Former Yoshikawa Residence (Izutsuya) Uchigura

An Inner Storehouse Built to Be Lived In

The Uchigura (内蔵, also transcribed uchi-gura) of the Former Yoshikawa Family Residence is a two-storey timber storehouse at 640 Kuchiganaya, Ikuno-cho, Asago City, Hyogo Prefecture, built in 1843 (Tenpo 14) and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Building) on 10 November 2005.

It does not stand alone in the yard. The building is attached to the northwest corner of the main house, and that connection shapes everything else about it.

The footprint covers just 22 square metres. Two storeys, timber framed, with a gabled roof laid in sangawara pantiles on a ridge that runs north to south. A low lean-to, called a geya, shelters the ground floor on the south side, and small copper-sheathed hoods project above the second-floor windows there. The earthen walls are plastered all the way up to the underside of the eaves, then sheathed in vertical boarding that takes the rain running off the tiles.

The two floors do different work. Below is a nando, the inner room where a household kept clothing, bedding and goods worth locking away. Above is a zashiki, a formal tatami room, and it is fitted with a toko, the recessed alcove used for a hanging scroll and a seasonal arrangement.

An alcove is not something you build into a warehouse. That upper room was meant for people.

The Yoshikawa Family, the Mine, and the Gōyado

Ikuno was tenryo, territory held directly by the Tokugawa shogunate, because of the silver under it. The mine was worked from the sixteenth century, and the town that grew around it lived by administering, supplying and arguing over that mine.

The Yoshikawa family were yamashi, mine operators licensed by the shogunal magistrate to work a particular vein; their holding was a hill called Kakurinzan. Under the shop name Izutsuya they also kept a gōyado, an inn of a very specific kind. People summoned to the magistrate's office on official business, above all litigants, lodged there. The keeper did more than provide a bed: he drafted the petition to be submitted, and walked the paperwork through, a function often compared to that of a lawyer before lawyers existed. Six such inns operated in Ikuno, and Izutsuya was one of them.

The main house carries a munafuda, a ridge tag, dating it to 1832 (Tenpo 3). The Uchigura followed eleven years later. A household that adds a storehouse with a guest room upstairs is a household doing well, and one that expects visitors of standing.

In 1999 the Yoshikawa family gave the land and buildings to the former town of Ikuno, asking that they be used for the community. Renovation followed, and in 2003 the property reopened as Ikuno Machizukuri Kobo Izutsuya, a base for local activity run by residents. Asago City is the registered owner.

Why the Uchigura Was Registered

Registration came in the forty-seventh round: recorded on 10 November 2005 and gazetted on 5 December 2005, under registration number 28-0211. The criterion applied was that the building is a model of its type in design.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary makes the point plainly. This structure shows one aspect of how life was arranged inside a large residence. It is not evidence about storage technique; it is evidence about domestic space, about a family wealthy enough to treat a strongroom as an extra wing.

Six structures on the plot are registered together: the main house, the detached wing, the Uchigura, the Komegura (rice storehouse), the freestanding dozo, and the west wall. Reading them side by side is what makes the site useful to historians. The Komegura sits at the northwest corner of the site facing the street, thick-walled and fireproof. The Uchigura sits inside the household, absorbed into the plan of the house. Same word in English, two different buildings.

Kuchiganaya has kept an unusual amount of this fabric. Eight houses in the district hold registered status, and on 18 March 2014 the wider landscape was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape under the title Cultural Landscape of the Ikuno Mine and Mining Town, the first such selection in Hyogo Prefecture and the first anywhere in Japan for a working mining city.

What to Look For on a Visit

The Uchigura is where Izutsuya keeps its exhibits. Documents given by the Yoshikawa family are displayed here, along with household objects and toys, among them a shusse-sugoroku, a board game in which players advance through ranks and offices rather than around a track. Small, domestic things, shown in the room built to hold small domestic things.

Step in and the temperature drops. Earthen walls half a metre thick hold yesterday's air, which is exactly the property that made them worth building.

Outside, walk around to the south face and look at the junction with the main house. The Uchigura's ridge runs north to south while the main house runs east to west, so the two roofs meet at right angles, and the copper hoods over the upper windows read as a small refinement on what is otherwise a utilitarian face. Look at the vertical boarding too: it is a sacrificial skin over the mud plaster, replaceable, and it gives the storehouses of this town their particular striped darkness.

Admission is free and the building opens from 9:00 to 17:00. It closes on Mondays, or the following day when Monday is a public holiday, and over the New Year period. There is free parking. The site sells local sweets and offers a tea corner, and the staff arrange townscape guides by prior booking.

Getting there is easy. Izutsuya is about one kilometre from JR Ikuno Station on the Bantan Line, roughly ten minutes on foot; limited express trains stop at Ikuno, and the run from Himeji takes about an hour. From the station the walk leads through Kuchiganaya past the Kuchiganaya Ginzan Town Museum Center in the former Asada residence and the Shimura Takashi Memorial Hall in former mine staff housing. The Ikuno Silver Mine itself, with its open galleries, lies further up the valley.

Photography rules are not published for the interior, and some exhibited items may be restricted, so ask at the desk before you raise a camera.