Okada Family Residential Storehouse

Eleven Square Metres in the Corner of a Nara Plot

The Storehouse of the Okada Family Residence (岡田家住宅蔵, Okada-ke Jūtaku Kura) is a dozō earthen-walled storehouse built in 1930 at 13 Kasasagi-chō, Nara City, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 25 April 2014.

It occupies the southeast corner of the property, its ridge running north to south, under a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles. The building area is eleven square metres. That is smaller than many bedrooms, and the modesty is the point: this is a kadan-gura, a household-goods store, not a merchant's warehouse. Bedding, seasonal implements, lacquerware brought out for New Year, documents a family keeps but rarely opens.

Japan's registration system, unlike designation as an Important Cultural Property, was designed to catch buildings of exactly this scale. A storehouse of eleven square metres would never have been a candidate for designation. Registered under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic character of the national landscape, it carries the number 29-0206, third in the group of three Okada buildings taken up in the 77th round.

How a Small Storehouse Is Built

The construction is worth reading closely, because a dozō concentrates a great deal of technique into a small volume.

It rests on a foundation of cut stone, which lifts the earthen wall clear of ground moisture. The external walls are finished in white lime plaster, the coat that gives storehouses their characteristic surface and, applied thickly over an earthen core, gives them their fire resistance. On both side walls the lower portion is clad in vertical boarding. That skirt of timber is not decoration; it protects the plaster from splashing rain and from the knocks that a working yard delivers.

The entrance is in the middle of the west face. Two leaves close it. Outermost is a single-sliding earthen door, itself plastered so that when shut the opening reads as continuous wall. Inside it hangs a wire-reinforced lattice door, which allows the store to be aired while remaining secured. A small tiled pent roof shelters the doorway.

Above, the roof frame is a rafter construction rather than the heavier assembly of struts and purlins used on larger buildings. For a span of this size the simpler solution carries the tiles adequately, and it keeps the internal volume clear.

Nara City notes that the exterior walls and roof have been renewed through repair, most recently in the work of 2010, while the rest of the building survives in good original condition. As an example of a Naramachi townhouse storehouse from the early Shōwa years, and as the piece that completes the layout of the property, it earned its place on the register.

The Property as a Whole, and What Visitors Can Expect

Three buildings on this plot are registered, and they were built across roughly sixty years. The main house came first, in the early Meiji period, as the home of a midwife. The detached wing and its connecting passage followed in the Taishō era. The storehouse arrived in 1930, at the end of that sequence, filling the southeast corner and completing the set of parts a Naramachi household expected to have.

Reading the dates in order gives you a family adding to its property as circumstances allowed, which is how most surviving townhouse groups actually came together.

The storehouse stands within the enclosure and is not visible from the public street. The Okada Family Residence is privately owned and remains a home; there is no interior access, no opening hours, and no admission. Visitors to Kasasagi-chō can see the street front of the main house and should keep photography to what is visible from the public road.

The address is a fifteen-minute walk from Kintetsu Nara Station or twenty from JR Nara Station, on the lane along the eastern side of Gangoji. To see the inside of a Naramachi storehouse, Naramachi Kōshi-no-ie reconstructs a complete townhouse property with its courtyard, detached room and kura, and Naramachi Nigiwai-no-ie preserves a Taishō machiya whose storehouse is used for exhibitions. Both charge no admission, open 9:00 to 17:00, and close on Mondays, on the day after a public holiday, and over the New Year period. Gangoji itself opens its main hall and treasure house 9:00 to 17:00 for a fee, reported as 400 yen for adults and best confirmed on the temple's site.