Former Nunoeda Family Residence (Haruya Naramachi)

Nineteen Square Metres Doing the Heavy Work

The Storehouse of the Former Fueda Family Residence (旧布江田家住宅（はる家ならまち）蔵, Kyū Fueda-ke Jūtaku Kura) stands at the northwest corner of a walled compound at 31-4 Minamibukuro-chō in Nara City, was built around 1940, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 March 2025.

Its recorded building area is 19 square metres. That is a footprint of roughly four and a half by four and a half metres, smaller than many bedrooms, and the smallest of the three registered structures on this site by a wide margin. Yet it is the one that does most of the work in the street picture, because it is the only building of the three that puts a full two-storey wall directly on the lane.

The Fueda family had held the plot since 1890 but spent the Taishō era and the early 1930s running a bathhouse business in Umeda, Osaka, leaving the Nara property to decay. Nara City's cultural properties division records that they reorganised the compound after returning, and dates this storehouse to the same campaign that rebuilt the main house in 1940. Repairs were carried out in 2017.

What a Dozō Is, and Why This One Was Registered

A dozō is not a timber shed with plaster on it. The wall is built up as a thick mass of earth over a timber armature, then finished in lime plaster, and the point of all that mass is fire. In a district of wooden houses standing eaves to eaves, the storehouse was where a family put the things it could not afford to lose, and the walls were sized to survive a neighbourhood fire long enough for the contents to come through. The heavy doors, the small openings and the sealed window surrounds all follow from that single requirement.

The roof here reinforces the point. It is a gabled roof laid in hongawara, the older and heavier tiling system that alternates broad flat pan tiles with semicylindrical cover tiles. The main house and the front gate on the same site both use sangawara, the lighter single-piece pantile that became standard for ordinary buildings from the Edo period onward. Choosing the heavier system for the storehouse alone was a deliberate decision about which building mattered.

Registration under the system introduced in 1996 works differently from designation as an Important Cultural Property. Where designation imposes a permission requirement on almost any change, registration imposes a duty to notify before major exterior alteration, and it was built for exactly this class of building: numerous, dating from the modern era, worth keeping, and best kept by being used. The criterion cited for this storehouse is the first of the three, contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Nara City's assessment notes the quality of the timber and the soundness of the workmanship, and values the building as one component of the family's compound rather than in isolation. Registration number is 29-0365, immediately after the main house and immediately before the gate and fence.

Two Faces, Finished Differently

The most rewarding thing about this building is that you can read the owners' priorities directly off its walls.

The upper walls are white lime plaster, and running below the eaves there is a noki-jabara, a projecting horizontal band worked in plaster that functions as a cornice. It throws a shadow line across the white face and gives the small building a sense of formality out of proportion to its size. This is a device you meet on merchant storehouses across Kansai, and it is one of the surest signs that a storehouse was meant to be looked at.

Below that, the treatment splits. On the compound side, the dado is finished as namako-kabe: square tiles set in a diagonal grid with the joints between them raised in thick white plaster, producing a quilted pattern of dark squares and white ribs. The name refers to sea cucumbers, after the rounded profile of the plaster joints. It is expensive, weatherproof and unmistakably decorative. On the lane side, the dado is plain vertical boarding.

Read that in order and the logic appears. The lane is where the family's neighbours passed; the courtyard is where the family lived and where guests were received once inside the gate. The decorative finish went to the inner face. This is close to the reverse of what a modern developer would decide, and it says something about who the household considered its real audience.

The doorway is on the east face, toward the main house, sheltered by a small pent roof. Nara City's description notes plastered window openings with their own small roofs on the upper part of the south wall and beside the doorway, sealed into the plaster in the manner used to make a storehouse defensible against fire.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record also describes the roof frame: gable beams carry a longitudinal jimune beam, and short posts standing on it support the ridge purlin. This is an economical and robust way to frame a small gable, and it is visible from the upper floor of the building.

Seeing It

The storehouse is the easiest of the three registered structures to see, and it does not require a booking or a fee. It faces a public lane in the southwestern part of Naramachi, so the plastered upper wall, the cornice band and the boarded dado can be examined from the street at any hour. The interior is another matter: the compound is privately owned by Haruya Co., Ltd. and operates as the guesthouse Haruya Naramachi, with no public opening, no admission ticket and no tour.

Come in low afternoon light if you can. Raking light is what makes a plaster cornice and a namako dado legible; flat midday light flattens both into a single white surface. From the lane you will see the boarded face, so to see the namako-kabe you would need to be inside the gate, which in practice means staying overnight. Note that guest payment is taken in cash at check-in and cards are not accepted.

Look at the storehouse and the gate together rather than one at a time. The two were registered on consecutive numbers on the same day, and Nara City treats them as jointly responsible for the historic character of this stretch of lane. Standing back far enough to get both in one view is the most useful thing a visitor can do here.

Getting there: about 15 minutes on foot from JR Nara Station, about 12 from Kintetsu Nara Station, or the inner-loop city bus (route 1) to the Hakkenchō stop followed by a 5 minute walk. Gangōji, a National Treasure and part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara World Heritage site, is a short walk to the north, and the Naramachi lanes between the two hold several other registered buildings, so the storehouse fits naturally into a longer walk rather than a single stop.