Okahashi Family Residence North American Storehouse

The Largest Storehouse on the Property

The Kita-komegura, or north rice storehouse, of the Okahashi Family Residence (岡橋家住宅北米蔵, Okahashi-ke Jūtaku Kita-komegura) stands in Ōzuku-chō in Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, dates from the later Taishō period, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 August 2020.

At 115 square metres of building area it is the biggest of the seven storehouses here, larger than the main storehouse it stands beside and nearly five times the footprint of the small ceramics store in the southwest corner. Rice explains the size. The Okahashi family is remembered chiefly for its forests, but a household that held the office of shōya also collected and stored the rice of a farming village, and that business needed volume.

The building sits east of the main storehouse, single-storeyed, under a formal hongawara tiled roof of alternating flat and rounded tiles. A lean-to shelters the doorway on the south face, and the windows carry the small bracketed hoods found throughout the compound. The walls are plastered, with vertical boarding protecting the lower portion against splash and knocks.

One point in the record is worth flagging. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the structure as dozō construction, single storey, while the same agency's descriptive note calls it a timber-framed single-storey building with a dozō-style tiled roof. The two phrasings sit awkwardly together and the discrepancy has not been resolved in the published sources.

Posts Left Showing, and a Truss Above

The registration falls under criterion one, buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, with register number 29-0312 in the 96th round.

Inside, the space is divided into two rooms, east and west, both boarded. The wall finish is the detail worth knowing about: it is shinkabe, meaning the structural posts and the nuki tie beams that pass horizontally through them are left visible against the plaster. Storehouses almost always go the other way, using ōkabe to bury the frame in a thick continuous skin, since that is what makes a storehouse resist fire. Choosing shinkabe for the interior of a rice store is a working decision rather than a decorative one: rice needs air, and a wall that is not sealed behind heavy plaster breathes better.

Above, the roof is framed as a truss, the same choice made in the inner storehouse of 1919. Two buildings on one property, built within a few years of each other, both using an imported frame. Whoever the family's carpenter was, this was his habit and not an experiment.

The agency's note observes that this storehouse and the main storehouse together give weight to the northern side of the compound. That is an assessment of composition rather than of any single building, and it is the reason all fifteen structures here were registered on the same day, numbered 29-0303 to 29-0317.

Seeing It, and Not Seeing It

Seiko Ringyo Co., Ltd. owns the compound and uses it. There is no public opening, no admission and no interior access, so the exposed nuki and the truss above them are matters of record rather than things a visitor can look at. The north storehouse also stands toward the interior of the site, behind the perimeter wall, which limits what can be made out from the lanes.

The white plastered walls and tiled ridges of the storehouse group do carry above the boundary wall in places, and walking the lanes on the north and east sides gives the clearest sense of how much building is packed onto this block. Photography from public roads is fine. Entering the property is not, and it should go without saying that this is somebody's workplace.

Masuga Station on the Kintetsu Osaka Line is about 1.3 kilometres south, some twenty minutes on foot. Lanes here are narrow with dead ends and there is no visitor parking. For anyone who wants to stand inside a rice storehouse rather than read about one, the preserved merchant quarter of Imai-chō lies about three kilometres southeast and has buildings that open their doors.