Yamanaka Oil Store Main Building

A Working Shop That Is Also a Protected Building

Yamanaka Aburaten Shuoku (山中油店主屋, the main house of the Yamanaka oil shop), at 508 Shimomaruya-cho on Shimodachiuri Street in Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, is a late Edo period merchant townhouse (also read Omoya outside the national register) that became a nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 31 July 2007.

The building faces south onto a narrow street, and its frontage is unusually wide for a Kyoto townhouse: nine ken, the traditional bay unit of roughly 1.8 metres, which works out to something close to sixteen metres of continuous timber, plaster and lattice. Recorded floor area is 326 square metres.

What makes it worth a detour is that nothing about it has been converted into a museum. Yamanaka Cooking Oil still trades here six days a week. Bottles of rapeseed, sesame, camellia and imported olive oil sit on shelves inside a structure that predates the arrival of the first foreign ships in Japanese harbours.

The national database classes the building under tertiary industry rather than housing, and that small bureaucratic detail is accurate: this was built as a shop.

Registered, Not Designated: What the Difference Means

Japan protects historic buildings through two parallel systems, and confusing them leads to overstated claims. Designation (shitei) covers National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, applies to a small number of buildings of the highest importance, and requires government permission before almost any alteration.

Registration (toroku) is the lighter instrument, introduced by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. It was created for exactly this kind of building: privately owned, roughly fifty years old or more, still in daily use, and valuable as ordinary fabric of a historic streetscape rather than as a singular monument. Owners notify the authorities of changes instead of applying for permission, which is what allows a registered building to keep functioning as a business.

The main house was registered under number 26-0258 in the fifty-fifth round of registrations, with public notice given on 13 August 2007. The criterion cited is that the building is a model of its form, the strictest of the three grounds available under the system.

Two storehouses on the same plot were registered on the same day, the Inuigura at the northwest corner and the Tatsumigura at the southeast, numbered 26-0260 and 26-0259. Those two were registered on a different ground: contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The distinction is deliberate. The house was judged exemplary in itself; the storehouses were judged valuable for what they do to the scene around them.

Reading the Facade

Stand on the opposite pavement and the front of the building resolves into a set of devices, each with a job.

• Battari shogi: a bench hinged to the facade that folds down to display goods and folds flat when the shop closes. Few survive in working condition.
• Shitomi: hinged wooden shutters, an older form of closure than the sliding panels that replaced them in most machiya.
• Degoshi: a projecting latticed bay window, which lets those inside watch the street while remaining hard to see from outside.
• Kazari-mado: a decorative window, included in the official description of the building.
• Mushiko-mado: literally insect-cage windows, thick plaster-covered bars set into the low upper storey.

That upper storey is the tsushi nikai, a half-height attic floor. The building is officially recorded as single-storey because the tsushi is too low to count. A guide will often tell you the ceilings were kept low so that townspeople could not look down on a passing daimyo procession. Treat that as the traditional explanation rather than documented fact; the more prosaic reasons include storage, ventilation and the cost of a full second floor.

The roof is gabled and covered with sangawara, the flat pantile that became standard in Kyoto during the Edo period. Eaves run along both the front and the rear, and a lower roofed section continues off the back to the north.

The Plan Inside, and What the Shop Does Not Claim

The interior divides lengthwise. The western half is a tori-doma, an earthen-floored passage running from the street straight through to the rear of the plot, which historically served as workspace, corridor and kitchen at once. The eastern half holds two parallel rows of rooms, and at the far north end sits a ten-mat formal reception room.

Walk in as a customer and you see part of this directly. The earthen floor is still there underfoot in places.

One thing the shop is careful about, and it is worth repeating because visitors get it wrong: Yamanaka has always been a merchant, not a producer. By the company's own account, pressing oil was noisy and pungent work unsuited to a dense residential quarter, so oil was bought from producers outside the city and sold from here in the centre. Old implements displayed indoors are relics of the oil trade, not evidence of a press operating on the premises.

The founder, recorded as Heibei, opened the business at this address during the Bunsei era, between 1818 and 1830. The company was incorporated in 2002 and is currently headed by Keiko Yamanaka.

Visiting, and What Else Is on the Plot

The shop opens 8:30 to 17:00 and closes on Sundays and national holidays, with longer closures at New Year and around Obon in August. There is no admission charge and no ticket, because this is a shop rather than a visitor attraction. Buying a bottle of sesame oil is the natural way to spend time inside without feeling like an intruder. Staff speak limited English but are used to foreign customers, and the products carry English labelling in part.

Photography of the exterior from the street raises no issue. For the interior, ask first: this is someone's business and the answer may depend on how busy the counter is.

To the east of the shop, on the same plot, a stone marker and an explanatory board stand beside a small pond garden with a water wheel. The marker records the site of the Ippon Goshodokoro, a Heian court office that kept single manuscript copies of books in circulation. Accounts drawn from the war tale Heiji Monogatari place the confinement of Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa and Emperor Nijo at this office during the disturbance of 1159, and the episode is repeated on local signage; it is a traditional account rather than an archaeologically confirmed one. A second marker for the Heian palace inner enclosure stands across the street.

Getting here takes a bus. From Kyoto Station, the Karasuma subway line to Marutamachi, then a city bus to the Marutamachi-Chiekoin stop, three minutes on foot. From Keihan Sanjo, city bus route 10 to the same stop, about four minutes' walk. From Hankyu Omiya, a bus to Senbon-Marutamachi, five minutes. Walking from Nijo Station on the subway or JR takes roughly fifteen minutes. Parking is available across Shimodachiuri Street and a short way west.

Nijo Castle lies about a kilometre southeast, and the Kyoto Imperial Palace grounds a similar distance east, so the shop fits neatly into a morning spent in this part of Kamigyo.