Watanabe Family Residence East Storehouse

An 1890 Storehouse in the Umeta District of Sukagawa

The Watanabe Family Residence East Storehouse (渡辺家住宅東蔵, Watanabe-ke Jūtaku Higashi-gura, also written Higashigura) is a single-storey earthen-walled storehouse at Iwase 85, Umeta, Sukagawa City, Fukushima Prefecture, built in 1890 (Meiji 23) and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 10 November 2005 under registration number 07-0078.

The Watanabe family held the post of shōya, village headman, of the old village of Narita through successive generations. Tax records, village paperwork, farm tools, household goods: a headman's yard accumulated a great deal that could not be allowed to burn. Three earthen storehouses still stand on the plot at Umeta, and that number is the clearest surviving sign of what the household once had to keep safe.

The east storehouse is the smallest of the three. Its building area is twenty-two square metres, the plan running three bays along the ridge and two across. It stands to the south-east of the earth-floored service entrance of what was the main house, turned to face north, under a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles. The doorway sits in the gable end rather than the long side, an arrangement Japanese building calls tsuma-iri.

Twenty-two square metres is not much. The interest lies elsewhere.

What the Register Recognised

Registration is the lighter of Japan's two main protections for historic buildings. Designation as an Important Cultural Property brings tight control and state repair funding to a small number of exceptional structures; registration asks mainly that an owner give notice before substantially altering the exterior, and it was created to bring the very large stock of buildings surviving from the Meiji period onward into some kind of official record. Every entry cites a criterion, and the east storehouse was accepted under the first of them, which covers buildings contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

Four buildings on this plot went onto the register together on 10 November 2005, with the public notice following on 5 December. They were the main house and the three storehouses: east at 07-0078, south at 07-0079, north at 07-0080.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry for the east storehouse closes by praising the quality of its plastering and pointing to that as the thing worth looking at. The entries for the south and north storehouses on the same plot carry no comparable remark. Whatever else the register was recording here, it singled out a craftsman's hand.

The Fire of 2013

In January 2013 the main house burned down. Sukagawa City notes the loss on its cultural property pages, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs list of registrations cancelled through fire and similar causes records the removal of Watanabe Family Residence Main House on 16 April 2015, nine and a half years after it was added.

The three storehouses came through. Thick earth walls and a roof framed clear of the shell were the construction meant to stop a fire crossing a yard, and at Umeta that intention was tested in earnest. The timber house is gone. The mud-walled stores it was built to serve are still there.

Reading the Plasterwork

Two bays of the north face carry a geya-bisashi, a lean-to eave thrown out over the entrance. Beneath it hang the doors: tsuchi-tobira, a double leaf that swings open in the manner of a shrine cabinet, built up in mud over a timber core until each leaf is thick enough to hold heat out for hours.

The wall changes character halfway up. Around the lower band runs namako-kabe, "sea cucumber wall": flat square tiles pinned to the earth in a diagonal grid, with lime plaster piped along every joint and worked into a raised half-round. The rounded joints give the wall its name, and they also shed water away from the tile edges, which is the point of the whole exercise. Above that band the surface turns white, finished in shikkui lime.

Step to the side and something else becomes visible: the roof does not rest on the walls. This is okiyane, a roof frame erected over the top of the mud shell as a separate structure, with an air gap left between the two. Rain runs off the tiles without ever touching the earth, damp that does reach the vault has somewhere to dry, and the shell carries none of the roof's weight. An oni-gawara, a moulded ridge-end tile, finishes the gable against the sky.

Four details repay a slow look:

• How evenly the half-round joints of the namako band are drawn across the whole face
• The gap between the top of the wall and the underside of the eaves
• The thickness of the door leaves seen at their edge
• The profile of the oni-gawara

Visiting

The east storehouse is privately owned and is not open to the public. Sukagawa City lists the owner as a private individual. There is no visitor facility, no opening season, no admission charge, and no interior access of any kind. The plot is somebody's ground.

What remains possible is the view from the public road. Umeta lies in the western part of Sukagawa City, roughly thirteen kilometres from JR Sukagawa Station on the Tōhoku Main Line, and a car is the practical way there; bus coverage in this part of the city is thin. Photographing the building from the road is a matter of ordinary courtesy rather than permission, but visitors should not enter the plot and should not approach the owner directly. Questions about the buildings go to the Cultural Property Section of Sukagawa City's Cultural Promotion Division, on 0248-94-2152.

Anyone making the trip may as well take in all three storehouses at once. They stand on the same plot and read as a set: the east storehouse in its namako and white lime, the south storehouse larger and left rough at the mid-coat, the north storehouse a small windowless miso store under a sheet-metal roof. The differences are differences of job.