Former Yamamoto Residence (Yamamoto Kiyoshi Memorial Foundation Hall) Storehouse

Former Yamamoto Residence (Yamamoto Kiyoshi Memorial Foundation Hall) Storehouse

A Japanese kura is normally built of earth. Thick walls of clay plastered over a timber frame, coated white, cool inside in August and slow to burn: that construction had been standard for centuries and remained standard in the 1930s. The storehouse at the northwest corner of this Nishinomiya property is made of reinforced concrete.

It stands two storeys high with a frontage of 4.9 metres and a depth of 6.9 metres, giving a building area of 53 square metres. The roof is gabled and pantiled, entered from the gable end. Attached to the front are a kuramae antechamber floored in tatami and a darkroom. Its outer walls carry the same scraped mortar finish as the main house, which it adjoins at the single-storey kitchen wing.

Set the concrete against the tiled gable and the building declares its date. Modern material, traditional silhouette, and no attempt to disguise either as the other.

Why a Concrete Storehouse Was Registered

The storehouse holds registration number 28-0294 on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties. It was entered on 5 December 2007 and notified on 19 December, in the fifty-seventh round of registrations, under the criterion of contribution to the historical landscape of the country. Four other buildings on the site were registered the same day: the main house, the front gate and wall, the gatehouse and the tea house.

Registration and designation are separate things in Japanese heritage law, and the difference explains why a service building like this one has a place on a national list. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated: the state picks out objects and buildings of exceptional value and controls what may be done to them. The registration system, created by the 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, addressed a quieter emergency. Enormous numbers of modern buildings were being demolished before anyone had asked whether they mattered. Registration records them, offers limited support, and asks only for notification before the exterior is altered.

Under a designation-only regime, a concrete storehouse would never have made the cut. Under registration it earns its place by two arguments. It is early evidence of reinforced concrete used for a domestic outbuilding in the Hanshin corridor, and it holds the ensemble together: the register itself notes that the plain treatment gives the storehouse a shared character with the main house. Five surviving buildings from one 1930s household is a far more informative record than any one of them alone.

The Darkroom, and What the Building Suggests

The register lists the rooms without explaining them, so some inference is needed. Two features are worth pausing over.

The first is the choice of concrete. Kondo Juichiro, who commissioned the house, had made his money from iron mines in Tottori, and he engaged Okada Takao of the Osaka Mitsukoshi housing department to design a substantial property. Whatever was kept in the storehouse, reinforced concrete offered protection against fire that earthen walls could approach but not match, and this was a decade in which Osaka and Kobe remembered their fires clearly. The house today holds a collection of tea utensils, lacquer and paintings assembled by the fifth owner, Yamamoto Kiyoshi, and his wife Tomie, which gives a modern purpose to a room built to be secure.

The second is the darkroom. Amateur photography was a serious pursuit among affluent households in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Kansai region produced some of the country's most active camera clubs. A purpose-built darkroom in a private storehouse indicates an owner who developed his own plates rather than sending them out. It is the kind of small, specific room that tells you more about how a family actually lived than any amount of decorative detail.

Then there is the tatami-floored kuramae at the front. A storehouse antechamber floored in tatami is not a passage. It is a place to sit, unwrap a box, look at what is inside and wrap it again, which is precisely how stored art objects were handled.

Visitors see the storehouse from the grounds during a booked tour of the property; interior access depends on how the building is being used. Bookings must be made by the previous day. The foundation opens from 10:30 to 15:30, with last admission at 15:00, and closes on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays as well as over the Obon and New Year periods. Admission is 300 yen for adults and 150 yen for primary and junior high school students. Hankyu Shukugawa station is about nine minutes on foot, Kurakuen-guchi about eight, JR Sakura-Shukugawa about twelve. Approach from the north side of the plot to see how the storehouse and the kitchen wing lock together, which is where the logic of the plan becomes visible.