Nakano Family Residence Lower Store

The Shop That Faces the Street

Nakano Family Residence Shitamise (中野家住宅下店, also written Nakano-ke Jūtaku Shitamise) is a two-story timber shop building in the Harukimachi district of Suzaka City, Nagano Prefecture, built in the mid-Meiji period and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 25 February 2016.

The name means "lower shop," and it makes sense only once you understand the layout of the property. The Nakano family runs a kimono business called Watakō, and their compound holds two shop buildings along the street. The northern one is the Shitamise; the southern one, still the working storefront today, is the Kamimise or "upper shop." Behind them the site runs west in a long, narrow strip, the classic tanzaku or paper-slip plan of a Japanese merchant town.

The family were kimono dealers in Nagano until Kōka 4 (1847), when they moved to this site in Suzaka. The location was not accidental. Suzaka grew around the junction of two old highways, the Ōsasa Kaidō and the Tani Kaidō, and the Nakano compound sits close to where they meet.

The building covers 86 square meters. It has a gabled roof of ceramic tile with the entrance on the long side, an arrangement Japanese carpentry calls kirizuma-zukuri hirairi.

One caution on dates. Watakō's own account of the compound describes this shop as early Meiji work, while the national record places it in the middle of the period, between 1883 and 1897. This article follows the Agency for Cultural Affairs as the primary source.

Why It Was Registered

Registration in February 2016 came under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. Four Nakano buildings were listed together in the same notification: this shop, the three-story living wing behind it, and two earthen storehouses.

What the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out about the Shitamise is how completely it preserves the look of a Meiji-era kimono shop in a town that made its fortune from thread. Suzaka was a silk-reeling center, and its wealth built the storehouses that still define the streets. A textile retailer here was selling into a population that knew fabric intimately.

The front wall is plastered over entirely, giving a timber-framed building the appearance of a fireproof earthen storehouse. Merchants adopted this treatment because fire moved fast through wooden towns, and a shop full of silk had a great deal to lose.

What to Look For

Stand on the opposite side of the street and look up at the second floor. The plaster there is black shikkui, lime finished with soot or ink, polished to a dark sheen that reads almost as lacquer in low sun. Below it a degeta, a projecting purlin carried on brackets, throws the eaves forward and casts a hard shadow line across the façade.

Set into that black wall is a lattice window. The combination of dark plaster, deep eaves and a single grid of timber gives the elevation its weight.

Inside, the ground floor originally held two rooms: the mise, the selling floor, and the chanoma, the family's everyday living room immediately behind it. Shop and home shared one plane, with no hallway between commerce and dinner.

The building was renovated in 2011 and now serves as a gallery known as the Watakō Salon, used for exhibitions of painting, calligraphy, textiles and craft. This is the one building of the four that visitors have any regular chance of entering, and only when an exhibition is open. Check the Watakō website for current dates before making the trip.

The floor above holds what the family calls the Storehouse Museum, where old shop signs, a cash register and desks from the business are laid out. The tools of the trade have become the display.

A stone-paved lane runs between the two shop buildings toward the back of the site. From the street you can see straight down it.