Goshobo Storehouse

A Storehouse of 1890 Across the Lane

Goshobo Dozo (御所坊土蔵, also written Goshoboh Dozō), a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse in the Arima hot spring quarter of Kita Ward, Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, was built in 1890 (Meiji 23) and registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 24 June 2021.

It is the smallest of the three Goshobo buildings on the register, covering forty square metres of ground, and the oldest of them by some years. It also sits apart from the other two. The Honkan and the Shinkan share a plot on the north side of the lane; the storehouse stands on the adjoining ground to the south, across the road, near the public bathhouse Kin-no-Yu.

A dozō is a building type before it is a building. Thick walls of earth are laid up over a timber frame and finished in lime plaster, producing a structure that resists fire well enough to be worth the labour. In a town of closely packed timber inns, that mattered. Fire was the standing risk of Japanese hot spring quarters, and Goshobo knew it directly: the inn's earlier main building burned in 1943. This storehouse, built more than half a century before that, was designed for exactly the danger the rest of the street lived with.

How It Is Built

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the storehouse compactly: dozō construction, two storeys, gabled roof of sangawara pantiles, entered on the gable end in the tsumairi manner.

Two details in the appraisal repay attention. The plaster is carried up and closed off at the hachimaki, the banded course that finishes the wall head beneath the eaves; the name means headband, and the term describes what the eye sees, a continuous white belt tying the top of the wall together. Below, the dado is finished as namako-kabe: square tiles fixed flat to the wall with lime plaster piled along the joints in raised half-round ridges. The word namako means sea cucumber, after the profile of those ridges. The pattern is not decoration alone. The tiles protect the earthen wall where splashing and knocks do the most damage, and the raised joints shed water away from the seams.

The interior is a single space with part of it open through both storeys, which is unusual enough to be recorded. Most storehouses of this size divide firmly at the first floor. The record notes remodelling around 1985, and states that the exterior follows the original.

What did it hold? Tea utensils and lacquerware, according to the register, which also notes that the storehouse originally belonged to a tea house on the site. That single line explains the double-height interior better than any structural argument would. A store attached to a tea room is a store for objects that are brought out, used, and put back, not for bulk goods.

Registration number 28-0751 was granted under the criterion of contribution to the historical landscape of the nation. The owner field in the national database is left blank, unlike the entries for the Honkan and the Shinkan, which both name Goshobo Co., Ltd.

The Easiest of the Three to Visit

Of the three registered Goshobo buildings, this one asks least of a visitor. The Honkan and the Shinkan are working inn buildings; the storehouse operates as a gallery and shop, Galeria Retiro de Ouro, showing ceramics, woodwork and other craft by makers from around Japan. Anyone walking the lane can go in. An adjoining café can be reached through the interior.

Going in is also the only way to see the double-height space and the underside of the roof, so it is worth doing even for those with no intention of buying anything. Opening days and hours shift with the exhibition programme and it would be sensible to check before making a special trip.

Outside, stand at the gable end. The tsumairi entrance means the roof slopes away to left and right rather than toward you, so the whole triangular wall face is presented at once: namako-kabe below, plain white plaster above, the hachimaki closing it under the eaves. That is a great deal of visual information in a wall about six metres wide, and it is the reason a forty-square-metre building earned a place on a national register.

The location makes a short walk natural. Kin-no-Yu, the public bath run by the city, is a few paces away, and the Honkan and Shinkan are just across the lane. Arima-Onsen Station on the Kobe Electric Railway is about five minutes on foot. Photography from the street is unproblematic; inside the gallery, ask, since the works on display belong to the makers.