Arai Family Residence Storehouse and Barn

Arai Family Residence Storehouse and Barn

A long, narrow building runs along one side of the Arai estate in the Tsukimiyama district of Suma Ward, Kobe. It measures five ken in length and one and a half ken in depth, a ken being the traditional structural bay of roughly 1.8 metres, which gives a slender footprint of about 25 square metres. Built in 1925, the same year as the main house it serves, the structure combines two functions under one continuous wall, and it is the clearest surviving evidence of how the estate was first laid out.

In the national register the building is listed as Araike Jūtaku Kura oyobi Naya, "the storehouse and barn of the Arai residence." It was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on the same day as the main house, but under its own entry, and the two are best understood together.

Two buildings in one: kura and naya

The western three bays form the kura, a storehouse in the dozō tradition: thick walls of earth built up over a timber frame and finished in plaster, the technique used across Japan to make a fire-resistant store for valuables, documents and seasonal goods. This kura rises two storeys and sits on a base of cut stone, a kir'ishi-zumi kidan, which lifts the earthen walls clear of ground damp.

The eastern two bays form the naya, the working barn. Its ground floor is a doma, an earthen-floored space left unboarded for muddy or heavy work, and the framing is shinkabe, the wall type in which the timber posts are left exposed rather than buried in plaster. Where the dozō hides its frame for protection, the naya shows its frame openly, and the contrast between the two halves is part of what the building records.

Outside, a single skin of vertical boarding runs along the whole length, tying the two parts into one continuous elevation. The roofs are gabled and laid with pantiles, but they do not meet at the same height: the line steps where the storehouse gives way to the barn, leaving a staggered profile that signals the change of use within.

Why it is a Registered Cultural Property

The storehouse and barn carry the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property (tōroku yūkei bunkazai), the lighter of Japan's two main systems for protecting buildings. Registration, created in 1996, works through notification and guidance rather than the permit controls that apply to Important Cultural Property and National Treasure. It was designed to record and retain the large stock of modern buildings, including everyday service structures like this one, that were vanishing before their value was recognised.

Outbuildings rarely survive when an estate is sold or rebuilt; the storehouse and barn usually go first. The fact that this one remains, in its original position and largely in its original form, is why the register values it. It was registered on 25 June 2002, in the thirty-third round, under the criterion that it serves as a model of design, with the registration number 28-0102. Read alongside the main house, it lets the original plan of a 1920s Suma villa be reconstructed in a way that the house alone could not.

What to look for

The pleasure of this building is in reading its two halves against each other from the street: the plastered, fire-proof storehouse on its stone base at one end, the open-framed working barn with its earthen floor at the other, and the stepped roofline that marks the join. It is a small lesson in how a well-run household of the period separated the things it needed to protect from the things it needed close at hand.

Like the main house, the storehouse and barn make up a private property and are not open to visitors. There is no entry and no interior viewing. The building can be appreciated only from the public road, and visitors are asked to respect the residents' privacy. Those who come to see it will find the wider district rewarding: Suma Rikyū Park on the grounds of the former Mukogawa Imperial Villa, the beach at Suma, and the temple of Sumadera are all close by and freely open, near Tsukimiyama Station on the Sanyo Electric Railway.