A Town Hall's Strongroom
The Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse (旧万場町役場土蔵, read Kyū Manba-machi Yakuba Dozō) stands at Manba in Kanna Town, Tano District, Gunma Prefecture. Built in 1938 as the record store of the town hall, it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 July 2008. It is used today as an exhibition space and is known by the name Gallery Yorozu.
The name deserves a note, because the character 万 does two jobs here. In the place name Manba it is read man. In the gallery's name it is read yorozu, an older reading meaning "ten thousand" in the sense of everything, all sorts. The same character, two lives.
The building is small: a footprint of fifty square metres carrying two floors, with the ridge running north to south. That is roughly the size of a generous studio flat, and it was enough. A mountain town's paper, seals, ledgers and cash did not need much room. They needed to survive a fire.
Old Method, New Materials
What makes this storehouse interesting is that it sits on a hinge between two building cultures.
The walls are dozō construction, the thick clay-over-timber technique that Japanese merchants and officials had used for centuries to build fireproof stores. Layer on layer of mud is packed over a timber frame and finished in white lime plaster, until the wall has the mass to hold out a neighbourhood fire long after the buildings around it have gone. Here the plaster is a plain white shirashikkui, and the west face carries a mizukiri, a projecting drip course that throws rainwater clear of the finish. West is the weather side in this valley, and the detail is there for a reason.
The roof works the traditional way too. It is an okiyane, a gabled outer roof set over the earthen roof rather than built into it, so that the clay below stays dry and can breathe through the cavity. Fire reaches the sacrificial outer roof first and the store below keeps its contents.
Now the 1938 half. The outer roof is covered in slate, not tile or shingle. The roof frame is a truss, an imported piece of engineering that a nineteenth-century dozō would not have used. And when it was new, every opening was hung with a pair of iron doors. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary notes these features as marks of the period, which is a careful way of saying that a small town in 1938 was building in its grandparents' method with its own generation's hardware.
The original doorway survives on the east face, with a canopy added over it. Two windows sit on the east upper floor, and two more on each floor of the west wall. Count them from outside and the plan of the interior becomes fairly easy to guess.
Manba, a Road Town Without a Railway
Manba grew as a stage on the Jikkoku Kaidō, a side route running from Shinmachi-juku on the Nakasendō up the Kanna River valley and over the Jikkoku Pass into the Saku district of Shinshū. Fifteen kilometres to the north, the parallel Shimonita road eventually gained a railway. The Jikkoku Kaidō never did.
That absence is the reason there is anything to look at. Places the trains reached rebuilt themselves; places they missed kept what they had. Manba lost its buildings to a great fire in 1891 and put up new ones, and those replacements, along with later additions like this storehouse, are largely still standing along the old road.
Manba Town merged with Nakasato Village in April 2003 to form Kanna Town, which is how a building called the Manba Town Hall Storehouse came to be in a town called Kanna. The registration criterion applied to it is the one covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, and along a street that has kept its shape, the phrase means something concrete.
Visiting
Kanna Town is a place you reach on purpose. From the Fujioka interchange on the Jōshin-etsu Expressway it is roughly fifty minutes by car up the valley; buses run from JR Shinmachi Station and take about eighty minutes to the Manba stop. There is a car park in the middle of Manba and the old road is short enough to walk end to end in half an hour.
Opening arrangements for the gallery vary with what is being shown, and a building of this size is not staffed continuously. Anyone travelling specifically to see inside should contact Kanna Town or the town tourist information office in advance. The exterior can be seen from the road at any time, and the plastered west wall with its drip course is the face worth walking round for.
A few minutes on foot brings you to Kura Gallery, a Meiji-period warehouse built for the Kanrasha silk cooperative's Manba branch, and to the Imaiya inn, a three-storey timber building put up after the 1891 fire. Manba Hachimangū holds a pair of wooden archery targets and arrowheads dated 1313, listed among Kanna Town's own designated cultural properties. Further west, the Kanna Dinosaur Centre commemorates the first dinosaur footprint fossils identified in Japan, found in this valley.
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Q&A
- Can you go inside the Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse (Gallery Yorozu)?
- The building serves as an exhibition space, so the interior opens when a show is running. It is not staffed on fixed daily hours. Contact Kanna Town or the town tourist information office before travelling if seeing inside matters to you.
- Where is the Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse and how do you reach it?
- The address is 15 Ōaza Manba, Kanna Town, Tano District, Gunma Prefecture. By car it is about fifty minutes from the Fujioka interchange on the Jōshin-etsu Expressway. By public transport, take a bus from JR Shinmachi Station and get off at Manba, roughly eighty minutes.
- Why was the Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse registered as a cultural property?
- It was registered under the criterion for buildings contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Its interest lies in the combination of traditional dozō walling and gabled outer roof with 1930s elements: slate covering, a trussed roof frame and iron doors at every opening.
- How big is the Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse?
- One building of two storeys with a registered footprint of fifty square metres. The ridge runs north to south, and the original entrance is on the east side beneath an added canopy.
- What else is worth seeing near the Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse?
- Kura Gallery, a Meiji-period silk cooperative warehouse; the Imaiya inn, a wooden three-storey building raised after the 1891 fire; Manba Hachimangū, whose fourteenth-century archery targets are a town-designated cultural property; and, further up the valley, the Kanna Dinosaur Centre.
Basic Information
| Name | Former Manba Town Hall Storehouse (Gallery Yorozu) / 旧万場町役場土蔵（ギャラリー万） |
|---|---|
| Location | 15 Ōaza Manba, Kanna Town, Tano District, Gunma Prefecture |
| Designation | Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Structure), registration number 10-0265 |
| Year Designated | Registered 8 July 2008; gazetted 23 July 2008 |
| Quantity | 1 building |
| Dimensions | Two-storey dozō construction, slate-covered roof; registered footprint 50 m² |
| Owner | Not recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs register |
| Public Access | Used as an exhibition space. Exterior visible from the street; interior access depends on the exhibition schedule, so enquire with the town in advance |
References
- National Cultural Properties Database, Agency for Cultural Affairs — 旧万場町役場土蔵（ギャラリー万）
- https://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/heritage/detail/101/00007186
- Cultural Heritage Online — 旧万場町役場土蔵（ギャラリー万）
- https://bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/142948
- Kanna Town — Cultural Property Map
- https://www.town.kanna.gunma.jp/soshiki/kyoikuiinkai/4/bunkazai/998.html
- Kanna Town — Designated Cultural Properties
- https://www.town.kanna.gunma.jp/soshiki/kyoikuiinkai/4/bunkazai/kanna_shiteibunkazai/index.html
- Kanna Town Tourism Site
- https://www.town.kanna.gunma.jp/kanko/index.html
Last verified: 2026.08.08