Yamanaka Oil Store Tatsumi Brewery

The One You Can Actually See

Yamanaka Aburaten Tatsumigura (山中油店辰巳蔵, the southeast storehouse of the Yamanaka oil shop), at 508 Shimomaruya-cho in Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, is an earthen-walled storehouse built in 1900 during the Meiji period, and it became a nationally Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 31 July 2007.

Three buildings on this plot carry registration. Two of them are storehouses, and this is the one a passer-by can appreciate without entering anything. It stands at the southeast corner of the site, east of the main house, and its gable end faces the street across a small garden. The official description written for the register ends with an aesthetic judgement, which official descriptions rarely do: the gable wall shown from the street across the garden is beautiful.

The building runs four and a half ken along the ridge by three across, oriented north to south, gabled and covered in sangawara pantile. Floor area is 45 square metres, making it the smallest of the three. The doorway is on the west face, sheltered by a narrow eave of sheet iron.

Moved in 1971: A Note on Hikiya

The register records two dates for this building. Construction in 1900, and a relocation in 1971.

The word used is hikiya, house-pulling, and it describes a practice that surprises visitors who assume a heavy earthen-walled structure must stay where it was built. The building is cut free of its foundation, jacked up as a whole, set on rails or rollers, and drawn to a new position, then lowered onto a new base. The frame is never taken apart. Practitioners have moved timber halls of considerable size this way, and the trade still exists in Japan, though it is small.

For a dozo storehouse the operation is delicate. Thick earthen walls crack readily under uneven load, so the lifting has to be even and slow.

The register does not state why the move was made. Relocations of this period were commonly prompted by road widening, replanning of a plot, or the construction of something new on the old footprint, but any specific explanation here would be invention. It also means one thing worth being clear about: the position this building now occupies, the southeast corner that gives it its name, may or may not be where it stood in 1900. The database records the move without recording the route.

That the relocation appears in the register at all is itself informative. A moved building can still be registered, because the registration system weighs the surviving fabric and the building's contribution to its setting rather than insisting on an unbroken relationship to one patch of ground.

Why the Criterion Fits This Building Exactly

Three grounds are available for registration under the system introduced in 1996. The main house on this plot was registered as a model of its form. This storehouse and its counterpart at the northwest corner were registered on a different ground: contribution to the historic landscape of the nation.

Stand on Shimodachiuri Street and the logic becomes visible. The garden east of the shop is open to the street. In it stand a stone marker and an explanatory board for the site of the Ippon Goshodokoro, a Heian court office that held single manuscript copies of books in circulation, along with a pond of arranged stones and a water wheel that the shop uses as its emblem. Behind all of this rises the white plastered gable of the storehouse.

The building is not a monument you visit. It is the back wall of a scene that anyone walking down this street receives for free. That is what the criterion is for.

Details Worth Looking For

• The gable wall: white lime plaster over thick earth, unbroken by openings on the side that faces the street, which is why it reads as a clean geometric shape rather than as a facade.
• The lower band: faced in vertical boarding. The Inuigura at the far corner uses charred boarding at the same level, a darker and rougher finish. Two storehouses on one plot, two answers to the same detail.
• The west doorway: single entrance with a sheet-iron eave above it. Compare the Inuigura, which has two doorways on its south face with double-leaf plastered doors.
• The roof frame: rafters pitched off a ridge beam laid low in the structure. The Inuigura instead doubles its beams with short posts standing between. Different carpenters, eighty years apart.

The roof pitch and the pantile are ordinary for their date, which is part of the point. Nothing here is showing off.

Visiting

There is no admission and no interior access. The storehouse remains private working property, and registration under the 1996 system imposes no duty to open. What is on offer is the view from the public pavement, and it costs nothing and requires no timing.

The garden and the gable can be seen at any hour, though the light falls best on a south-facing plot in the late afternoon. If you want to combine the view with the inside of the main house, come during shop hours: 8:30 to 17:00, closed Sundays and national holidays, with longer closures at New Year and around Obon. The shop sells rapeseed, sesame and camellia oils along with imported olive oil, and entering costs nothing.

Photography from the street is fine. Do not walk into the garden without asking; it is part of a private plot even though the marker in it is a public historic site.

Access is by bus. From Kyoto Station, take the Karasuma subway line to Marutamachi, then a city bus to the Marutamachi-Chiekoin stop, three minutes on foot. City bus route 10 from Keihan Sanjo reaches the same stop in about four minutes' walk. From Hankyu Omiya, buses run to Senbon-Marutamachi, five minutes away. Walking from Nijo Station takes around fifteen minutes. Parking is available opposite the shop.

A marker for the Heian palace inner enclosure stands across the street, and Nijo Castle is about a kilometre to the southeast, so the corner rewards a slow walk rather than a quick stop.