Okahashi Family Residence New Dry Storehouse

Named for a Direction on the Old Compass

The Shin-inuigura, or new northwest storehouse, of the Okahashi Family Residence (岡橋家住宅新乾蔵, Okahashi-ke Jūtaku Shin-inuigura) stands in Ōzuku-chō in Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, was built around 1938, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 17 August 2020.

The name repays a moment's attention. Inui (乾) is one of the eight points of the old Japanese compass, a system that borrowed from the trigrams of the I Ching, and it marks the northwest. The building duly occupies the northwest of the compound, facing south. Shin means new, which implies an earlier inuigura that this one replaced or supplemented. Households of this rank did not usually name their storehouses by function alone; position within the walls was information a family used every day, and the vocabulary of directions was ready to hand.

It is a dozō storehouse of two storeys with a formal hongawara tiled roof. Building area is 88 square metres, second only to the north rice store and the main storehouse. A lean-to shelters the doorway, and the windows carry the bracketed hoods used throughout the property. Plaster covers the walls and runs up over the eave soffits, with two raised bands beneath the eaves and drip courses at mid-height and at the base.

The Last One Built

Registration falls under criterion one, buildings contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The register number is 29-0313, from the 96th round.

Among the fifteen registered buildings on this property, this storehouse is the youngest. The detached zashiki goes back to the closing decades of the Edo period, the ceramics store to about 1887, the main house and main storehouse to 1917, the inner and east rice stores to 1919. The rest belong to the early Shōwa years, and this one, at around 1938, closes the sequence. A little over a century of continuous building, ending on the edge of the war.

Its interior differs from the storehouses raised twenty years earlier. The floor is boarded and the walls are lined with horizontal planking, as elsewhere, but the roof frame is wagoya, the conventional Japanese arrangement of posts and horizontal beams, rather than the truss chosen for the inner storehouse and the north rice store. The corners are stiffened with hiuchibari, diagonal braces set at the junctions of the horizontal members to keep the frame square under lateral load.

That combination is worth sitting with. A family that had already used trusses reverted to the traditional frame for its last storehouse, then added diagonal bracing. Reading it as a step backwards would be a mistake; hiuchibari address the same structural problem a truss does, and Japanese carpentry of the 1930s used them routinely.

The property's registered address for this building is 586-2 rather than 586-1, a small administrative detail that reflects its position at the northwest edge of the holding.

Getting There, and What You Will Actually See

Seiko Ringyo Co., Ltd. owns and uses the compound. It is not open to the public, there is no admission and no interior access, and the hiuchibari and wagoya frame described here are matters of record. Standing at the northwest corner of the site, this storehouse is among the buildings closest to the boundary, so its plastered upper wall and tiled roof can be made out from the lane on that side more readily than most.

Photography from the public road is acceptable. Entering the grounds is not, and the lanes are residential, so visitors should keep noise down and stay out of the way of vehicles that do have business here.

The walk from Masuga Station on the Kintetsu Osaka Line is about 1.3 kilometres, twenty minutes or so. Lanes narrow as you approach, several terminate without warning, and there is no visitor parking. The Important Preservation District of Imai-chō sits roughly three kilometres to the southeast, and its open houses give the interior experience that this compound cannot.