Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence

An Art Deco Front on Nakamachi Street

Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence (森戸文四郎商店店舗兼住宅) is a two-storey timber shop house of about 1930 on Nakamachi Street in Kokufu, Ishioka City, Ibaraki Prefecture, placed on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 19 September 2003. The street elevation is rendered in mortar and finished in a manner borrowed from Europe; everything behind it is a Japanese carpenter's building.

Walk along the street and the upper storey does the talking. Three pilaster bays sit at the centre, each holding a tall narrow window with relief work between them. Brown tiles face the pilasters at the two corners. The idiom is Art Deco, the decorative language fashionable in Europe and America in the early twentieth century, and it arrived here through pattern books and photographs rather than through any architect trained abroad.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the building as 1 building, 4 Ken across the front and 15 ken deep, roofed in steel sheet, with a building area of 153 square meters. Those proportions describe a plot far longer than it is wide, which is how the frontages along this street were divided.

The Signboard-Architecture Idea

Ishioka City describes kanban kenchiku, signboard architecture, as a form that spread through Tokyo and the surrounding Kanto region after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. The recipe is simple: take a wooden two-storey building combining shop and dwelling, raise the street facade vertically like a flat board, and clad that board in mortar, copper sheet or tile worked into Western ornament. The city's own account is careful to say that the ornament rarely follows classical Greek rules, and that the deviation is the point. Local craftsmen with no Western training reworked what they had seen into something of their own.

Timing matters for Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence. A large fire swept Ishioka in 1929, and the city's guide notes that shops along Nakamachi Street were rebuilt in signboard form afterwards. This building dates from around 1930, the year following that fire, so it belongs to the reconstruction rather than to what preceded it.

The city lists several survivors of the same episode nearby, among them a footwear shop, a cosmetics shop and a barber's. Registration under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country applies to Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence as one of a set. A single Art Deco facade is a curiosity. A street of them is a record of how a provincial town chose to rebuild.

Reading the Facade, and a Note on the Address

Stand across the road and read the front of Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence from the bottom up. The ground floor is opened wide, as a shop front should be. The board above it is where the money went. The relief panels between the three central pilasters catch raking light in the afternoon, and the brown tile at the corners changes the surface from render to something harder, marking where the composition stops.

The Ishioka Tourism Association records that the building was put up as a feed dealer's premises. Knowing that changes how the front reads. This was not a boutique. It was a business selling animal feed, and it still thought a designed facade was worth paying for.

One practical warning. The address is written differently by two reliable sources: the Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives 695-1 Kokufu 3-chome, while the Ibaraki Prefectural Board of Education gives Kokufu 3-2-6. The two systems, land-parcel numbering and residential address numbering, do not map onto each other cleanly. Navigate to Nakamachi Street rather than to a house number.

Visiting Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence

Morito Bunshiro Shoten Store and Residence is privately owned and the interior is not open. No admission is charged and no reservation exists, because the visit consists of standing on the pavement and looking at the front. That is not a limitation here. The facade was built to be seen from exactly that position.

From the west exit of Ishioka Station on the JR Joban Line, walk west along Miyuki-dori for roughly 5 minutes to reach Nakamachi Street, which carries Route 355. The registered buildings stand along it within a few minutes of each other, so plan a walk rather than a single stop.

Photography from the street is unrestricted, and the front is best in the afternoon when the sun comes round to the west and the relief work throws shadows. Morning light flattens it. If the premises are trading, keep out of the doorway.

Ishioka runs a volunteer guide association covering the town's registered buildings. Guiding is free of charge, with printing costs paid at cost, and advance telephone booking is advised; guides are stationed at the tourist information office beside the station on weekends and public holidays, so same-day requests are sometimes possible. Arrangements change, so confirm with the city before relying on them.