Fukushimaya Sugar Store and Residence

A Sugar Merchant's House Built After the Fire

The Fukushimaya Sugar Shop and Residence (福島屋砂糖店店舗兼住宅, Fukushimaya Satōten Tenpo-ken-Jūtaku) is a two-storey merchant building at 3-4-20 Kokufu in Ishioka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, completed in 1931 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 July 2003.

It sits on Nakamachi Street, the old commercial spine of a castle-adjacent town that once served as the provincial capital of Hitachi Province. In March 1929 a fire tore through this district and left the merchants of Ishioka with a decision to make about how to rebuild. Most of them chose the style then sweeping through provincial Japan: a timber frame behind a flat street-facing wall finished in mortar or copper sheet, shaped into cornices and pilasters borrowed from Western architecture. Japanese architectural historians later named the type kanban kenchiku, or signboard architecture.

The Fukushimaya went a different way.

Instead of the light, theatrical front used by its neighbours, the sugar wholesaler put up a building with the heavy proportions of an older merchant house: a gabled roof of pantiles laid with the ridge built up high, a lower eaves canopy running the width of the ground floor, and a deep black wall. The result is a building that looks a generation older than it actually is.

The Wall That Earned the Registration

The registration file gives the criterion as difficulty of reproduction, and the reason lies in something not obvious from across the street. What appears to be the standard black plaster of a traditional merchant house is in fact concrete.

Merchant buildings of this scale almost always used earthen walls finished with lime plaster. Concrete in 1931 was a material for bridges, silos and government offices, not for the front of a sugar shop in a market town of forty thousand people. Someone in the Fukushima family, or the carpenter they hired, decided to use it anyway and then finished it black so that it would read as tradition.

The building covers 146 square metres of ground and counts as a single structure in the register. Its registration number is 08-0075, issued in the thirty-seventh round of registrations, with the public notice following on 17 July 2003.

Ishioka has around nineteen registered buildings, nearly all of them products of the same post-fire rebuilding. Seen against that group, the Fukushimaya is the one that refused the fashion of its moment and reached for permanence instead.

What to Look For From the Street

Start with the roofline. The ridge tiles are stacked into a thick band that gives the whole facade its weight, a detail that costs money and announces it.

Drop your eye to the second-floor eaves. The projecting purlin is worked into three stepped tiers, a moulding treatment that catches raking light in the late afternoon and reads almost as a Western cornice while using entirely Japanese carpentry. This is the detail most visitors walk past.

Then look at the surface of the wall itself. Concrete does not weather the way plaster does. Where lime plaster crazes into fine hairlines and flakes, this wall has aged in broader, flatter patches, and up close the texture is subtly wrong for what your eye expects from a prewar merchant house.

The ground floor keeps the deep canopy that shelters shoppers standing at the shopfront, an arrangement almost every building on this street shares in some form.

Two doors along stand the Jūshichiya Footwear Shop and the Hisamatsu Store, both from 1930, both registered, and both textbook signboard architecture with their vertical window banks and applied capitals. Standing between them and the Fukushimaya, you can see two answers to the same fire, given by neighbours, within a year of each other.

Visiting Nakamachi Street

The building is in commercial use and remains in private hands. There is no admission charge and no ticket office, because there is nothing to buy a ticket for: the exterior is the exhibit, visible at any hour from the public street. When the shop is open, ordinary customers go in as customers, and courtesy suggests treating it as a working business rather than a museum.

Photography from the street is unrestricted. Photographing shop interiors or the occupants calls for asking first.

From JR Ishioka Station on the Jōban Line, walk west along the station approach for roughly seven minutes to reach Nakamachi Street, then turn and continue a few minutes more. The whole walk runs about ten minutes on flat ground.

Chōjiya, a late-Edo merchant house that survived the 1929 fire and now operates as the visitor centre Machikura Ai, is a useful first stop and sits a short distance along the same street. Ishioka Station's tourist information desk hands out a walking map marking each registered building.

Late February and early March bring the Ishioka Hina Doll Walk, when shops along the street display seasonal doll sets in their windows. Mid-September brings the great festival of Hitachi no Kuni Sōsha-gū, one of the largest in the Kantō region, and the street fills with float processions.