Takizawa Family Residence Storehouse

The Storehouse North of the Main House

Takizawa-ke Jūtaku Dozō (瀧澤家住宅土蔵, also written 滝澤家住宅土蔵), the storehouse of the Takizawa family residence in the Isobe district of Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture, is a late-Edo-period earthen-walled store that was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on June 28, 2017.

It stands north of the main house and faces south, across the open working yard that every farmstead of this kind kept clear. The building measures 9.1 meters along the ridge by 4.6 meters across, two stories, with a building area of 57 square meters. The walls are dozō-zukuri, thick mud laid in successive coats over a timber frame and finished with plaster. The roof is gabled and covered in sheet iron, and along the south face a lean-to eave, geya-bisashi, projects to shelter the doorways beneath.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the structure to the late Edo period, between roughly 1751 and 1830, and records repair work in 1993. The present metal roofing almost certainly belongs to that later campaign rather than to the original building; storehouses of this date were normally tiled or shingled.

How a Storehouse Was Built to Survive

A farm household of the Takizawa's standing stored a great deal. Rice for the family and for the annual dues, seed grain held back from the harvest, tools, ceremonial clothing, lacquerware brought out twice a year, documents recording village obligations. All of it had to keep through a Shinano winter and a humid summer without rotting, and all of it had to survive fire, which in a settlement of thatched roofs was the standing threat.

Thick mud walls answer both problems at once. Earth laid up to 30 centimeters or more absorbs and releases moisture slowly, so the interior temperature and humidity move less than the outside air; and mud does not burn. What mud does badly is shed water, which is where the roof of this particular building becomes interesting.

The registration description specifies okiyane, literally a placed roof. In this technique the roof structure is not integrated with the mud box below but built as a separate frame set over it, resting on the walls with a gap left between the two. Rain runs off the roof clear of the plaster; air moves through the void, drying the wall heads; and when the roof covering eventually fails, it can be renewed without cutting into the earthen shell that does the actual work of protection. Carpenters across central Japan used the method for centuries, and it explains why so many storehouses outlive the houses they served.

Two doorways open on the south face, and a single window sits high on the western wall of the second floor. Each of the three is framed by a torii-waku, a projecting surround of two uprights and a lintel whose silhouette recalls a shrine gate. The frame is not decoration alone. It throws water clear of the opening, which is the weakest point in any mud wall, and gives the plasterer a clean edge to finish against. That the Takizawa storehouse carries the treatment on all three openings, including one small upper window, says something about how the household wanted the building to look.

The Agency registered the storehouse under the first of the three admission criteria: contribution to the historic character of the landscape. The official wording notes that it forms a well-composed farmstead group together with the main house. The judgment is about the ensemble rather than the single building, which is a different basis from the one applied to the main house, entered as a model of form.

Visiting, and What Can Actually Be Seen

The Takizawa residence is a private home and remains occupied. There is no admission, no opening time, and no access to the interior of any of the three registered buildings. Viewing is from the public road along the western side of the compound only, and visitors should not enter the grounds or aim a camera through the gate.

This limits what you can see of the storehouse, and it is worth saying so before anyone travels. The store sits behind and to the north of the main house, so from the road it appears in part rather than in full: a plastered gable end and the line of the metal roof rising past the edge of the thatch. The south face with its lean-to eave and its three framed openings is turned inward toward the yard, which is exactly where a working storehouse belongs and exactly why it is hard to photograph.

What the roadside does give you is the relationship between the three buildings, and that relationship is the point of the registration. Thatch at the gate, thatch again and higher at the house, then the harder line of a metal roof over white plaster behind. Three roof forms, three materials, three functions, arranged in the order a farming household needed them.

Togura Station on the Shinano Railway lies a little over a kilometer south, fifteen to twenty minutes on foot. Drivers reach the district from the Sarashina Interchange on the Nagano Expressway in roughly a quarter of an hour, though there is no parking for visitors and the lanes are narrow. For anyone who wants to go inside a building of this type, Chikuma City's Center for History and Cultural Properties, in the Kamiyamada hot spring district, is the place to ask what is currently open locally.