Nan'etsu (Former Nakamura Shoten)

A Shop That Grew a Third Floor

Nan'etsu (南越, read nan'etsu and also transcribed Nanetsu), formerly the Nakamura Shoten (旧中村商店), is a three-story wooden merchant building of 1912 standing at Horai-cho in Echizen City, Fukui Prefecture, and registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 1 July 2003 under registration number 18-0022.

Three stories in timber is not what most visitors expect from a Japanese provincial shopfront. Two is the norm. The reason this one reaches higher is that it was not built that way. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record states plainly that the building began as a two-story structure and passed through two rounds of enlargement and remodelling, dated around 1930 and again in 1940. The top floor arrived later, and the façade you see today is the sum of three campaigns spread across three decades.

The setting matters. Echizen City was called Takefu until the municipal merger of 2005, and Takefu itself sits on ground that served as the provincial capital of Echizen Province. The old Hokurikudo highway ran through here, and the commercial streets that grew along it supplied a hinterland known for forged blades, washi paper and textiles. Horai-cho lies in that commercial core, a short walk from the station, and by the late Meiji period it was a street of shops rather than a street of houses.

Nakamura Shoten was one of those shops. The building has continued in trade ever since, and the footwear wholesaler that occupies it today has kept the name Nan'etsu, which is also the historical regional name for this southern part of the old Echizen area.

Registered as a Model of Form

Japan's registration system offers three criteria, and buildings are registered under whichever fits. Many rural registrations invoke the first criterion, contribution to the historic landscape. This building was registered under the second: serving as a model of design and form. That is a different and slightly more demanding claim. It says the building is worth studying as a piece of architecture, not merely as scenery.

What justifies it is the way the shop resolves two vocabularies that usually pull against each other. The construction is conventional Japanese carpentry: timber frame, gabled roof, pantile covering of the type called sangawara. The street elevation, however, is treated in a manner that owes something to the commercial architecture arriving from the cities in the Taisho and early Showa years. Four large openings are set across the second and third floors, and their scale is far more generous than a traditional townhouse front would allow.

Reading the Numbers

The frontage measures four ken, roughly 7.3 metres, and the registered building area is 89 square metres. That is a compact plot even by the standards of a castle-town commercial street, which is part of why the building went up rather than out. The Agency's record describes the ground and second floors as shop and storage, with four Japanese-style rooms occupying the third.

That arrangement is worth pausing over. Putting the living rooms at the top of a merchant building, above two floors of trade, is an urban solution to a small site, and it produces something unusual: tatami rooms with genuine long views over a provincial townscape. The residents of a two-story shophouse look at their neighbours' walls. The residents of this one looked over the roofs.

Fukui Prefecture has counted the building among the cases supported through its programme for the conservation and use of historic structures, listed there under the name of the present business. Local architectural surveys have long treated it as one of the notable early modern buildings of the Takefu district, alongside the former post office of 1914 and the former town hall of 1929 that stand nearby on the same street.

What to Look For From the Street

Start with the roof line. The gable end and the pantiles are entirely ordinary, and that ordinariness is the point: from a distance the building reads as part of the traditional street. The surprise comes as you get closer and count the floors.

Then look at the four openings. Their rhythm across the upper two levels is regular and the proportions are large, which produces a face that is more window than wall. Compare that with a standard Meiji townhouse front, where the second floor is usually a low mushiko-mado lattice window or a shuttered band, and the difference is immediate.

The seams between the three building campaigns are not advertised, but they can be inferred. Look for changes in the pitch and alignment of the roof, differences in the treatment of the eaves, and any discontinuity in the way the upper wall meets the frame. A building enlarged twice rarely conceals everything.

Visiting, Access and Etiquette

This is a private, working commercial building, not a museum. There is no admission desk, no opening hours and no general public access to the interior. Plan on viewing the exterior from the public street, which is free and possible at any hour, and treat the building as someone's place of business. Photographing the façade from the pavement is normally unproblematic; photographing into the shop, or entering to look around, is not something to assume. If you hope to see inside, enquire in advance through the Echizen City Tourism Association rather than turning up.

Getting there is straightforward. Takefu Station is about five minutes on foot. Note that since March 2024 the station has been operated by Hapi-Line Fukui rather than JR West, following the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Tsuruga. Travellers arriving by Shinkansen use Echizen-Takefu Station instead, which is a separate station roughly twelve minutes away by car.

Build the visit around the street rather than the single building. The former Takefu Post Office of 1914, now used as a workshop, and the Echizen City Takefu Public Hall Memorial Museum of 1929, with its six-storey tower and reinforced concrete frame, both stand in Horai-cho. The Memorial Museum is a working museum and holds several designated cultural properties, so it offers an interior to balance the exteriors. Half a day covers all three comfortably, with time left for the knife workshops that remain the city's best-known craft.