Kurihana-ke Jutaku Misegura (Shop Storehouse of the Kurihana Family Residence)

A Merchant's Storehouse Facing the Old Highway

The shop storehouse of the Kurihana Family Residence (栗花家住宅店蔵, Kurihana-ke Jūtaku Misegura, also written Kurihana-ke Jutaku Misegura) is a two-storey earthen-walled commercial building of 1908 in Kitamachi, Koori Town, Date District, Fukushima Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 6 March 2024.

Koori was a town where the road split. The Oshu Kaido, the great inland highway running north from Edo through Mutsu Province, passed straight through the settlement, and here the Ushu Kaido branched off to the west, climbing the Kosaka Pass and continuing by way of Shichikashuku, Yamagata and Akita to Aburakawa on Mutsu Bay. Post-horses, pilgrims, official processions and freight moved through in both directions. The strip of houses and businesses that thickened along the road became known as Koori-juku, and the Kurihana storehouse sits in the middle of it.

Its west wall is the street wall. Behind that face the building held a trade that is easy to overlook now: the family were sanbutsushō, dealers in the goods of the silkworm economy. Cocoons, silkworm egg cards, reeling and rearing equipment, the whole apparatus a farming household needed to turn mulberry leaves into raw material for thread. Northern Fukushima was mulberry country. By 1908, when the storehouse went up, Japanese raw silk was moving abroad in enormous volume, and around the following year Japan is generally reckoned to have passed China to become the world's largest exporter of raw silk. A cocoon dealer on this street in Koori was sitting at a collection point for that trade.

Why the Building Was Registered

Registration was granted under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the landscape. That is the narrower of the reasons the national system recognises, and it is the right one here. The case does not rest on a single virtuoso carving or a rare structural system. It rests on what the building does to a street.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the construction as dozō-zukuri, two storeys, roofed in sheet iron, with a building area of 52 square metres. The roof is gabled, and the entrance is on the long eaves side, which architectural writing in Japanese calls hirairi. So the eaves line runs parallel with the highway. You do not meet a triangular gable end as you walk up the street; you meet a long horizontal wall, and the effect is heavier and more closed than a shopfront of ordinary post-and-beam construction would be.

That heaviness is deliberate. The outer walls are plastered continuously up to the eaves, sealing the timber frame inside a thick skin of earth and lime. The technique is fireproofing, developed for the storehouses of merchants who kept stock they could not afford to lose in one of the fires that periodically ran through Japanese towns. Applying it to a building that also functioned as a shop produced the type known as the misegura: half retail frontage, half strongbox.

The national register also records a renovation in 2011. The family have spoken publicly about repairing earthquake damage sustained over several tremors before the property was put forward for registration, and the building standing today has been through that work.

What There Is to See from the Street

Start with the ground floor. The front of the interior is an earth-floored space, a doma, and this was the mise, the selling area. Its original suriage-do survive. These are shutter boards that slide upward in grooves rather than swinging or sliding sideways, so the shopfront could be opened in stages as trade required and shut solid at night. Very few of them are left in place anywhere, because they are the first thing replaced when an old shop is modernised. Their survival here is one of the specific reasons the building drew attention.

Then look up. The second floor is a single undivided room, with one window opened in each of the north and south gable ends and nothing else piercing the walls. That room was where the cocoons were kept. Cocoons need steady air and darkness, and two facing openings at the ends of a long space will draw a cross-current through it without letting in much light. The plan of the upper floor is a piece of practical storage engineering rather than a design decision about living space.

Immediately to the east, sharing the same plot, is the single-storey main house, registered on the same day. Seen together from the road the pair explain a common arrangement in Japanese merchant towns: the tall, sealed, fire-resistant box at the front doing business with the street, the low tiled dwelling behind it doing the living.

One practical point matters more than any of this. The Kurihana Residence is a private home and it is not open to the public. There are no opening hours, no admission, and no interior access. What a visitor can do is look at the exterior from the public road, which is where the building was designed to be seen from in the first place. Photographs taken from the street are a normal courtesy; entering the plot or photographing into the property is not. Koori Station on the JR Tohoku Main Line is roughly a kilometre north, about a twelve-minute walk, and the old highway is a straightforward walk in a small, quiet town.