Storehouse Opposite Nawa Paper Store

Naba Kamiten Mukaigura: A Storehouse That Outlived the House Around It

The Mukaigura is the smallest of the five buildings that Naba Kamiten had registered in 2014, at 70 square metres, and its name simply means the storehouse across the way. It stands on the far side of the street from the shop, on a separate plot, 9.7 metres along the ridge and 5 metres across, two storeys of earthen-walled construction under a gabled steel sheet roof.

Akita Prefecture's registration report calls it an uchigura, an internal storehouse, and this is where the building becomes interesting. An uchigura is a storehouse absorbed into the body of a house, entered from indoors, roofed together with the dwelling around it. There is no dwelling here now. An office building occupies the adjoining ground, put up in 1984.

The report explains why the term still applies. The Naba Ishiro family's own residence originally stood where the office now stands, and the assessors concluded that this storehouse was that house's internal storehouse. The house went. The storehouse stayed. What covers it today is a protective outer shell, an oiya, standing in for the roof that once tied it to the rooms it served.

Why It Was Registered

Registration came on 25 April 2014, number 05-0198, in the seventy-seventh round, on the criterion of contributing to the nation's historical landscape. The same day, four other Naba Kamiten buildings entered the register.

The registration system, established in 1996, is the lighter of Japan's two mechanisms for protecting buildings. Designation, which produces Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures, applies strict controls to a small number of works of the first rank. Registration casts a wider net over buildings valued for their contribution to the landscape, requires notification rather than permission for changes, and is intended to let owners keep using what they own. A storehouse on an active commercial plot, its original context long since altered, is precisely the kind of survivor the system was built to catch.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the building in exterior terms: a gabled structure running east to west on the plot across the street from the Shohingura, with the west gable serving as the entrance under a lean-to, a window on the south face, plastered walls, and the lower wall finished in sasarako shitami-ita-bari. On the roof frame, its citation notes a resemblance to the Shohingura, with double beams supporting the ridge.

Note that the Agency locates the storehouse across the street from the Shohingura, while the prefectural report places it across the road to the south of the main house. The two accounts describe the same building from different reference points and do not necessarily conflict, but readers comparing sources should expect the difference. The two records also differ on roofing material, the Agency specifying steel sheet and the prefecture iron sheet.

The Wall and the Bent Beam

Sasarako shitami-ita-bari is worth knowing about, because once you can name it you will see it across northern Japan.

Plaster at ground level takes a beating in snow country. Meltwater splashes, drifts sit against the wall for months, and the surface fails from the bottom up. The remedy is to clad the lower zone in horizontal boards, each overlapping the one below to shed water. Holding those boards flat requires vertical battens, and a sasarako batten is notched at intervals so that each notch straddles the edge of a board and grips it. The teeth of the notching give the batten its name. The result is a skirt of dark timber below a white plastered wall, functional first, but a line that carpenters clearly enjoyed drawing.

Inside, according to the prefectural report, the floor is boarded, the ceiling is neda-tenjo with joists exposed, and the wall bays are braced with nuki ties. The roof frame is a double-beam wagoya type in which struts rise from a large curved beam, and the uppermost roof beam takes the ridgepole directly.

That curved beam is worth a moment. A carpenter selecting a naturally bent trunk for a major member is not making a compromise. Curved grain follows the tree's own response to load and can carry more than a sawn straight beam of comparable section, and in a storehouse, where the roof has to hold up whatever snow Akita delivers, the choice is structural sense rather than rustic charm.

Visiting

The Mukaigura is private and closed. It is not a museum and not a display; it is a building belonging to a working firm, on a plot adjoining that firm's office.

The exterior is visible from the public street, which is more than can be said for the Bunkogura or the Shohingura behind the shop. From the pavement the gable end with its lean-to entrance can be seen, along with the boarded lower wall.

Please look from the street and go no further. Standing on a private lot to get a better angle is not acceptable, and the staff at the shop across the road are running a business rather than a heritage site.

The shop opens Monday to Friday 9:30 to 17:30 and Saturday 9:00 to 17:00, closing Sundays, public holidays, Obon, and New Year. Akita Station is fifteen to eighteen minutes away on foot. When the Nihonkai-Chubu earthquake struck in 1983, the walls of two of the firm's storehouses collapsed and were repaired afterward; the company's records do not say which.