Built-in Okahashi Family Residence

A Storehouse Attached to the House Itself

The Uchigura, or inner storehouse, of the Okahashi Family Residence (岡橋家住宅内蔵, Okahashi-ke Jūtaku Uchigura) stands in Ōzuku-chō in Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, was built in 1919, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 August 2020.

The word uchigura distinguishes this building from the storehouses out in the yard. An inner storehouse sits within the household's private zone and holds what the family itself uses: documents, ceremonial utensils, textiles, valuables. This one is reached through an antechamber off the northwest end of the covered corridor that runs from the main house, so a member of the household could go from a tatami room to the storehouse without crossing open ground.

It is built in dozō construction, two storeys, with a formal hongawara tiled roof of alternating broad and rounded tiles. Building area is 62 square metres. The doorway opens on the east face. Small brackets carry narrow hoods above the windows, a detail repeated across almost every storehouse on the property. Plaster covers the walls and continues up over the eave soffits, so the whole exterior reads as one continuous white surface, broken only by a raised band below the eaves and a drip course at mid-height.

Western Trusses Under a Traditional Roof

Registration came under criterion one, covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. The register number is 29-0307, issued in the 96th round.

The interior is where this building earns its own entry rather than being folded into a general note about the compound. The floor is boarded, the walls are lined with horizontal planking, and the roof above is framed as a truss. That last point deserves a pause. Japanese storehouses of this date normally use a wagoya frame, a stack of posts and horizontal beams that carries load by weight and joinery. A truss works differently, resolving loads into triangles, and it came into Japanese carpentry through Meiji-era engineering and school buildings. Finding one inside a plastered storehouse built in 1919 shows a family that hired carpenters familiar with current practice and saw no conflict between an imported frame and a traditional shell.

A second working detail sits in the middle of the upper floor: an opening that could be closed, used for hoisting goods between the two levels. Storehouses were not display pieces. Someone had to get rice bales, chests and crates up and down, and the opening is the evidence of that daily traffic.

This building was one of fifteen on the property registered on the same August day in 2020, their numbers running from 29-0303 to 29-0317.

Practical Notes Before You Go

The compound belongs to Seiko Ringyo Co., Ltd., a forestry company, and remains in private use. There is no public opening, no admission charge and no interior access, so the trusses and the hoist opening described above cannot be seen in person. The inner storehouse also sits well inside the site, screened by the main house and the corridor, which makes it one of the harder buildings here to glimpse at all.

What can be seen from the surrounding lanes is the perimeter: the earthen wall, the long nagaya-mon gatehouse on the south, and the white plastered flanks of the storehouses that stand nearer the boundary. Photography from the public road is acceptable; entering the grounds or photographing into them is not.

Masuga Station on the Kintetsu Osaka Line lies about 1.3 kilometres to the south, twenty minutes or so on foot. The lanes near the property are narrow, several end without warning, and no visitor parking exists. Imai-chō, roughly three kilometres southeast, has storehouses and merchant houses that are open, and it makes a sensible second stop for anyone who wants to actually step inside a building of this kind.