and there is no visitor access to them. This is a place of business, and courtesy toward the staff and their customers matters more than photography.

Akita Station lies roughly fifteen to eighteen minutes away on foot. If you are coming to see this building, four other registered properties belonging to the same firm stand within a few minutes' walk, and the Akita City Folk Performing Arts Heritage Centre and the Red Brick Local History Museum, the latter an Important Cultural Property, are both nearby.