Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House

A wide shopfront on the Kujiragaoka ridge

Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House is a late Edo-period merchant property at 2177 Nishini-cho, Hitachiota City, Ibaraki Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2021 (Reiwa 3).

The property is a pair of connected buildings on one plot. The shop block faces east onto the street; the main house sits directly behind it and joins it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the construction to the closing decades of the Edo period, between 1830 and 1868, and records the whole as a timber, two-storey, tile-roofed structure with a building area of 269 square metres.

Its setting is a narrow plateau in the old centre of Hitachiota, roughly 38 metres above the surrounding land and shaped like a horse's back. Locals call it Kujiragaoka, the whale hill, because of that profile. The shop stands on the ridge road south of the site of Ota Castle, in the stretch where the merchant frontages run continuously.

Why the Tachikawa property is on the national register

Registration took effect on 26 February 2021 under registration number 08-0314, in the 98th round, with the notification issued the same day. The criterion applied was that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country, and the registration text names the reason directly: a wide-fronted shop that shapes the appearance of the street.

Frontage width is the measure that mattered in a merchant town, because it was taxed and therefore hoarded. A house that kept a broad frontage kept it at cost. The Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House holds one of the widest on the ridge, and because the row is otherwise continuous, that width sets the rhythm for everything on either side of it.

The Tachikawa family traces its arrival in Ota to 1595, when, by family tradition, it moved from the Musashi region and entered the service of the Satake clan. Accounts of when the business began differ. Hitachiota City puts the founding in the Horeki era, 1751 to 1763, and says the trade was sake brewing through the Edo period, turning to soy sauce after the Meiji Restoration. The firm's own chronology places the first head, Jirozaemon Motonao, at the start of sake and soy sauce making around 1702, and dates the end of sake brewing to about 1882, when insect damage to the casks settled the matter. The two accounts are not reconcilable from published sources, and both are given here as they stand.

What to look at

The shop block of the Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House is built as Tsushi-nikai, with a low half-storey above the ground floor under a Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles. A Geya lean-to runs the full width of the front. The southern half of the ground floor is Doma, beaten earth, with a raised boarded platform pushed out into it to serve as the selling floor. That is the arrangement to look for when you step in: earth for the customer, boards for the goods and the scales.

Behind, the main house is fully two-storeyed, again gabled and pantiled, with lean-to additions along its north and south flanks. The two blocks read as one continuous depth from the street, which is how the plot has been worked for generations.

There is a discrepancy in the record worth knowing about. Hitachiota City states that the shop burned in the fire of 1859 and that the present shop was put up afterwards as temporary work, while the main house survived because it was built as a storehouse-style structure. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry describes the fabric only as timber with a tiled roof and does not mention storehouse construction. Both readings are on the record.

The family points visitors to the pillars of the main house, where sword cuts are said to remain from the night the Tengu-to forced their way in. That insurgency, the Tengu-to rebellion, broke out in 1864 and ran through this part of northern Ibaraki, so the tradition sits plausibly in its period even though the marks themselves carry no date.

Visiting the Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House

This is the rare registered building you can simply walk into, because it is still a working soy sauce business. The firm states that visitors who ask are free to look at the shop front and the main house behind it. Trading hours are 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and the shop is closed on Thursdays.

There is no admission fee and no guided tour. Ask at the counter before going through to the rear, and treat the interior as what it is: a private house attached to a working business, not an exhibition space. Photography of the street facade is unrestricted; for the interior and the pillars, ask first.

Hitachiota City holds an annual autumn event called Shuchu Bakuryo, in which cultural properties across the city are aired and opened together for a weekend, with student volunteers on hand to explain them. The Tachikawa Soy Sauce Store and Main House has featured among the Kujiragaoka venues. Dates are announced each year by the city's cultural affairs section.

Getting there is easy on foot. Hitachi-Ota Station on the JR Suigun Line is about 15 minutes' walk, or about 5 minutes by car, and the last part of the approach climbs onto the ridge. By road, the shop is roughly 15 minutes from the Hitachi-Minami Ota interchange and about 20 minutes from the Naka interchange on the Joban Expressway.