Sato Family Residence Document Storehouse

The Building That Held the Paperwork

The Document Storehouse of the Sato Family Residence (佐藤家住宅文庫蔵, also written Satō-ke Jūtaku Bunko-gura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse in the Izumi district of Fukushima City, Fukushima Prefecture, built in 1875 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 24 December 2013.

It sits west of the main farmhouse, reached across the detached wing, and runs on an east-west axis. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives its plan as 6.6 metres along the ridge by 4.8 metres across, which works out to a building area of about 32 square metres. Small, then. Smaller than a modern two-car garage.

The name settles what it was for. A bunko-gura is not a granary and not a general storeroom. Bunko means an archive, and a household of this standing had one because it needed one: land registers, deeds of sale and mortgage, tax records, ledgers running back generations, correspondence, genealogies. Paper. A farmhouse of 267 square metres could burn and be rebuilt. The documents proving what the family owned could not.

How an Earthen Storehouse Resists Fire

The construction technique here is dozō-zukuri, in which a timber frame is packed out with thick layers of clay and finished in lime plaster until the walls behave less like a wall than like a kiln shell. Fire outside meets several inches of earth before it meets anything that will burn.

Three details are worth picking out. The roof is okiyane-shiki, a separate framework set down over the earthen box rather than built into it, so the mud walls carry none of the roof's weight and the tiles can be renewed without disturbing the shell beneath. It is gabled and laid in sangawara pantiles. The doorway is placed on the eastern gable end, facing back toward the house. And the second floor carries a tsuchido on its east face, an opening closed by a door itself packed with earth and plastered over, so that the weakest point in the envelope is sealed with the same material as the rest of it. A small pent roof shelters it.

The exterior walls are finished in white lime plaster with the lower band treated in arai-dashi, a washed-out finish in which the surface is rinsed while still green to expose the aggregate underneath. The result is a rough, granular base under a smooth white body: practical, since the lower wall takes splashing and knocks, and deliberate as a visual division.

The registration file notes that this storehouse composes the western edge of the property's appearance. Its file cites the same criterion applied to the three buildings beside it, the one for structures that shape the historic character of the landscape, and gives it number 07-0146 in the seventy-sixth round.

Four Buildings, One Registration, and What You Can Actually See

The storehouse was one of four buildings on this property registered on the same December day in 2013. The main house of 1873 took number 07-0144, the detached wing of 1932 took 07-0145, this storehouse 07-0146, and a miso storehouse of 1873 took 07-0147. That last building, also earthen-walled and two storeys but roofed in sheet iron and covering 35 square metres, is not treated in this article.

A corridor along the south side of the detached wing connects the main house to the wing and continues to this storehouse, so the archive was reachable without stepping outside. In a snow country winter that arrangement is less about elegance than about not carrying ledgers through a drift.

Now the caveat. Nobody is admitted here. The compound remains a working private residence, unstaffed and unticketed, and the Agency's file carries no owner name, its convention for buildings held privately. What the storehouse holds today, if anything, is not on view. Stay on the public road, where a stretch of white wall and a tiled ridge show above the boundary, and give the household its privacy when a camera comes out.

Trains on the Fukushima Kotsu Iizaka Line leave Fukushima Station and reach Izumi in about ten minutes, with Iwashiro-Shimizu a short walk back down the track. Anyone drawn to earthen storehouses will find plenty more along this line and through the older quarters of Fukushima City, a number of them registered in their own right.

One caution on the name. A separate Sato Family Residence in Masuda, Yokote City, Akita Prefecture, also includes a building called a bunko-gura, and that property is an Important Cultural Property rather than a registered one. The two have no connection.