Watanabe Family Residence Paddy Granary

A Ten-Square-Metre Store Beside the Gate

The Watanabe Family Residence Paddy Granary (渡部家住宅籾蔵, also written Watanabe-ke Jūtaku Momigura) is a small board-walled storehouse in the Ōkawara district of Okuma Town, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture, built in the early Meiji era between 1868 and 1882, and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 February 2021.

Its floor area is ten square metres. A single parking space takes up more ground. Yet the building carries its own registration number from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, 07-0246, and was accepted in the ninety-seventh round of registrations alongside four other structures on the same farmstead.

The granary sits immediately east of the front gate, so close that anyone walking in from the lane sees the two together: the tiled gable of the gate, then the low grey ridge of the store to its right. Unhulled rice was kept in buildings of this kind, deliberately separated from the dwelling. A kitchen fire that took the house should not also take the year's grain.

The ridge runs east to west, and the building is entered from the gable end rather than the long side, an arrangement Japanese carpentry calls tsumairi. Sheet iron covers the roof now, laid as an okiyane or set-on roof: a separate framed cap resting over the box of the walls rather than tied structurally into them, which keeps rain off the boarding and can be replaced without disturbing what it shelters.

Reading the Carpentry

Look closely at the walls and the method becomes legible without any specialist knowledge. Grooves were cut down the faces of the posts, and horizontal boards were slid into those grooves one above the next until the wall closed. No nails hold the boarding in place. The posts do the holding, and the boards can move a little as the timber takes up and gives back moisture through the seasons.

The same technique continues inside, where the partition dividing the interior is built exactly as the outer wall is. That consistency matters, because it tells you the builder was not treating the outside as a face and the inside as an afterthought. One method, applied throughout, by someone confident in it.

Above, the roof frame is equally direct. A beam is thrown across at the position of the central post along the ridge line, a short strut rises from that beam, and the strut carries the ridgepole. The rafters are split logs, round timber halved lengthways and laid flat side down. Nothing is planed smooth for show. This is a working building, framed by someone solving the problem in front of him with the timber he had.

Compare it with the plastered dozō storehouse elsewhere on the property, a two-storey structure of forty-five square metres finished in white lime, and the difference in intent is plain. The dozō protected valuables against fire. The board store held grain and needed to breathe.

Why a Small Farm Store Was Registered

Japan's registration system for Tangible Cultural Properties, introduced in 1996, works differently from the older designation system that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Registration applies a lighter touch, encourages continued use, and rests on criteria that include the contribution a building makes to the historical landscape of the country. That last criterion is the one cited for this granary.

The reasoning is spatial rather than architectural rank. The Agency's own description notes that the building forms the frontage of the site, and that is precisely its role: standing at the road edge next to the gate, it is part of what the estate presents to anyone passing. Remove it and the approach loses a step.

Five buildings at the Watanabe property were registered together on the same February day in 2021. The main house of 193 square metres, hip-and-gable roofed and originally thatched, dates from the same early Meiji years as the granary. The stable, a comparatively large two-storey building of 96 square metres, reflects the horse breeding on which the family's wealth was founded. The dozō storehouse, this granary, and the gate with its fences complete the group.

Read as a set, the five describe a substantial farming household of the Meiji period in the Hamadōri region: where the grain went, where the horses went, where the family lived, and how the whole was presented to the road.

Ōkawara Today

Okuma is the town where the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station stands, and after the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March 2011 the entire town was evacuated. Ōkawara lies inland in the western part of the municipality. Evacuation orders there were lifted on 10 April 2019, the first such lifting anywhere in Okuma, and the town relocated its offices to the district, with the new town hall beginning operations in May of that year.

The Watanabe buildings stood through all of it. Many old houses in the coastal towns of Fukushima were demolished after 2011, and the town's own account of the registration connects it directly to residents' fear that the Okuma they remembered would disappear entirely. Registering these buildings was a way of holding on to a place.

Since then the property has been used rather than sealed off. Okuma's board of education has run cleaning days, grass cutting, and guided walks on the site with the local heritage group Ōkuma Furusato Juku. In January 2023 around seventy people, townspeople and students from the Tokyo area, gathered here for a New Year rice-pounding event, eating under the eaves of the main house and touring the storehouse and stable with a town curator explaining as they went.

For a visitor, the practical position is straightforward. This is private property and a lived landscape, not a museum. There is no ticket office, no opening hours, and no route through the buildings. The gate, the granary beside it, and the fence line are visible from the lane that runs along the south edge of the site, and that view costs nothing and asks nothing. Interior access happens through events organised by the town. Photography from the public road is unlikely to trouble anyone, though it is courteous to keep to the road and to contact the Okuma Town Board of Education before publishing images or bringing a group.

Ōkawara is roughly six kilometres west of Ōno Station on the JR Jōban Line and is best reached by car; the town hall complex stands in the same neighbourhood. Radiation monitoring posts remain in place across the district, and the town publishes current information on conditions and access.