Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum

What the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum Is

The Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum (伊勢河崎商人館, Ise Kawasaki Shōninkan) is the former premises of a sake wholesaler in the Kawasaki district of Ise City, Mie Prefecture, where 12 buildings raised between the Tempō era of the Edo period and the early Shōwa period were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2001. Ise City puts the site at 1,962.79 square metres with 1,057.86 square metres of floor area, holding 14 structures in all, among them 7 storehouses and 2 Machiya townhouses.

Three storehouses turn their backs on the Seta River. A main house faces the street. Small storehouses hide at the rear of the plot. What survives here is the accumulated building record of a single wholesale business over nearly two centuries, added to whenever the trade required it. Because each structure belongs to a different decade, a circuit of the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum runs from Tempō-era Dozo-zukuri earthen-walled construction through to reinforced concrete of the 1920s and 1930s.

The Seta River and the Kitchen of Ise

Kawasaki spreads along the middle reaches of the Seta River, which runs through the centre of Ise City. According to Ise City, the district grew as a wholesale quarter built on river transport, supplying food and household goods in bulk to the pilgrims who came to Ise Jingu, and this earned it the name "the kitchen of Ise." Storehouses and townhouses lined both banks, and cargo went straight from boat to storehouse. When road haulage displaced river traffic the wholesale trade declined, but the heavy storehouses and the townhouse frontages stayed.

The layout of the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum follows directly from that geography. The main house stands on the south side facing the street; the three storehouses opposite, across the street, present their backs to the river. The receiving side and the selling side of one business are separated by a single roadway.

From the Ogawa Sake Shop to a Museum

The Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum began as Ogawa Shōten, one of the leading merchant houses of Kawasaki and a wholesaler of sake. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a long-established sake wholesaling business said to have been founded in the Genroku era, which ran from 1688 to 1704. Sake was not the only line. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states that a cider plant was added to the business during the Showa period, while the museum's own account dates the bottling of its "S Cider" to 1909; the sources differ on the starting year. The wholesale trade continued until 1999.

The turning point came with the torrential rain of 1974. The Seta River burst its banks and flooded most of the built-up area, and the river improvement scheme that followed marked about 90 households in Kawasaki for removal. Ise City's own account records that residents who opposed the scheme, while working up an alternative, were told by visitors from outside how remarkable their streets were, and came to look at their town afresh. In 1979 citizens, the architects' association and others formed a society to nurture the history and culture of Ise Kawasaki, and the preservation campaign began in earnest.

In 1997 the city master plan designated Kawasaki a centre for historical and cultural exchange. Ise City bought the Ogawa land in 1999 and received the buildings as a donation; the nonprofit Ise Kawasaki Machizukuri-shu was founded in the same year. Restoration work ran across the 2001 and 2002 financial years, and the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum opened on 25 August 2002 at a total project cost of 457 million yen. It began as the city's first publicly built, privately run facility, and since September 2006 the nonprofit has operated it under the designated manager system.

Twelve Listed Buildings and How to Walk the Site

Registration of the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum came in two rounds. Ten buildings were listed on 28 August 2001: the main house, the annex, South Storehouses 1 to 3, North Storehouses 1 and 2, Inner Storehouses 1 and 2, and the cider inspection room. The reception room and anteroom, together with the cider filtration facility, followed on 20 November of the same year. The criteria vary by building. Three are used across the group: contribution to the historic landscape of the nation, value as a model of design, and difficulty of reproduction.

Reception is in the main house. North of it stands Inner Storehouse 2, linked by a corridor and now used for displays; beside the west gate, the reception room and anteroom serve as a rest and exhibition space known as the Shōnin Club. Further back sit the annex, now a document library, and Inner Storehouse 1, used as a store. North Storehouse 1 and North Storehouse 2 stand side by side beyond them, the first an event hall, the second the district history gallery. The cider inspection room and the filtration tower are near the open plaza. Across the street, South Storehouses 1 to 3 hold shops. Allow roughly an hour to walk the whole circuit.

Access varies from building to building. Some interiors are open as galleries, some are let as shops or rooms for hire, and some are closed stores. Ise City publishes a virtual tour of the Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum with 3D panoramas of interiors and exteriors, which covers several of the buildings visitors cannot enter.

Visiting

The Ise Kawasaki Merchant Museum is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. It closes on Tuesdays, moving to the following day when a Tuesday falls on a public holiday, and over the New Year period from 29 December to 3 January. Admission is 350 yen for adults, 200 yen for university and high school students and 100 yen for elementary and junior high school pupils; children below school age enter free. Holders of a disability certificate and one carer pay half. Typhoons and weather warnings can force an unscheduled closure, so check on the day if the forecast looks poor. PayPay is accepted.

Getting there is straightforward. From JR or Kintetsu Iseshi Station it is a 15 minute walk, or 5 minutes by car; from Kintetsu Ujiyamada Station, 20 minutes on foot or 5 minutes by car. Mie Kotsu buses stop at Kawasaki Hyakugo-mae, 5 minutes away, and the city's Okage Bus stops at Funae on the loop line, 6 minutes away, and at Mitasu Ise on the Misono line, 12 minutes away. Parking is available for about 20 cars.

The tea room and the event hall in North Storehouse 1 are also let for private use, so they may be unavailable when a booking is in place. Shop hours in the riverside storehouses do not match the museum's own hours. Photography rules differ between buildings and displays, so ask at reception.