Storehouse of Sasaki Nobutsuna's Birthplace

Fourteen Square Metres Behind the House

The Storehouse of Sasaki Nobutsuna's Birthplace (佐佐木信綱生家土蔵, Sasaki Nobutsuna seika dozo) is an 1875 plastered storehouse in Ishiyakushi, Suzuka City, Mie Prefecture, entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties as a structure on 28 October 2011. It stands against the north face of the main house, toward the western end, and covers a building area of just 14 square metres.

That figure is worth pausing over. A modern single-car garage is larger. The storehouse measures 4.6 metres along its ridge and 3.1 metres across, two storeys of it, and the whole thing would fit inside the reception room of many temple buildings. Small storehouses of this kind were the strongboxes of ordinary households: seasonal bedding, ledgers, tools, ceremonial dishes, anything that mattered too much to leave in a timber house with an open hearth.

It was built by Sasaki Hirotsuna, a scholar of national learning and a student of Ajiro Hironori, whose eldest son Nobutsuna (佐佐木信綱, 1872 to 1963, also written 佐々木信綱) went on to edit the Kohon Man'yoshu and to receive the first Order of Culture in 1937. The dates line up narrowly. The storehouse went up in 1875, and in December 1877 the family left Ishiyakushi for Matsusaka, so Nobutsuna would have known it for roughly the last two years of his childhood in this house.

Why a Small Kura Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the building as registration number 24-0110, granted in the seventy-first round, under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country. That is a different criterion from the one applied to the main house standing a metre in front of it, which was registered the same day as a model of design. The distinction is not bureaucratic filler. It says that the storehouse earns its place through what it does for the view along the old highway rather than through the refinement of its own construction.

Read the two entries together and a small argument emerges about how heritage protection works in Japan. Registration as a Tangible Cultural Property is the light-touch tier, introduced in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old and upward, requiring notification before alteration rather than permission, and designed to keep buildings usable. It suits exactly this kind of property: modest, functional, valuable as part of a group. Alone, a fourteen-square-metre kura is unremarkable. Behind a surviving post-town machiya, with the reading room of the Ishiyakushi Bunko a few paces east along the road, it becomes one term in a legible sentence about how this plot was occupied.

The date of its move sharpens the point. The Agency records the storehouse as relocated in 1932, and 1932 is also the year Nobutsuna, then turning sixty by the traditional count, gave his home town a library. The Agency's own entry for the Ishiyakushi Bunko reading room places that building to the east of the storehouse, along the old Tokaido. The two records describe a site being rearranged, with the storehouse shifted and the new library set along the street frontage.

How It Is Built

A dozo is a fireproof box. The technique wraps a timber frame in thick layers of clay, then finishes the outside in white lime plaster, shikkui, so that a fire in a neighbouring house has nothing to catch. The walls carry weight and resist heat at the same time, which is why storehouses so often outlast the dwellings they served.

This one follows the pattern with the economies you would expect at its size. The roof is gabled and laid with sangawara pantiles, matching the main house. On the south side, the face turned toward the dwelling, a pent roof shelters the single doorway. The lower band of the exterior wall is boarded rather than plastered, a koshi-ita skirt that takes the splash-back from the eaves and can be replaced when it rots without disturbing the plaster above.

Inside, the Agency's description is unusually specific: posts set at intervals of half a ken, roughly ninety centimetres, tied together with nuki, horizontal members driven through the posts and wedged, with boarding applied to the walls. Half-ken spacing is close by any standard. In a building this narrow it produces a cage of timber that resists the outward push of the earthen walls and gives the boarded lining something to fix to. The interior would have read as a wooden room, not a mud one.

The pairing of a machiya and its kura, one long and low along the street, one squat and white behind, is the signature silhouette of a Japanese merchant plot. Very little of that survives in Ishiyakushi, which is what the registration language about historic landscape is pointing at.

Visiting, and What to Expect

The storehouse sits inside the grounds of the Sasaki Nobutsuna Memorial Museum, operated by Suzuka City. Admission to the site is free, viewing hours run from 10:00 to 16:00, and the museum closes on Mondays, Tuesdays and the third Wednesday of each month, opening when only the Monday falls on a public holiday, as well as over the new year period.

Public information about the storehouse's interior is inconsistent, and visitors should plan for the more restrictive case. The Sasaki Nobutsuna Commemorative Society describes the inside as having been fitted out with a table and chairs, showing video of scenery around Suzuka. At least one visitor-information site lists the storehouse as closed to the public. The city's own facility page does not address the building individually. Telephone the museum on 059-374-3140 before travelling if going inside matters to you. The exterior can be seen from the garden in any case, which is where its plastered wall and boarded skirt read most clearly against the dark timber of the main house.

No photography policy is published for the grounds. Check at the reception desk, especially for the exhibition rooms in the adjacent Reference Hall.

One anecdote follows this building around. The Commemorative Society records a story that the young Nobutsuna, when he misbehaved, would be shut inside the storehouse. It is a family recollection rather than a documented event, and the arithmetic leaves a narrow window for it, but it is the kind of detail that changes how a small white box looks when you are standing in front of it.

Buses reach the site from Kintetsu Suzuka-shi Station and JR Kawano Station via the C-Bus to the Sasaki Kinenkan stop, about two minutes on foot, and from Kintetsu Yokkaichi and Kintetsu Hiratacho on Sanco services, about five minutes on foot. Drivers need around twenty minutes from the Suzuka interchange of the Higashi-Meihan Expressway. Late April to mid-May brings the deutzia flowers planted through the garden, and Ishiyakushi-ji, the temple Hiroshige drew for his Tokaido series, lies a short walk south along the old road.