Hatta Shodayu Sake Shop Sumi-gura and Keshoshitsu

Eight and a Half Square Metres, and Fully Registered

The Sumi-gura and Keshoshitsu of the Hatta Shodayu Sake Shop (八太正太夫酒店角蔵及び化粧室, Hatta Shōdayū Saketen Sumi-gura oyobi Keshōshitsu) is a single-storey corner storehouse with an attached timber annex at 1094 Karasu-cho in Tsu City, Mie Prefecture, dated to around 1884 and registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 29 March 2013. Its building area is 8.5 square metres, which makes it by a wide margin the smallest of the four registered structures on this merchant compound.

Two facts about it are worth holding together. It is the size of a large garden shed. It also carries the most carefully detailed base of anything on the property.

A Corner Is a Design Problem

The building occupies the northwest corner of the compound, where the road turns and wraps around the site. That position exposes it to view from two directions at once, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary states plainly that its treatment was intended to compose the appearance seen from the encircling road.

The detailing bears this out. The foundation is tamaishi-zumi, laid up from rounded river cobbles, a technique that reads as rough and settled rather than machined. Above it, shitamiita weatherboarding rises to waist height, and a hachimaki, literally a headband, runs around the building as a horizontal plaster band capping the boarding. Three distinct horizontal registers stacked on a footprint smaller than a parking space.

Nobody applies that sequence to an outbuilding they expect to be ignored. The point of the corner storehouse is that the family treated the far end of their frontage as seriously as the shop itself.

What the Two Parts Are

The sumi-gura (角蔵), the corner storehouse, is single-storey dozo-zukuri, earthen-walled construction under a gabled roof of pantile, with its entrance opening in the west gable end.

Attached to it is the keshoshitsu (化粧室), a single-storey timber structure roofed in gabled sheet metal with some pantile. The register records that it functions as the kuramae for the storehouse, the fronting space through which the earthen vault is entered and worked. The word keshoshitsu in modern Japanese means a dressing room or washroom, and the national record does not explain the name here or specify what the space was used for. The safest description is the one the register itself gives: a small timber annex serving as the front room of the storehouse.

The sheet-metal roofing is worth a glance. Where the rest of the compound runs to pantile throughout, this one element switches material, the sort of substitution usually made on a subsidiary structure or during a later repair.

The fabric is dated to about 1884, Meiji 17, with repair work carried out in 2010. Alone among the four registered items here, this one carries a specific year rather than a period bracket, which suggests documentary evidence survived for it that did not survive for its neighbours. The register's structural field gives 8.5 square metres; the commentary rounds this to eight.

Why Something This Small Is Protected

Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties was created in 1996 to catch buildings that matter but would never clear the bar for Important Cultural Property designation. Registration applies to structures over fifty years old and asks owners to notify the authorities before major alteration, leaving day-to-day use in private hands. More than twelve thousand structures were on it as of April 2019, and the total has continued to climb.

This one was accepted under criterion one, contributing to the historic landscape of the nation, in the 74th round of registrations, holding number 24-0130. Its three siblings on the same compound took 24-0127 through 24-0129 in the same notification, and the four were assessed as a group forming a continuous street elevation on the western side of the site, running from south to north as the shimo-no-kura, the mukai-zashiki, the kuramae, the shop storehouse, and this corner storehouse at the far end.

Assessed alone, an 8.5 square metre shed would not qualify for anything. Assessed as the terminating element of a fifty-metre wall of white plaster and dark boarding, it does.

Visiting

The compound is privately owned and no public opening is listed in the national register, so there are no hours, no ticket and no interior access. Given the size of this particular building, that costs the visitor very little.

Approach from the north or west, where the road bends around the corner, and take in the base first: cobble foundation, boarding, plaster band, then the gable above. Then walk south along the frontage and watch the same three-part wall logic scale up across the larger buildings. The corner storehouse is the miniature statement of a formula repeated at full size down the length of the lane.

Photography from the public road is unrestricted. Do not enter the compound or shoot through openings; people live here.

Mie Kotsu bus route 32 from the east exit of Tsu Station reaches Karasu Jinja-mae in about 35 to 45 minutes, and route 21 from Hisai Station stops there as well. Buses are infrequent, so fix the return time before setting out. Takachaya on the JR Kisei Line lies roughly four kilometres away, and drivers can park free at Karasu Shrine, the sanctuary that gave this town its name in 1929 when the village of Yano took town status.