Nakamura Family Residence Upper Storehouse

The Building in the Photograph

Nakamura House Upper Storehouse (中村家住宅上の蔵, Kami-no-Kura) is a two-story earthen-walled storehouse at 52 Yawata Yamashiba, Yawata City, Kyoto Prefecture, built in 1917, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 August 2012.

Photographs of Ankobashi, the humpbacked wooden bridge over the Hojo River at the foot of Otokoyama, almost always contain this storehouse. It stands at the northwest corner of the Nakamura property, white-plastered above and boarded below, and it closes the far side of the composition. Visitors photograph it constantly without knowing its name.

That is worth stating plainly, because it explains the registration. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record ends its description of the building with the observation that it lends interest to the riverbank scenery before the shrine. The storehouse was not registered for rarity of type. Earthen storehouses of this size and date exist in the thousands. It was registered because of where it stands and what it does to a view that people were already looking at.

The property was built as a country villa for Amano (尼野貴之), proprietor of the Bentenza, one of the five theatres of Dotonbori in Osaka. The Nakamura family took it over in the early Showa period. Reporting at the time of registration noted that the storehouse's ridge tablet, together with the construction details, established the Taisho date.

Reading a Dozo

The storehouse measures 7.9 metres along the ridge and 5.9 metres across, two stories in dozo construction, under a gabled roof of pantiles. Dozo means thick walls of clay applied in layers over a bamboo lattice, finished in lime plaster. The point of the technique is fire. A merchant or landowner kept documents, textiles, and valuables in the storehouse precisely because the main house was expected to burn and the storehouse was not.

Several details on the outside are functional before they are decorative. Along the north face runs a course of mizukiri-gawara, drip tiles set into the wall to throw rainwater clear of the plaster below. Plaster fails when water runs down it, and the north wall gets the least sun and the most persistent damp. The lower portion of the wall carries vertical boarding to waist height, protecting the plaster where splash and knocks occur.

The doorway sits in the east gable end and is closed by a pair of tsuchido, doors clad in clay on a timber frame so that the opening, the weak point of any fireproof box, seals as thickly as the wall. In front of it the kurumae, the sheltered forecourt where goods were handled, is roofed in sheet iron.

The west gable has windows on both floors, each under a small pent roof. These matter more than they look. A sealed clay box holds humidity, and stored textiles rot; the openings admit air, and the pent roofs keep rain out of them while they are open.

One arithmetical note for the technically curious. A footprint of 7.9 by 5.9 metres yields roughly 47 square metres, while the registered building area is 60. The difference corresponds to the roofed forecourt in front of the door, which the survey appears to have counted. Reporting at the time of registration cited a smaller figure of 46 square metres, suggesting that the earlier number covered only the storehouse body.

Registered, Not Designated

Japan runs two systems side by side. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated: few in number, tightly regulated by permit, heavily supported. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties fall under a lighter framework created by the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, effective 1 October of that year, under which owners notify rather than seek permission. The system exists because buildings from the Meiji period onward were vanishing before anyone assessed them, and because a scheme demanding permits for every repair would have deterred the private owners who hold most of them.

Eligibility generally begins at fifty years of age, plus one of three criteria. The Upper Storehouse met the first, contribution to the historic landscape, as did the other two buildings registered here on the same day. For a building whose value lies in a view, the lighter regime is the appropriate instrument: it keeps the silhouette while letting the owner maintain and use the structure.

Seeing It

Look from Ankobashi. That is the whole instruction, and it is free, unrestricted, and available at any hour. Walk from Iwashimizu Hachimangu Station on the Keihan line, about six minutes, following the road toward the shrine until the wooden arched bridge appears on the left. Cross it and turn around. The storehouse gable, the bridge, the river, and the wooded slope of Otokoyama stack into the composition counted among the eight scenic views of Yawata. Photography from the bridge and the public riverside path is unrestricted.

Late afternoon light comes over the hill from behind the viewer and falls on the white plaster, which is when the wall reads best. After rain the drip tiles do their visible work.

The storehouse interior is not open. It stands within a private residence that now operates as a whole-house rental lodging, the reception building being the registered Daikado Hall, and guests use the house rather than the storehouse. Occasional short daytime openings have been arranged through the Yawata City Tourist Association, sometimes with music in the main hall, at modest cost and small capacity; these are irregular, so check the association's announcements.

If the storehouse leaves you wanting more of the same construction, the walk uphill offers a useful contrast. Iwashimizu Hachimangu Shrine, ten of whose main-precinct buildings became National Treasures in 2016, is reached on foot or by cable car from the same station. The shrine shows what full designation protects. The storehouse at the bottom of the hill shows what registration protects, which is often the setting that makes the monument legible.