Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse

A storehouse you enter from indoors

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse (旧堀田廣之家住宅蔵, Kyū Hotta Hiroyuki-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a two-storey Dozo-zukuri earthen-walled storehouse with a tiled roof in Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, built as part of a compound begun in 1912 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. It covers 31 square metres, measuring 8.3 metres by 3.8 metres, which makes it small as storehouses go.

What defines the building is not its size but the direction its door faces. The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse is attached to the west flank of the main house, and its doorway opens into the interior of that house rather than onto the yard. Nobody had to cross the garden with a key. You walked down a passage and you were in the strongroom. Japanese calls this an uchigura, a storehouse held inside the household rather than standing apart from it, and the arrangement tells you the family expected to use it constantly rather than once a season. The building became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016.

Black boards instead of white plaster

Foreign visitors usually picture a Japanese storehouse as a white plastered block. This one is not. Over its thick earthen walls the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse carries black horizontal boarding, the joints pinned by vertical battens notched along their edges, a technique known as sasarago shitami itabari.

The boarding is practical before it is decorative. Earthen walls absorb driving rain and decay from the weather face inward, and a plaster finish has to be repaired by a plasterer. Cladding shifts the problem onto a sacrificial layer. When the boards go, the boards get replaced, and the earth behind them is untouched. The dark, matt surface that results was a by-product of maintenance thinking, though the family clearly liked it, because the same detail turns up on the base of the boarded fence along the street and on the base of the wing wall beside the gate.

The official commentary notes that this boarded exterior shapes the character of the compound's interior yard. Roof form follows the same restrained logic: Kirizuma-zukuri gables under Sangawara-buki pantiles, stepping down from the ridge of the main house.

Inside, the floor, the walls and the ceiling are all boarded as well. Lining a storehouse in timber keeps stored goods off the damp earth of the structural walls, and combined with the second storey it marks the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse out as a place built for keeping things properly rather than a shed for surplus furniture.

What the storehouse was keeping

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse held paper. Hotta Hiroyuki (1887 to 1962), who commissioned the compound, was a compulsive keeper of records: diaries, the drawings for his own house, receipts for timber and milk and newspapers, letters, commemorative postcards. The collection is known as the Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko, and in 2017 the Tsushima City Library put a selection of it on public display.

Because those papers survived, the construction of the compound can be followed date by date rather than guessed at. The rough plan Hotta drew himself in May 1912. The visit to a diviner in Nagoya to check the orientation of the bath and lavatories. The ground-breaking ceremony on 30 October 1912 and the raising of the main frame on 12 April 1913. Even the brick wall along the west boundary is documented, down to the nineteen bricklayers brought in from Kuwana who laid nine thousand bricks and finished on 14 January 1913. That level of detail is rare for a private house of this period anywhere in Japan, and it exists because a storehouse kept the humidity out.

The same archive raises a question about the storehouse itself. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records its date as 1912, in line with the rest of the compound. The family's papers, as presented by the Tsushima City Library, put the completion of the storehouse in 1918. Since the interior of the main house was only finished in 1914, a storehouse added several years later is entirely plausible, and the register entry most likely reflects the year the compound as a whole was begun. The discrepancy is worth flagging rather than smoothing over, and the precise completion date deserves specialist confirmation.

Access and what you can see

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse is closed to the public. Tsushima City's cultural heritage archive lists the compound as not open, and there is no interior visiting, no entry to the grounds, and no advance-booking or special-opening scheme.

Being an internal storehouse compounds the problem for a visitor. Attached to the west side of the main house and screened by the perimeter walls, it is the least visible structure on the site. The honest advice is to look at what does front the street, the gate, the boarded fence and the brick wall, and to understand that the storehouse sits behind them. Photography from the public road is unrestricted, but this is somebody's home, and pointing a lens over the wall for any length of time is not the way to behave.

Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines is the nearest station, about one kilometre east, fifteen minutes on foot along the approach to Tsushima Shrine. The Hotta Family Residence immediately to the west, an Important Cultural Property of the mid Edo period, is city-owned and open on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00 (300 yen for adults, 100 yen for schoolchildren, checked August 2026). Its three storehouses stand in a row on the north side of its main house, detached in the older manner, which makes it a useful comparison with the attached arrangement used at the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Storehouse a generation later.