Yamanaka Oil Store Inuizo

The Oldest Building on the Plot

Yamanaka Aburaten Inuigura (山中油店戌亥蔵, the northwest storehouse of the Yamanaka oil shop), standing at 508 Shimomaruya-cho in Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, is an earthen-walled storehouse built during the Bunsei era of the late Edo period, and it became a nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 31 July 2007.

Of the three registered buildings on this plot, this one is almost certainly the earliest. The national database gives its date as the Bunsei era, 1818 to 1829, with alterations in 1927. Yamanaka Cooking Oil records its own founding at this address during those same Bunsei years. The storehouse and the business, in other words, appear to be contemporaries.

It measures six and a half ken along the ridge and two and a half across, a long thin box oriented east to west, with a gabled roof of sangawara pantile. Floor area is 62 square metres. The national register classes it under housing rather than industry, which reflects its role as a private outbuilding rather than a shopfront.

Why a Merchant of Oil Built in Earth

Dozo construction wraps a timber frame in layer upon layer of earthen plaster, sometimes thirty centimetres thick, then finishes the outside in white lime. The walls are heavy and slow to build. What they buy you is fire resistance.

Kyoto burned with grim regularity. The Great Tenmei Fire of 1788 destroyed most of the city centre, and the fires of 1864 did similar damage a lifetime later. A merchant in this quarter had to assume that the timber house at the front of the plot might not survive the century. The storehouse at the back was the insurance policy.

There is a sharper reason here than mere prudence. Yamanaka dealt in oil. Rapeseed and sesame oil are flammable, and a stock of it sitting in a wooden shed in a densely built quarter would have been an unacceptable risk to everyone on the street. Building in earth was not decoration; it was the condition on which the trade could be carried on at this address at all.

The company describes itself as a merchant rather than a producer: oil was pressed by makers outside the city, brought in, and sold from the centre. That makes this building a warehouse for bought stock, not a workshop. Nothing was made here. Things were kept here, safely.

Inui: Reading a Building's Name as a Compass Bearing

The name carries no family reference and no poetry. Inui combines the Dog and the Boar, the eleventh and twelfth signs of the Chinese zodiac, which in the old Japanese system of bearings occupy the segments of the horizon between west and north. The point between them is northwest, and the building stands at the northwest corner of the plot.

Its counterpart across the site is named on the same logic. Tatsumi pairs the Dragon and the Snake, which sit between east and south, so the Tatsumigura occupies the southeast corner. Merchant households used this system as a matter of course, and it produces names that function as addresses: anyone familiar with the convention knows where to walk.

The two storehouses also differ in date by roughly eighty years. The Inuigura belongs to the 1820s, the Tatsumigura to 1900, and the contrast between them records how one family's premises grew.

Details Recorded in the Official Description

The interior is divided into two rooms, each with its own doorway on the south side, closed by double-leaf doors finished in plaster. Two entrances rather than one suggests two categories of stock kept apart, or two households sharing the space at some point in its history.

The eastern room has a mezzanine floor laid in above it, gaining storage volume without raising the roof.

Above, the roof frame is built up with beams doubled one over another and short posts standing between them. The neighbouring Tatsumigura is framed differently, with rafters pitched off a ridge beam. The two buildings solve the same problem by different means, which is the kind of thing that tells a carpenter more about a date than a signature would.

Outside, the walls are finished in white lime plaster above and boards below. The lower band, the koshi, is faced in charred boarding. Scorching the surface of cedar leaves a carbon layer that resists water, rot and insects, and it darkens the plank to near black. Where the Tatsumigura uses plain vertical boarding at the same level, this building uses the charred kind, and the official description singles out the effect as the feature that catches the eye.

What You Can and Cannot See

This is the frank part. The Inuigura sits at the back northwest corner of a private plot. It cannot be seen from Shimodachiuri Street, the interior is not open, and there is no scheduled public opening. Registration under the 1996 system does not carry any obligation to admit visitors, and most registered buildings in Japan are simply private property that happens to be listed.

What is available to a visitor who comes to the address is worth knowing all the same.

• The shop in the main house is open 8:30 to 17:00, closed Sundays and national holidays, with longer breaks at New Year and Obon. Entry is free and the earthen-floored passage of an Edo period machiya is visible from inside.
• The Tatsumigura, the other registered storehouse, shows its white gable end from the street across a small garden to the east of the shop, so at least one of the two storehouses is genuinely viewable.
• That same garden holds a stone marker and board for the site of the Ippon Goshodokoro, a Heian court office that kept single manuscript copies of circulating books, along with a pond and a water wheel.
• Across the street, the company operates a machiya lodging house at number 512. It is not a registered property itself, but guests look out at the main house through its own plastered attic window.

To get here, take a city bus to the Marutamachi-Chiekoin stop and walk three minutes; from Kyoto Station, the Karasuma subway to Marutamachi first. Route 10 from Keihan Sanjo reaches the same stop. Photographing the street frontage is unproblematic. Attempting to see or photograph the rear of the plot is not appropriate, and asking at the counter is the correct approach if the building interests you seriously.