Matsuura Family Residence Stone Storehouse

A Stone Storehouse Dated 1905 on the Miyazaki Plateau

The Matsuura Family Residence Stone Storehouse (松浦家住宅石蔵, Matsuura-ke Jūtaku Ishigura, also romanised Matsuurake Jutaku Ishigura) is a two-storey stone building of 1905 at Kashiwabaru in Miyazaki City, Miyazaki Prefecture, added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 February 2016.

It is a small building. The floor area comes to about 25 square metres, no larger than one generous room, and yet the mason gave it two full storeys and a tiled roof. Storehouses like this held what a rural household could not replace if the main house burned: hulled rice, lacquered trays brought out for weddings and funerals, land deeds, the tools of whatever trade the family ran on the side.

Kashiwabaru sits in the plateau country roughly six kilometres west of Miyazaki Station, in what is now the Ikime district of the city. The ground here has been settled for a very long time. Two kilometres to the north lies the Ikime Kofun Group, a nationally designated historic site with more than fifty burial mounds, three of them keyhole tombs over one hundred metres long.

The date of the storehouse is not a guess. According to the Miyazaki prefectural cultural properties record, an inscription cut into the stone itself gives Meiji 38, the year 1905.

Registered as Work That Could Not Easily Be Made Again

Japan runs two parallel systems for historic buildings. The older one, designation (shitei), covers National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and involves tight controls. The registration system (tōroku) was added in 1996 for the much larger population of buildings roughly fifty years old or more, where the aim is continued use rather than preservation under glass. An owner of a registered building notifies the authorities before making significant changes; they do not have to apply for permission. Most registered properties are still lived in, farmed around, or worked in.

Each registration is granted under one of three criteria. The Matsuura storehouse was accepted under the criterion for structures that would not easily be reproduced, and reading the Agency for Cultural Affairs entry makes the reasoning plain. The agency calls the building an accomplished piece of mixed Japanese and Western design and points to the skill of the masons working in this district.

That last phrase carries local weight. The prefecture's record notes that stonemasons were once numerous around Takaoka, west of here, and that stone storehouses survive in numbers across the surrounding villages. The Matsuura building was registered as number 45-0082 in the eighty-third round of registrations. Two of its neighbours in the same round, the storehouse and stone wall of the Dokiya Family Residence at Tomiyoshi, stand about two kilometres away and share the same architectural grammar, down to the arcading under the eaves.

So this is not an isolated curiosity. It is one surviving piece of a local building culture that had money behind it, patrons willing to pay for ornament on a granary, and craftsmen capable of delivering it.

Reading the Four Storeys of Ornament

Look first at the eaves. Running beneath them is a Lombard band, a row of small blind arches that originated in the Romanesque churches of northern Italy and reached Japan through nineteenth-century Western building manuals and brick engineering works. On a Miyazaki rice store, executed in cut stone by a rural mason, it is an unlikely thing to find.

Then the corners. The quoins have been left standing proud of the wall plane so that each block reads as a separate mass, and the vertical edges of the building gain a shadow line that changes through the day.

At second-floor level a course of stone projects as a continuous band around the building, and into that band the mason cut karakusa, the scrolling arabesque of vines that runs through Japanese decorative art on everything from sword fittings to wrapping cloth. Beside the doorway is shakujō-bori, carving named for the ringed staff carried by Buddhist monks and pilgrims.

Arches from Lombardy above, Buddhist and Japanese ornament below, all on one small farm building. The mason was not confused. He was showing what he could do.

Practical matters are simple, and slightly disappointing. The Matsuura Family Residence is private property and its interior is not open to visitors. There is no admission desk, no opening season, no leaflet. What you can do is look at the exterior from the public road, which is how the building meets its village anyway, and photograph it from there. Do not step onto the grounds. The nearest realistic base is central Miyazaki, under thirty minutes away by car; public transport into the Ikime district is thin, so a rental car or taxi is the practical choice. Pairing the visit with the Ikime Kofun Group, which is freely open and has a parking area, makes a more satisfying half-day.