Chikada Family Residence Storehouse

A Storehouse Built Against a World Heritage Wall

The Chikada Family Residence Storehouse (近田家住宅蔵, Chikada-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a small tiled storehouse at the rear of a townhouse plot at Kasasagi-cho in Nara City, Nara Prefecture, built around 1933 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 April 2014.

Its position is the first thing to understand. The plot runs west from the street along the eastern edge of Gangoji, and the storehouse sits at the far back of it, hard against the line where private land meets the precinct of a temple whose Main Hall and Zenshitsu are National Treasures and whose grounds form part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara World Heritage property. The back wall of a working family storehouse and the edge of a World Heritage site are the same line on the map.

The building occupies 28 square metres. It is timber-framed, single-storeyed with a partial upper floor, roofed with sangawara pantiles under a gable. In plan it is a trapezoid: the beam span at the north gable is shorter than at the south, so the walls are not parallel. Nobody designs a trapezoidal building for pleasure. The shape is what the boundaries of the plot left over once everything else had been fitted in.

The Room That Is No Longer There

What earned this storehouse its place on the register is an arrangement that has since been dismantled.

Originally a room called the kuramae-zashiki, literally the parlour in front of the storehouse, stood immediately to the east of the kura, and a single continuous roof was carried across the storehouse, that parlour and the earth-floored doma together. Nara City's cultural properties division notes that this configuration has few parallels in Naramachi. Storehouse and reception room are usually distinct structures with distinct purposes; fusing them under one roof plane was a local solution rather than a standard type.

The 2008 renovation removed the kuramae-zashiki. What survives is the storehouse itself, and the city's assessment argues that the surviving fabric still allows the earlier arrangement to be understood: a cramped urban plot that had to accommodate a timber yard for the family business alongside space for people to live, resolved by stacking functions under one continuous roof rather than spreading them across the ground.

Registration came under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country, as entry 29-0208 in the seventy-seventh round, on the same day the main house on the same plot was registered as 29-0207. The city describes the storehouse as a rare surviving record of an early Showa merchant household's site layout in Naramachi. The value being protected is a plan, not an elevation.

Details Worth Knowing About

The roof steps. The ridge over the southern half is set lower than the northern half, producing a deliberate offset rather than a single unbroken line. On a building this small the step is easy to miss and easy to misread as damage; it is neither.

The walls are finished in shikkui, the white lime plaster standard on Japanese storehouses for its resistance to fire and weather, with the lower portion protected by vertical boarding. That combination of plastered upper wall and boarded skirt is functional: rain splashing off the ground would otherwise eat into the plaster at exactly the height where it is hardest to repair.

On the east face, towards the southern end, a doorway carries a small tiled hood. Inside, the southern half is earth-floored doma with a door opening to the west, and the northern half is boarded, the storage proper. Nara City's account adds that a raised boarded section marks the junction between the two halves.

None of this is available to a visitor in person, and it is worth being clear about that. The storehouse stands deep inside a private plot behind an occupied family house. There is no access, no opening day, and no view of it from any public road. Even the exterior is effectively invisible from the street, unlike the main house at the front of the same site, whose facade can be looked at freely.

The practical way to encounter this building is indirect: walk the street along the eastern side of Gangoji, look at the registered townhouse fronts including the Chikada main house, and know that the plots behind them run back to the temple boundary and that this storehouse is one of the things filling that depth. Gangoji is roughly fifteen minutes on foot from Kintetsu Nara Station and twenty from JR Nara Station, with Nara Kotsu buses stopping at Fukuchiin-cho five minutes away. The temple precinct itself is open to paying visitors, and its stone pagoda field, the futoden, gives a sense of how much of medieval and early modern Nara is packed into a small area. On 23 and 24 August the Jizo-e Manto Kuyo lantern offering lights the grounds after dark.