Kobayashi Family Residence Fumigation Storehouse

A Twelve-Square-Metre Storehouse Built for Fumigation

Most of the buildings on a wealthy farmhouse compound have obvious jobs: living quarters, a rice store, a miso store. This one is stranger. Pressed up against the east side of the front gate stands a small earthen-walled storehouse, barely twelve square metres in floor area, built specifically for fumigation, for the smoking and treatment of stored goods against insects and damp.

It belongs to the Kobayashi Family Residence in Inasato-cho Tamaki, in the Kohoku part of Nagano City. The little storehouse and the long earthen wall on the gate's western flank together form the framing of the entrance. Its roof is hipped and sheet-metal clad; its south face rises off a band of hexagonal, tortoiseshell-pattern stone masonry, the same coursing used in the adjoining wall. The lower walls are closed off with wooden boarding. So far, a perfectly ordinary kura.

The surprise is at the eaves. Instead of the deep, shadowed overhang of a typical Meiji storehouse, the eaves line here is worked to stress the horizontal, a quietly Western touch grafted onto a thoroughly Japanese building. It is a small thing, easy to walk past, and it is exactly what the registration singled out.

The Compound and Its Designation

The Kobayashi were the former shoya, the village headman, of a district along the Sai River that prospered as one of the granaries of the Kawanakajima plain. Their residence was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 1999, and several structures were listed together: the main house, a north storehouse holding miso and document stores, the front gate, and the fumigation storehouse.

The main house, rebuilt in 1904, is a large two-storey farmhouse with a tiled hip-and-gable roof and a formal stepped entrance porch on its south front, the kind of dignified frontage a headman's house was expected to present. The front gate is a yakui-mon, a roofed gate with its posts set on a particular bracketing arrangement, standing about twenty metres back from the road behind three rows of stone paving that stretch the approach into something deliberately grand.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is a lighter designation than Important Cultural Property, introduced in 1996 to protect the broad stock of buildings from the modern centuries. The fumigation storehouse was registered under the criterion that it would be difficult to recreate, a nod to the specific craft of its construction and that unusual Western-influenced eaves treatment.

What to Look For

Read the gate as a single composition rather than as separate pieces. The wall, the gate, and the small storehouse were meant to be seen together, and the tortoiseshell stonework ties them into one base line. Then look up at the storehouse eaves and compare them with the heavier, more traditional lines elsewhere on the compound. The contrast is the point: a builder in Meiji Nagano reaching, in one modest corner, for a fashionable foreign idiom.

The Kobayashi house carries a more recent story too. During the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics it hosted a cheering delegation from the German state of Thuringia, and one of its rooms is now kept as a memorial to that exchange. The residence is open to the public, so the gate ensemble, the main house, and the storehouses can be seen at closer range than most private heritage homes allow. Checking opening details ahead of a visit is sensible.

Around the Residence

The house sits on the Kawanakajima plain south of central Nagano, the broad flat country between the Sai and Chikuma rivers that was famous as the ground of the sixteenth-century battles between Takeda and Uesugi. The area is farmland and quiet suburb now, easiest reached by car or local bus from Nagano Station.

Central Nagano, a short drive north, holds Zenko-ji, one of the most visited temples in Japan, along with the streets of shops and inns that grew up along its approach. A day that starts at a granary-district headman's house and ends at the great temple traces, in miniature, the old economic and spiritual poles of this part of the Shinano country.