Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen)

A tea merchant's lot on the old Nakasendo

The Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) (小見家住宅（水村園）, Komi-ke Jūtaku) is the premises of Mizumuraen, a tea shop founded in 1857 in Honmachi, Takasaki City, Gunma Prefecture, where eight buildings raised between the early Meiji era and 1927 were entered on the national register as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on December 4, 2000.

The title joins two names. Komi is the family; Mizumuraen, roughly "Mizumura Garden," is the name the business trades under. According to the shop, six generations have sold tea from this address, through the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, Showa, Heisei and Reiwa eras.

The lot is a textbook castle-town strip: 9.6 metres of frontage and 46 metres of depth, nearly five times as deep as it is wide. The Agency for Cultural Affairs reads the plot as a survival of the street layout of Takasaki's castle-town years. Everything worth seeing lies along that depth.

The street face is not old. In 1959 the widening of National Route 354, the former Nakasendo highway, took the front of the shop, and the sales floor was rebuilt. The Agency's notes add that the shop's front storehouse and the main house were lost to the road. The eight registered buildings are the ones that stood far enough back to survive.

Eight buildings forming a firebreak

A narrow alley runs down the middle of the Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen), with buildings on either side. The shop describes a string of six storehouses standing one after another behind the sales floor.

Along the west side, five storehouses line up from south to north, gable to gable. At the southern tip is the New Zashiki of 1906; next comes the Kimono Storehouse, then a gap of 1 Ken before the Miso Storehouse, the New Storehouse of 1887, and finally the Front Storehouse in the north-west corner. The Agency repeatedly describes this row as a firewall, a fire break running the length of the lot.

The east side is held by a brick firewall that doubles as the boundary with the neighbours. Backed against it are the Bathhouse, facing the New Zashiki; the Brick Storehouse, facing the Kimono, Miso and New storehouses; and, in the north-east corner, the Retirement House of 1927. The result is a long, slender courtyard walled in earth on one side and brick on the other.

• New Zashiki: 1906, Dozo-zukuri storehouse, single-storey, building area 22 square metres
• Kimono Storehouse: early Meiji era, dozo-zukuri, 2-storey, 17 square metres
• Miso Storehouse: early Meiji era, dozo-zukuri, 2-storey, 29 square metres
• New Storehouse: 1887, dozo-zukuri, 2-storey, 23 square metres
• Front Storehouse: mid-Meiji era, dozo-zukuri, 2-storey, 17 square metres
• Bathhouse: mid-Taisho era, brick, single-storey, 12 square metres
• Brick Storehouse: mid-Taisho era, brick, 2-storey, 53 square metres
• Retirement House: 1927, timber, 2-storey, 36 square metres

The registration numbers run consecutively from 10-0044 to 10-0051. Only the Retirement House was listed as a model of design; the other seven qualified as buildings that would not be easy to reproduce. The Agency also sorts them by use: the New, Front and Brick storehouses as commercial buildings, the remaining five as domestic ones. Tea stock and household goods shared the same line of walls.

Brick bonds and very old tea

The brickwork on the east side of the Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) rewards a close look. According to the shop, the Bathhouse is laid in Flemish bond and the Brick Storehouse in English bond. Flemish bond alternates long faces and short ends within every course; English bond stacks a course of long faces on a course of ends, turn and turn about. Here the two can be compared within a few steps.

The Agency singles out the Flemish bond of the Bathhouse, noting the care lavished on what was, after all, a building for a bath, a boiler and a toilet.

In the courtyard stands a hydrant post that the shop dates to November 1910, when Takasaki began receiving a full piped water supply, and which it says is still used every day. It is not part of the registration, but it has kept company with the storehouses for more than a century.

The shop tells one more story. In tea chests kept in the storehouses are leaves harvested in 1881, which the shop says have been recognised as the oldest surviving tea leaves in Japan. The shop does not say who made that assessment, so it is reported here as the shop's own account. Upstairs in the New Storehouse, tea chests are built into the walls, and the business of keeping tea safe in a storehouse is written into the fabric of the building.

Visiting

The Komi Family Residence (Mizumuraen) is a working tea shop, and the sales floor at the front is open to customers. The eight registered buildings stand behind it on private property still used for living and trade, so their interiors are not open to the public. The shop says it is a stop on Takasaki's town-walking route, stages photo shows and other small exhibitions in the shop from time to time, and will discuss requests to look around.

Opening hours and closing days are not published on the shop's website, so phone ahead (027-322-3213). If you hope to photograph the storehouses or the courtyard, ask the shop first. The shop notes that the long run of tiled roofs can be seen from the neighbouring lot.

The address is 123 Honmachi, Takasaki (the registered lot number is 123-1). It lies about 1.2 kilometres north-west of JR Takasaki Station as the crow flies; allow roughly 20 minutes on foot from the West Exit. Look for the shop front on National Route 354.