Tomari Shrine Taikogura (Drum Storehouse)

A 1936 Storehouse in a Precinct Rebuilt in 1653

Tomari Shrine Taikogura (泊神社太鼓倉, Tomari-jinja Taiko-gura), the drum storehouse in the precincts of Tomari Shrine at Kimura, Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture, was built in 1936 and entered the national register of tangible cultural properties in 2008. It is the youngest of eight shrine buildings registered together that year.

It stands southwest of the kaguraden, the hall used for sacred dance, and west of the zuishinmon gate. Most visitors walk past without looking. Fair enough: one storey, 6.4 metres along the ridge, 3.8 metres across, twenty-four square metres of floor area. No carving. No vermilion.

The purpose explains the shape. Taiko drums are bulky and awkward, and they have to come out through a wide opening once or twice a year and go back in without being knocked about.

The shrine around it is older by centuries. Its main hall and kagura hall were rebuilt in 1653 by Miyamoto Iori, adopted son of the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi and later chief retainer of the Kokura domain in Buzen Province. Iori left two large ridge tablets (munafuda) recording the work, and the text on their reverse, running to some 527 characters, sets out his own family background. Those tablets are now a Kakogawa City designated cultural property. The storehouse belongs to a far later chapter of the same ground.

Why a Working Storehouse Was Registered

Japan runs two parallel systems for architectural heritage. Designation, the older and stricter route, picks out individual masterpieces. Registration, introduced in 1996, is lighter: it applies to buildings roughly fifty years old or more that deserve to stay standing and stay in use, and one of the qualifying criteria is that a structure contributes to the historic character of the landscape. The Taikogura was registered on exactly that ground.

Registration took effect on 18 April 2008 and was publicly notified on 7 May in the fifty-ninth round. The building carries registration number 28-0354 in the Hyogo prefectural series. Seven other structures at the shrine went onto the register in the same batch, numbered 28-0347 through 28-0353.

Together those eight span 283 years of building. The main hall and kagura hall date to 1653; the offering hall and the small Kumano subsidiary hall to the closing decades of the Edo period; the noh stage to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century; the Sumiyoshi and Shushi subsidiary halls to the Meiji era; the Taikogura to 1936. Listing the group instead of extracting one prize building keeps the relationships between them intact, which is the whole point of the landscape criterion.

What to Look For

Walk round to the north gable end and the roof starts to look strange. The north face is irimoya-zukuri, hipped and gabled, the more formal of the two common Japanese roof types. The south face is kirizuma-zukuri, a plain gable. One small building, two different roof treatments, divided front and back.

Sightlines are the likely explanation. North faces into the precinct where people actually walk; south turns away from it. The building was given a dressed face where it would be seen and a plain one where it would not.

The walls carry the same reasoning into materials. Three sides are earthen wall, tsuchikabe, clad outside in yakiita: cedar boards deliberately charred so the carbonised skin resists rot and insects. In low sun the grain reads as a set of fine black ridges, and the surface has the dull sheen of charcoal rather than the flat black of paint. Inside, the finish switches to white shikkui lime plaster, which helps steady the humidity around stored drum skins.

The roof is sangawara, the interlocking pantile that became standard for ordinary Japanese buildings during the Edo period and stayed standard deep into the twentieth century. The large door opening sits on the north gable, sized for what has to pass through it.

Nothing here was expensive. The interest lies in how carefully a cheap vocabulary was handled.

Visiting

The precinct is open ground and can be walked at any reasonable hour at no charge. The Taikogura is seen from outside only. Its interior is not open, and there is no reason to expect otherwise, since this is working storage rather than an exhibit.

From JR Kakogawa Station the shrine lies about 1.5 kilometres southwest, close to twenty minutes on foot. Kako Bus and Shinki Bus services stop at Inaya, a two-minute walk from the torii. Parking is available in front of the shrine. The shrine office can be reached on 079-422-4813.

Photographing the exterior is not restricted in ordinary circumstances, though it is courteous to stop during rites and to leave worshippers out of frame. The shrine is reported to hold a summer festival in July and an autumn festival in October, each on the second Sunday. Those are the days the storehouse doors open and the building does what it was made for, so anyone travelling for them should confirm dates with the shrine first.

Once you are on the ground, the noh stage south of the kagura hall repays a few minutes. Its ceiling is left as keshō-yaneura, an exposed decorative underside, with the beam frame visible overhead.