Kuretake Bunko Storehouse

About the Kuretake Bunko Storehouse

The Kuretake Bunko Storehouse (呉竹文庫土蔵, Kuretake Bunko Dozō) is a two-storey Dozo-zukuri earthen storehouse built around 1889 at Kuretake Bunko in Minatomachi, Hakusan City, Ishikawa Prefecture, renovated in 1990, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on June 29, 2022. It has a tiled roof and a footprint of 51 square meters.

The Kuretake Bunko Storehouse was built to hold the Kumada family's kimono. It was already standing before Kumada Gentarō opened his books to the public in 1915, which makes it the oldest of the four registered buildings at Kuretake Bunko. The library's leaflet notes that three more storehouses stood on the property during the Meiji and Taishō eras. Today it serves as the museum's exhibition room.

Why It Was Registered

The Kuretake Bunko Storehouse was registered as a model of architectural form. The Agency for Cultural Affairs points to the different wall finishes on its faces and to the imposing doorway with its plaster relief and torii-shaped frame.

Most of the buildings at Kuretake Bunko were built or rebuilt for the library. The storehouse alone belongs to the earlier life of a Kitamaebune shipowning household, and it is the clearest trace of the Kumada family as it was before the library existed.

Wall Finishes and the Great Doorway

The Kuretake Bunko Storehouse has a Kirizuma-zukuri gabled roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles, entered on the long side in the Hirairi manner. Only the west face has a stone-clad lower wall; the other faces are covered in overlapping Shitami-itabari clapboards. Walking around it, each side looks different.

Inside, each floor is a single room with a plank floor. The highlight is the ground-floor doorway, where Kakegonuri stepped-edge fire doors decorated with Kote-e plaster relief sit within a heavy frame of posts and crossbeams shaped like a torii gate. Fire doors like these were where a plasterer could show off his skill, and they reveal how prosperous the Kumada household was.

In the ground-floor exhibition room the posts and the horizontal tie beams (nuki) are left exposed on the walls, so the Meiji-era frame of the storehouse can be read from inside.

Visiting the Kuretake Bunko Storehouse

The Kuretake Bunko Storehouse is connected to the rest of the museum by a corridor, and an admission ticket gives access to the exhibition room on its ground floor. The displays rotate several times a year and draw on Gentarō's collection: paintings and calligraphy, crafts, documents on shipping, mining and domain government, and rare books. In 2026 the exhibition room is showing picture postcards from around Japan, mostly of the Taishō era, from September 26 to November 29.

Photography is not allowed inside, and the exhibits should not be touched, so take a close look at the plasterwork and the torii frame of the doorway while you are there. The library's guide does not say if the upper floor can be visited. Opening hours and directions are on the Kuretake Bunko page.