Nawa Paper Store Product Collection

Naba Kamiten Shohingura: The Storehouse the Paper Came Out Of

Of the five buildings at Naba Kamiten that the national government registered in 2014, this is the only one with a firm date. Not a range, not an estimate. The Shohingura was built in 1897.

It is also the largest of the storehouses, and the only one roofed in tile rather than metal sheet. Eleven metres along the ridge, 6.7 metres across, 157 square metres of ground, two storeys of earthen-walled construction. It stands behind the shop toward the south, running east to west, at the point where the toori, the earthen passage through the main house, comes to its end.

That position is the whole argument of the building. Walk in off the street, keep going, and you arrive at the merchandise. The Japanese word shohin means goods for sale, and this was the inventory.

1897, and What It Meant

Eleven years before the Shohingura went up, the Tawaraya Fire of April 1886 had burned more than 3,500 houses across Akita's merchant quarter in a single night. Naba Kamiten lost everything. The family rebuilt, and around that time shifted the business from tea and sugar toward paper.

By 1897 the paper trade had gone well enough to justify this.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the shop and main house to somewhere between 1883 and 1897, and the other storehouses to the middle Meiji period in similarly loose terms. The Shohingura's precise date sits at the far edge of that window, which suggests a sequence rather than a single campaign: shelter first, then the archive, then, once there was enough stock to warrant it, a proper fireproof warehouse for the goods.

Company records describe how those goods were sold. Customers sat on tatami. The shop floor held samples only. When an order was placed, the actual paper was carried out from the storehouse and unrolled across the mats for inspection. The building and the selling method were one system. Fixed display shelving replaced the arrangement around 1976, and by then the Shohingura had been doing its job for eighty years.

Why It Was Registered

The Shohingura was registered on 25 April 2014, number 05-0197, in the seventy-seventh round of registrations, under the single criterion of contributing to the nation's historical landscape.

Japan's registration system, in place since 1996, is deliberately lighter than the designation system that produces Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures. Registration asks owners to notify the authorities before major alterations rather than to seek permission, and it exists to keep ordinary working buildings standing and in use. A commercial storehouse on an active merchant plot is close to the archetype the framers had in mind.

The Agency's citation makes two points. The first concerns how the building sits: the Shohingura and the Bunkogura stand side by side, and a saya-yane, a protective outer roof, is thrown across both of them as one continuous surface, tying the storehouses into a single spatial composition with the main house. The second concerns the roof framing, which the Agency describes as showing regional character.

The Roof Frame, and a Discrepancy Worth Knowing About

Japanese roof framing in the wagoya tradition builds upward in stages, each beam carrying struts that carry the next beam, until something at the top receives the ridgepole. What a carpenter does at that last stage is often where local practice announces itself.

Akita Prefecture's registration report gives the fullest account. On the gable ends of the Shohingura, struts rise from the roof beams in a triple-beam arrangement, with the topmost beam taking the ridge directly. Along the centre of the building, the framing is a strutted double-beam type, and on the uppermost beam sits a funahijiki, a boat-shaped bracket member, which is what actually carries the ridgepole.

The national database describes the same detail differently. Its citation has the funahijiki-like member laid across the double beam at right angles, whereas the prefectural report says the funahijiki lies parallel. The two descriptions cannot both be literally correct, and the discrepancy is noted here rather than resolved. Where sources conflict, the Agency's record is the one this article follows, and it is worth reporting that these two public documents describe the same piece of carpentry in incompatible terms. Both agree on the essential point: a boat-bracket member intervenes between the beam and the ridge, and this is unusual enough to have caught the assessors' attention as a mark of Akita practice.

Inside, the floors are boarded and the ceilings are neda-tenjo with joists exposed. The wall bays are braced with nuki tie members and with diagonal bracing, the latter distinguishing this storehouse from the Bunkogura, where the prefectural report records nuki alone.

The exterior is finished in black plaster throughout. Kuro-shikkui, tempered with pine soot, resists water better than white lime plaster and hardens to a denser surface, and the prefectural report describes the resulting appearance as weighty. Set against the white-walled Bunkogura beside it, the contrast is not accidental.

Visiting

There is no access to the Shohingura. It stands within the working premises of Naba Ishiro Shoten, and the storehouses are private.

The shop in front is open Monday through Friday from 9:30 to 17:30 and Saturday from 9:00 to 17:00, closed Sundays, public holidays, Obon, and the New Year period. Standing in the shop, the passage leading back toward the storehouses is visible, and that line of sight is the most direct experience of this building a visitor can have.

One detail is available from outside. Look at the roofs behind the shop. Everything on this plot is metal sheet except the Shohingura, which is tiled, and a tile roof reads differently at a distance: heavier, with the shadow lines of the courses. The building announces itself that way, if you know to look.

Akita Station is roughly fifteen to eighteen minutes away on foot. In 1983 the Nihonkai-Chubu earthquake collapsed the walls of two of the firm's storehouses, which were subsequently repaired; the company's history does not record which two.