Former Nishihiro Family Residence (Jirokichi) Warehouse

The North Warehouse: One of the Few Edo-Period Buildings Left in Choshi

Choshi has almost no Edo-period architecture. This is a town that prospered for two and a half centuries on fish and soy sauce, and yet walking its streets you will find very little built before 1868. The bombing of 1945 took most of it.

Which makes the warehouse on the eastern rise of the Nishihiro property an unusual survivor. It faces west from ground raised above the rest of the compound: 95 square metres, timber, single storey with a partial second floor, tiled roof. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the Keio era, 1865 to 1867. Chiba Prefecture words this more cautiously, saying the warehouses carry a tradition of Keio-era construction, which suggests the date rests on inherited account rather than a dated ridge tablet. Either way, the building went up as the shogunate was entering its final months.

It was built to hold fishing nets.

That fact says a great deal about the Nishihiro family. Before the fine cypress rooms, before the cannery, before any of the buildings a visitor now photographs, they built a proper structure to protect their nets. Hemp and cotton netting rots in damp and degrades in sunlight, and a ruined net means a boat that cannot fish. Nets were capital.

A Closed Box with Deep Eaves

At the centre sits a two-storey volume with a gabled roof, entered from the long side rather than the gable end. Around three of its faces, the front and both flanks, a lower roof called a geya extends deep and low. The walls are clad in vertical boarding; the roof carries sanmenkawara pantiles.

Openings are almost absent. A single doorway in the centre of the front elevation, one window in the south gable at second-floor level, and nothing else. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the composition as closed.

Closure was the design brief. Nets needed darkness, dryness and stillness. The deep geya roofs keep rain off the wall faces entirely; vertical boarding sheds water down its length rather than trapping it in horizontal joints. Almost nothing here exists for the eye.

Local tradition holds that the roof tiles were made from black clay quarried at Kurohae in Choshi, a tile no longer produced. That account comes from local record rather than from the national database, and is worth treating as such.

Registered as a Model of Design

The north warehouse was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 27 March 2018, number 12-245, alongside the main house, the cannery, the south warehouse and the brick wall.

Its criterion was quality of design. The cannery and the brick wall, on the same site and the same date, were registered instead for their contribution to the historical landscape. A plain net store, then, was held to the higher aesthetic standard and met it.

There is no contradiction in that. The judgement is not that someone decorated this building well. It is that a form arrived at purely through use has become a type worth preserving. The deep eaves and the sealed walls answer a functional demand so completely that the answer reads as architecture.

Registration, established in 1996, differs from designation in a way that matters here. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated and closely controlled; registered properties operate by notification and are expected to stay in use. This warehouse still stores things. Choshi City records that alongside nets it now holds boat repair equipment, fittings and ceremonial dining trays. A hundred and sixty years on, it is doing what it was built for.

What to Look For

Stand at the front and read the silhouette. From a distance the geya roofs make the building look like a single low shed. Move closer and the gabled two-storey core lifts clear above them. That doubled section is the whole structural idea, visible in ten seconds if you know to look.

Find the south gable window. It is effectively the building's only opening to the outside world. The south warehouse standing right beside it has no window in that position at all. Seeing the two together makes visible a small decision taken inside a shared design logic, and small decisions of that kind are where regional building traditions actually live.

Run your eye along the vertical boarding. The boards have surely been replaced over the generations, but the method of laying them has not changed since the 1860s.

One practical note. There is no interpretive signboard at the warehouses. They sit apart from the main house on their rise, unannounced, and many visitors miss them entirely. Coming on a guided open day is the reliable way to understand what you are looking at.

Open days fall on the second and fourth Sunday of each month, 10:00 to 15:00. Confirm with the Choshi City cultural properties office, 0479-21-6662, before travelling.