Aoki Family Storehouse

A Thirteen-Square-Metre Building That Makes a Garden

The Storehouse of the Aoki Family Residence (青木家住宅土蔵, Aoki-ke Jūtaku Dozō) is a two-storey mud-walled kura of 1930 standing in Fukunaga-cho, Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto, and it was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties (Registered Tangible Cultural Property, 登録有形文化財) on 7 October 2014.

It measures 3.9 metres along the ridge and 3.0 metres across, with a recorded building area of 13 square metres. The ridge runs north to south. It sits behind the main house of the same property, separated from it by a courtyard, and its west face carries the doorway.

A dozō is built by packing thick earth over a timber frame and finishing the surface in shikkui, a lime plaster. The technique was developed against fire, and in a city that burned as often as Kyoto did, the kura was where a household kept anything it could not afford to lose. This one is small enough that two people would fill the ground floor. The Agency for Cultural Affairs description ends by noting that it faces the sukiya-style main house and creates a garden space of quality, and that sentence is the reason the building is on the register.

Registered for the Landscape It Helps Make

Japan's registration system offers three criteria, and a building is listed under the one it meets. The main house of the Aoki property was registered as a model of design. The storehouse was registered under a different heading: that it contributes to the historical landscape of the country (国土の歴史的景観に寄与しているもの). Its registration number is 26-0460, immediately following the main house at 26-0459, both in the 78th round.

The distinction is worth pausing over. A storehouse of thirteen square metres is not going to be praised for the ingenuity of its plan. Its value lies in what it does to the space between itself and the house. Kyoto's long, narrow merchant plots have produced courtyards for centuries, and the standard ingredients are a main building, a kura at the rear, and a strip of ground between them planted and gravelled into a garden that supplies light and air to rooms with no other outside wall.

One detail separates this example from the general pattern. Both buildings date from 1930. Many Kyoto kura are older than the houses they stand behind, having survived while everything in front of them was rebuilt. Here the storehouse and the sukiya house went up together, which means the courtyard between them was composed rather than inherited. The white plastered wall of the kura, catching afternoon light on its east-facing side of the yard, was part of the design brief.

Reading the Details, and Visiting the Area

The gabled roof is covered in sangawara, the interlocking pantile that became standard across urban Japan in the Edo period and stayed standard afterwards. The doorway on the west face is closed by an iron door, the fireproof fitting that a plastered wall would be pointless without, and a lean-to roof, a shitanoya, projects over it to keep rain off both the door and the plaster around it. A raised plaster band called a hachimaki runs around the walls. On the upper floor, a single window is cut into the west face.

The arithmetic of the recorded dimensions is mildly interesting: 3.9 by 3.0 metres gives about 11.7 square metres, while the registered building area is 13. The difference is most likely accounted for by the lean-to over the entrance.

None of this can be inspected in person. The property is privately owned and listed in Kyoto City's records simply under an individual, with no opening hours, no admission and no visiting scheme. The storehouse stands behind the main house across an interior courtyard, so unlike the house it is not visible from the street at all. Visitors should not enter the grounds or photograph over walls.

The street itself is worth the detour if you are already nearby. Tomikoji Street north of Sanjo lies about five minutes on foot from Kyoto Shiyakusho-mae Station on the Tozai subway line, and the same block holds the Hayami Family Residence, registered in March 2015, whose Inui storehouse dates from 1862. For a plastered storehouse you can actually walk into, the Museum of Kyoto Annex a few blocks west retains the old vault of the 1906 Bank of Japan branch, an Important Cultural Property since 1969, now in use as a coffee shop.