Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse

A storehouse that moved house

The Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse (山内家住宅倉, Yamauchi-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a two-storey timber storehouse of 1897 in the Irino district of Doi-cho, Shikokuchuo City, Ehime Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on July 25, 2011. It runs 12 meters along the ridge and 5.9 meters across, covering 71 square meters of ground.

The roof is Kirizuma-zukuri, laid with Sangawara-buki pantiles, and the ridge runs north to south beside the road. The wall changes material halfway up: mortar below, white Shikkui lime plaster above.

The building has not always stood here. It went up in 1897, was taken apart and re-erected on this site in 1959, and was repaired again in 2007.

Just to the south stands the Yamauchi Family Residence Detached Wing of 1926, listed on the same day.

Why the building is on the register

The Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse carries registration number 38-0097 and was announced in the seventieth round of listings, on July 25, 2011. One criterion was applied: that the building contributes to the historic character of the national landscape.

That test looks outward, at what a building gives to the street it stands on. Here the wall facing the road is effectively the whole case.

A structure that has been dismantled, carted off and rebuilt might seem a weak candidate. Under the Registered Tangible Cultural Property system it is not. What came through the 1959 move and the 2007 repairs was the plasterer's work, and that is what a visitor sees today.

A dragon holding a jewel

High on the road-facing wall of the Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse is a kote-e, a relief modelled in lime plaster with a plasterer's trowel. The subject is a dragon gripping a jewel. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the work as being attributed to a plasterer named Fukuda Kōhei, and stops short of confirming it.

Kote-e is not painting. The craftsman builds the image out of wet Shikkui plaster, working against the clock while the material is still soft. Overlapping scales, the curl of a claw, the line of a tail: all of it has to be settled before the wall sets, and none of it can be brushed out and tried again.

Three windows sit in a row below the dragon, each under its own small pent roof. The eaves are there to keep rain off the openings, but spaced evenly across a broad wall they also break up a surface that would otherwise read as blank.

The corners have been worked as well. The plaster imitates sangi-zumi, the long-and-short stonework used at the angles of castle walls, where blocks are laid alternately end-on and side-on. A timber storehouse borrows the look of masonry, and the corners pick up a shadow the rest of the wall does not have.

Visiting the Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse

The Yamauchi Family Residence Storehouse is privately owned and closed to visitors. The interior is not open, and the grounds cannot be entered. Viewing is from the public road only.

That is less of a loss than it sounds. Everything the listing rests on faces outward. Stand on the road and look up, and the dragon, the change from mortar to plaster and the imitation stone corners are all there.

Photographing what is visible from the road is fine. Houses and a medical facility surround the site, so do not point a camera over walls, through gateways or at windows.

The nearest station is Iyo-Doi on the JR Yosan Line, about 1 kilometer to the northeast, or roughly 13 minutes on foot. Drivers approach from the Doi Interchange on the Matsuyama Expressway, about 4 kilometers to the east. There is no visitor parking, and the street is not a place to leave a car.

Questions about the listing go to the cultural properties section of the Shikokuchuo City Board of Education, on 0896-28-6043.