Former Yoshikawa Residence (Izutsuya) Komegura

The Rice Store at the Corner of the Street

The Komegura (米蔵, rice storehouse) of the Former Yoshikawa Family Residence is a dozo-style earthen-walled storehouse at 640 Kuchiganaya, Ikuno-cho, Asago City, Hyogo Prefecture, built in 1872 (Meiji 5) and entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (Building) on 10 November 2005.

Nineteen square metres of floor plate. That is the whole building.

It stands at the northwest corner of the plot, where the property meets the road, and the register singles out that position: the storehouse gives order to the streetscape. Anyone walking through Kuchiganaya passes its blank wall before reaching the entrance of the main house.

The construction is dozo, thick earthen walls built up in layers around a timber armature and finished with plaster. Each face is then clad in vertical boarding, with a plastered band, a hachimaki, running round the top of the wall. The gabled roof is laid in sangawara pantiles and framed as an oki-yane, a separate roof structure set over the earthen vault rather than resting on it, so that heat and fire reach the roof timbers before they reach the contents. On the east face, a doorway at the centre. On the gable end, higher up, a small window with a board hood.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as single-storey, while its commentary describes openings at two levels. Inside, the explanation shows itself: the space is one tall volume, not two floors.

Rice in a Town That Produced Silver

A mining town has an awkward relationship with food. Ikuno's valley worked metal, not fields, and the population that dug, smelted, administered and traded had to be fed from outside. Rice arriving in a household of this size was capital, and capital wants a strongroom.

The Yoshikawa family were yamashi, mine operators granted extraction rights by the shogunal magistrate, and they ran a gōyado, an inn for those summoned to the magistrate's office on official business, under the shop name Izutsuya. Ikuno had six such inns. The keeper of a gōyado also drafted litigants' petitions and steered them through procedure, work that has been likened to that of a lawyer in an age before the profession existed.

The date of the Komegura sits at a hinge. The main house went up in 1832 (Tenpo 3), late in the shogunate. The Komegura was built in 1872, four years after the new Meiji government took the Ikuno mine under direct control and began rebuilding it as Japan's first modern mine, bringing in French engineers and, eventually, the ore road down to Himeji known as the Silver Carriage Way. The family's world was changing. The building method did not change with it: in 1872 a merchant household still stored its rice behind half a metre of mud.

The Yoshikawa family gave the land and buildings to the former town of Ikuno in 1999. After renovation the property opened in 2003 as Ikuno Machizukuri Kobo Izutsuya, run by local residents; Asago City is the registered owner.

Why the Komegura Was Registered

Registration fell in the forty-seventh round, recorded on 10 November 2005 and gazetted on 5 December 2005, under registration number 28-0212. As with the Uchigura next door, the criterion cited is that the building is a model of its type in design.

Two things carry the case. The first is the construction itself, an oki-yane dozo of modest size with its boarding and hachimaki intact, a type once ordinary across this region and now much thinned out. The second is the corner it occupies. Registration texts rarely praise a building for where it stands, and this one does.

The Komegura is one of six registered structures on the property, alongside the main house, the detached wing, the Uchigura, the freestanding dozo and the west wall. The Uchigura makes an instructive comparison: built in 1843, timber framed, attached to the northwest corner of the main house, with a nando below and a tatami room above. That one faces inward, into family life. This one faces the road.

Eight buildings in the Kuchiganaya district hold registered status. On 18 March 2014 the surrounding area was selected as an Important Cultural Landscape under the title Cultural Landscape of the Ikuno Mine and Mining Town, the first selection in Hyogo Prefecture and the first in Japan for a mining city still in operation.

What to Look For on a Visit

Izutsuya runs a gallery inside one of its storehouses and publishes the dimensions: 4.4 metres wide, 3.7 metres deep, 2 metres to the beam and about 4 metres to the ceiling, entered through an opening 1.2 metres wide and 1.7 metres high. Those figures correspond closely to what the register says about the Komegura, a 19-square-metre footprint enclosing a single tall interior. Exhibitions change monthly and the space is offered to applicants for a modest fee, so what you find inside depends on the month.

Look at the roof before you go in. An oki-yane sits above the earthen vault with a gap between the two, and once you know to look for it the line of the eaves reads differently: the roof is a lid, not a hat.

Then the walls. Vertical boards cover every face, weathered to grey-brown, with the plastered hachimaki showing as a paler band at the top. Boards were cheaper to replace than plaster was to redo, so this is maintenance thinking made visible.

The main house nearby repays a look too: reddish Ikuno tiles, a kimono-yellow earthen wall, and the projecting bamboo lattice known as Osaka degoshi. The site sells sweets made by the local workshop members and serves Ikuno black tea and, in season, koji-based drinks; there is a meeting room, a courtyard, and a corner where you can grind your own matcha on a stone mill.

Admission is free. Opening hours run from 9:00 to 17:00, with closures on Mondays, on the following day when Monday is a public holiday, and over the New Year. Free parking is provided. Townscape guides can be arranged by advance booking.

From JR Ikuno Station on the Bantan Line it is about one kilometre, some ten minutes on foot; limited express services stop at Ikuno, about an hour from Himeji and about thirty minutes from Wadayama, the junction for Takeda Castle. By car the Bantan Expressway's Ikuno ramp is roughly two minutes away. Photography rules for the interior are not published, and individual exhibits may be restricted, so check at the desk first.