Fukoe Family Residence Barn

Two Sheds Counted as One Property

The Barn of the Fukoe Residence (普光江家住宅納屋, also romanised Fukōe-ke Jūtaku Naya) is an early Meiji era outbuilding at 2051 Tano, Aki District, Kōchi Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 December 2003 under registration number 39-0102.

The register counts it as a single item, yet the building is two. Both sheds measure two and a half ken along the ridge by one and a half ken in depth, sit with their ridges running east to west, and carry gabled roofs of sangawara pan tiles over a single timber storey. Combined building area is 27 square metres, which is small even by the standards of service buildings. The Agency for Cultural Affairs treats them as one registered structure because they were built and used as one facility.

They are not identical. The east shed sits with its ridge slightly lower than the west shed's, so the two roofs step down rather than align, and the east shed is roofed with hidari-gawara, left-handed pan tiles.

The Left-Handed Roof, and Where Everything Stands

A standard pan tile carries its raised roll on the right. The left-handed version is the mirror image, laid so the overlaps run the opposite way across the roof. Roofers of the older generation chose between the two according to which direction the wind drove the rain across a given slope, and gabled roofs were sometimes tiled right-handed on one face and left-handed on the other. Finding a left-handed roof on the smaller of two adjacent sheds is the kind of detail that survives only where nobody has re-roofed wholesale.

The four registered Fukoe buildings sit in a legible arrangement, and the barns anchor its far corner. The main house presents its length to the road on the north, its east wing holding the counter and living rooms, its west wing the shop. Behind the east wing, to the south, stands the storehouse, a plastered dozō of 19 square metres with water-cutting tiles at its gable and above the lean-to shelter across its north face. The barns lie south of the west wing and west of the storehouse, filling the back corner of the plot.

Read as a plan, that is a working merchant property in miniature: trade at the street edge, valuables in the fireproof storehouse behind the family rooms, and bulk goods and tools in the cheapest structures at the rear. The Agency's own description of the barns puts it plainly, calling them plain in construction yet indispensable to the rear arrangement of a merchant house.

Why the Register Bothers With Sheds

Designation as an Important Cultural Property is reserved for the exceptional. The register of Tangible Cultural Properties, created by a 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, was built for a different purpose. It covers structures generally more than fifty years old, operates through notification rather than permission, and allows owners to keep using and modifying their buildings within limits. It exists because Japan's stock of Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa buildings was vanishing far faster than any designation programme could examine it, and because a townscape is made of ordinary buildings as much as remarkable ones.

The barns were registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, the same criterion applied to the west wing of the main house. On 1 December 2003 the town of Tano registered thirty buildings across eleven properties in one action, an unusual concentration for a municipality of 6.53 square kilometres, the smallest in Shikoku. Tano earned that density in the Edo period, when it held the Aki district magistrate's office and the domain school Tano Gakkan and served as the commercial centre of eastern Tosa.

The Fukoe property remains a private residence and is not open to the public. There is no admission fee, no opening hours and no interior access. The barns stand toward the rear of the plot and are difficult to see from the road, so a visitor's realistic view is of the main house frontage. Photography from the public road is unrestricted; entering the grounds is not appropriate.

Tano Station on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line lies about ten minutes away on foot, with a roadside station selling local produce attached to it. Along the same street, Oka Goten, the 1844 mansion of the Oka merchant family that served as the lodging of the Tosa lords, is a prefecturally designated cultural property, open to visitors, 500 yen for adults. Its preserved storehouse and reception rooms show at full scale what the Fukoe outbuildings show in compressed form.