Kimura Family Residence Storehouse

A Late-Edo Storehouse in a Mie Valley

The Kimura Family Residence Storehouse (木村家住宅蔵, Kimura-ke Jūtaku Kura, also written Kimura-ke Jutaku Kura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse of the late Edo period in Komagano, Watarai Town, Mie Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 29 November 2016.

It occupies the northeast corner of the Kimura compound and faces west, across the yard toward the main house. The footprint is 30 square metres. That is small for a rural kura, and the scale says something useful about the household. This was a samurai residence rather than a landlord's farm, and the storehouse was sized for a family's goods rather than for a season's rice.

The building is hirairi, entered on its long side beneath the run of the eaves. In front of the door sits a kuramae, a small forecourt walled in on its flanks so that the doorway opens into a sheltered pocket instead of straight onto the open yard. Anyone who has watched a storehouse being unlocked in heavy rain understands the point of the arrangement.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the structure to the closing decades of the Edo period, roughly 1830 to 1868. Two further parts of the same property carry the same date range and were registered on the same day: the main house, a single-storey timber building of 133 square metres, and a stone boundary wall running 44 metres along the western and northern edges of the site.

Registered, Not Designated

Japan protects historic buildings along two separate tracks, and the difference decides how any listing should be read.

Designation, shitei, produces Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures. The state selects them, alterations need permission, and the numbers are deliberately small. Registration, tōroku, was introduced in 1996 and works the other way round. It covers buildings generally more than fifty years old, asks only for notification before substantial changes, and exists to keep large numbers of ordinary structures alive and in daily use. The Kimura storehouse belongs to the second category. Describing it as an Important Cultural Property would be a mistake.

Its registration number is 24-0237, issued in the eighty-fifth round of registrations and gazetted on 29 November 2016. The criterion applied was the first of the three available under the scheme: that the structure contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

That criterion repays a moment's attention. It makes no claim that the storehouse is rare, or that its carpentry is exceptional. It says that the valley floor at Komagano looks the way it does partly because this building is still standing on it.

Registration places no obligation on an owner to admit visitors, and the Kimura property admits none.

Reading the Exterior

A storehouse wall is a technical problem. Thick clay keeps fire out and holds temperature steady, but clay has no defence against rain, and the Watarai valley receives a great deal of it. This building solves the problem twice over.

The roof is okiyane, a separate timber roof set down over the earthen shell rather than framed into it. Water runs off a structure that can be repaired or replaced without disturbing the walls beneath, and the clay below is left free to settle at its own pace. Within the roof, the frame uses noboribari, beams that climb the slope rather than span it horizontally. Clay pantiles, sangawara, complete the covering.

The walls themselves are boarded. White lime plaster appears only on the hachimaki, the band immediately under the eaves where the overhang keeps rain off. Everything below that band is sasarako shitami itabari: horizontal weatherboards held by vertical battens notched to sit over each board edge. Practical, and quieter to the eye than a fully plastered wall.

What results is a dark boarded box carrying one white stripe near the top, standing among paddy fields and wooded slopes. Storehouses of this kind were rarely meant to be admired. This one was meant to keep things dry, and it has.

A practical note. The property is privately owned, by a company, and is not open. No visiting arrangement has been announced, there is no admission and no interior access, and photography of the inside is not available. The buildings should be looked at from public roads, and the grounds should not be entered.

Visitors who have come to Watarai for its history do have somewhere to go. The town runs a small free museum, the Watarai Town Furusato History Museum, at Nakanogo 1025 in the former Ogawago Elementary School. It opens on Thursdays and on the second and fourth Sundays of each month, 9:00 to 16:00, with last admission at 15:30, and closes on fifth Thursdays and over the New Year period. Watarai has no railway station. Mie Kotsu buses run from Ise-shi Station to the Watarai Town Hall stop, and town-operated buses cover the outlying districts. Komagano lies in the south of the town, roughly thirty to forty minutes by car from central Ise.