Okahashi Family Residence Pottery Storehouse

The Smallest Storehouse, and the Most Worked Over

The Setomonogura, or ceramics storehouse, of the Okahashi Family Residence (岡橋家住宅瀬戸物蔵, Okahashi-ke Jūtaku Setomonogura) stands in Ōzuku-chō in Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, was built around 1887, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 August 2020.

Setomono literally means goods from Seto, the kiln town in Aichi Prefecture, but the word long ago became the everyday Japanese term for ceramic tableware generally. A storehouse dedicated to it tells you something about the household: enough dishes were kept, in enough sets, for a separate building to be worth putting up. A house that received timber buyers and officials needed to lay a table for them.

The building sits southwest of the main storehouse. It is dozō construction of two storeys with a building area of 24 square metres, the smallest of the seven storehouses here, roughly a fifth the size of the north rice store. It is also the oldest of them, predating the main house by thirty years.

Where the Money Went

The registration falls under criterion one, buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, with register number 29-0309 in the 96th round.

What lifts this building above its size is finish. The roof is hongawara tile in okiyane form, meaning a separate timber roof structure is set over the thick mud-plastered roof of the storehouse proper. Two roofs, one on top of the other. The plastered roof does the fireproofing; the tiled roof above sheds rain and keeps the plaster dry. Building it that way costs more, and it is a choice made by owners who intended their storehouses to last.

Then the plasterer went to work. The eave soffit of the okiyane is modelled in plaster to imitate rafters, so the roof reads as timber framing when it is in fact rendered. A drip course runs around the base, and below it the wall becomes namako-kabe, the pattern of square tiles set with raised plaster ridges along the joints that gives the finish its name, from the sea cucumber those swollen white lines resemble.

The doorway on the east face is the most deliberate element of all. Its hood is roofed in copper and carried on brackets of shiraki, unpainted wood left to show its grain, and the edge is trimmed in a mokkō outline, the rounded lobed shape borrowed from family crests and metal fittings. None of this makes the storehouse hold more plates. It signals that the family cared how the building looked from the yard.

This was one of fifteen buildings on the property registered together on 17 August 2020, numbered 29-0303 through 29-0317.

What a Visit Amounts To

The compound belongs to Seiko Ringyo Co., Ltd., a forestry company, and is in private use. There is no public opening, no admission and no interior access. The copper hood, the mokkō trim and the namako walling described above face into the yard rather than out toward the lanes, and the storehouse itself stands within the site, so a visitor should not expect to see them.

An exterior circuit of the block still gives a good reading of the compound: the earthen perimeter wall, the thirty-metre gatehouse along the south, the stone east gate, and the white flanks and tiled ridges rising behind. Photography from the public road is acceptable; entering the property or shooting into it is not.

Masuga Station on the Kintetsu Osaka Line is about 1.3 kilometres to the south, roughly twenty minutes on foot. The lanes are narrow, several are dead ends, and no visitor parking exists. Anyone who wants to see namako-kabe and okiyane at close range will do better in Imai-chō, about three kilometres southeast, where the preservation district includes buildings that admit visitors.