Nakano Family Residence South Storehouse

The Oldest Building on the Property

Nakano Family Residence Minami-dozō (中野家住宅南土蔵, also written Nakano-ke Jūtaku Minamidozō, the south earthen storehouse) is a two-story dozō-zukuri storehouse at Nakamachi in Suzaka City, Nagano Prefecture, dated to the late Edo period and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 25 February 2016.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs places its construction between 1751 and 1830. That range carries an implication worth pausing over: the Nakano family did not arrive in Suzaka until Kōka 4 (1847), having traded as kimono merchants in Nagano until then. The south storehouse was standing here before they came.

It sits behind the Kamimise, the upper shop, on the southern side of the compound, and adjoins it to the west. The building covers 33 square meters under a tiled roof. Watakō, the kimono business the family still runs, refers to an Edo-period storehouse behind the upper shop as the Senshokukan (染織館); this appears to be the same building, though the shop's name for it does not appear in the Agency's records.

Why It Was Registered

Registration came under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic character of the national landscape, and the official assessment points to two things: the quality of the plasterwork and the fidelity of the building to the local storehouse tradition.

Both matter more than they might sound. Plastering was a specialist trade, and a sakan, a plasterer, who could execute a storehouse door properly was a craftsman of standing. The work could not be rushed and could not be faked. A poorly built door meant the whole structure failed at its weakest point on the day it was needed.

The building also functioned as the commercial heart of the operation. This is where the merchandise lived: bolts of silk and finished garments, the entire capital of a kimono dealer, held in a fireproof box a few paces behind the counter.

What to Look For

The entrance faces east, and it is the doors that repay attention. They are thick earthen doors, hung as a pair to open outward from the center, and they are finished in a technique called kakego-nuri.

Kakego-nuri builds the meeting edge of a door and its frame as a series of stepped rebates, each layer of plaster set slightly back from the one before, so that door and frame interlock like a lid seating into a jar. Closed, the joint has no straight path through it. Smoke and flame would have to turn corners to get inside, and in a fire that geometry buys time. Producing those steps in wet earth, to tolerances that still allow the door to swing, is among the harder things a plasterer does.

Above, the roof frame is a wagoya, the Japanese post-and-beam truss in which short vertical posts stand on horizontal beams to carry the ridge, rather than the triangulated Western truss introduced in the Meiji period. It is set as an okiyane, an independent roof placed over the earthen shell instead of framed into it, so the sealed walls stay unbroken.

The Minami-dozō is private and in active commercial use, and it cannot be visited. Its exterior stands within the compound rather than on the street. Visitors to central Suzaka can, though, see the same construction vocabulary all around them, since the old town preserves a dense run of storehouse walls, and the publicly accessible Mayugura cocoon warehouse a short walk away shows the type at full scale.