Storehouse of the Araki Family Residence (Former Hayashi Family Residence)

Sixteen Square Metres of Plastered Wall

The Storehouse of the Araki Family Residence (荒木家住宅（旧林家住宅）土蔵, also written Araki-ke Jūtaku Dozō, formerly the Hayashi Family Residence) is a two-storey earthen-walled kura in Shichiku Seinan-chō, Kita Ward, Kyoto, dated to the late Edo period and placed on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2007.

It stands behind the main house, set toward the western side of the plot, and its ridge runs east to west. The building covers sixteen square metres. That is a small footprint by any measure, roughly the area of a modest bedroom, yet it carries two floors and a full tiled roof.

Storehouses of this type, called dozō, were the fireproof heart of a Japanese household. Kyoto burned repeatedly across its history, and a family that could afford one built thick walls of clay over a timber frame and finished them in lime plaster. Textiles, documents, tableware, seasonal furnishings and anything else worth keeping went inside. The house might be lost. The kura, with luck, would not.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns the building to the late Edo period, giving a range of 1751 to 1829. The main house in front of it is dated precisely to 1807, which falls inside that span, so the two may well have gone up within a generation of each other. The record does not permit a firmer statement than that.

A Roof That Sits Rather Than Binds

The technical interest of this small building lies in how its roof is put together, and it is worth spelling out because the arrangement is easy to miss from outside.

The roof is an okiyane, a term meaning roof that is placed. Instead of framing the roof into the earthen structure below as an integral part of it, builders raised a separate timber roof and set it over the plastered box. The reason is practical. Clay walls need to stay dry, and a roof that overhangs generously keeps rain off them. An air gap between the top of the walls and the underside of the roof also lets heat escape, which matters when the contents are silk or paper. If fire took the roof, the box beneath could survive and be re-covered.

Above that sits a kirizuma gable clad in sangawara pantiles, the same tile type used on the main house.

Now the detail that a carpenter would notice. The roof frame carries no beams. In ordinary Japanese roof construction, horizontal beams span the width of the building and short posts rise from them to support the purlins and the ridge. Here that intermediate layer is absent: the posts themselves rise to receive the moya purlins and the munagi ridge beam directly. The building is only one and a half ken along its length and two ken across, something like 2.7 by 3.6 metres, and at that span the usual beam is surplus to requirement. The result is a frame reduced to what the loads actually demand.

This is the kind of economy that rarely survives in larger, more prestigious buildings, where structural redundancy and display both push toward heavier framing. In a household storehouse, no one was watching. The carpenter built what worked.

The White Wall, the Small Window, the Tiled Hood

The exterior finish is shirosikkui, white lime plaster, applied over the clay wall core. It weatherproofs the earth beneath and reflects heat, and its brightness against a dark tiled roof gives the Japanese storehouse its familiar silhouette.

Openings are kept to a minimum. A single window pierces the south face at second-floor level. The doorway, also on the south, carries its own small tiled pent roof, a hisashi, which shelters the entrance and stops water running down the plaster around the frame. Every opening in a kura is a weakness in both the fire barrier and the moisture barrier, which is why there are so few.

The official Agency for Cultural Affairs description ends by calling the building trim and well-proportioned despite its small scale, an unusually appreciative note in a database that mostly confines itself to dimensions and dates.

The storehouse was registered under number 26-0255 in the 55th round, with a registration date of 31 July 2007 and gazette notice on 13 August 2007. The main house received number 26-0254 on the same day. The registration criterion applied was the first of the three, covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape, which places the value of this kura in its role within the surviving Shichiku streetscape rather than in any claim to singularity.

Practical Notes for Visitors

The Araki Family Residence is a private, occupied home, and the storehouse is not open to the public. There are no visiting hours, no admission fee and no interior access. Because the kura stands behind the main house on the western part of the plot, it is also substantially harder to see from the road than the main house is; visitors should not expect a clear view, and should not enter the property to look for one.

The address is 17-1 Shichiku Seinan-chō, Kita-ku, Kyoto. Kitaōji Station on the Karasuma subway line lies about twenty to twenty-five minutes' walk to the south-east, and city buses along Kitaōji-dōri and Ōmiya-dōri come closer. Photography from the public road is unrestricted, though this is a residential street and discretion is expected. Anyone wanting to examine a Kyoto storehouse at close range will do better at one of the city's publicly opened machiya, several of which retain their kura and admit visitors; Daitoku-ji and its sub-temple gardens, a short walk south, make an obvious pairing for the same outing.