Shoji Family Residence Inner Storehouse

A Small Storehouse Behind the Main House

The Shoji Family Residence Inner Storehouse (荘司家住宅内蔵, Shōji-ke Jūtaku Uchigura) is a late Edo-period plastered storehouse in Nishiando, Ando Town, Ikoma District, Nara Prefecture, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2020.

Attached to the north side of the main house, it served both as a store for tools and as a document store. Its plan is 2 ken square, the ken being the traditional bay used to size Japanese buildings, it rises 2 storeys, and it covers 30 square metres. It is the smallest of the six registered buildings on the Shoji property, but it ranks with the main house as one of the oldest.

Its name, uchigura, suggests a storehouse joined to the house and reached from inside it. For a family that served as village officials for generations, a fireproof place to keep papers as well as tools would have been essential, and the Shoji Family Residence Inner Storehouse filled that role directly behind the living quarters.

Why It Was Registered

The Shoji Family Residence Inner Storehouse received registration number 29-0298 in the 95th round of national registrations, dated 2020/4/3, for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that it forms one corner of the compound's northern edge, where it lines up with the storehouse to the north-east as a row of white-walled stores. Because this small late Edo storehouse still stands where it was built, joined to the house, you can read its purpose within the life of the household rather than as an isolated building.

What to Look For

A floating tiled roof

The building is dozo-zukuri, the thick-walled plastered storehouse construction, and its roof is an okiyane: a separately framed timber roof set over a clay-sealed roof beneath, so that the lower layer resists fire and the upper one sheds rain. The upper roof is laid in hongawarabuki, the heavy style of alternating flat and round tiles.

Lean-tos on three sides

Lean-to geya roofs wrap the west, south and east sides of the storehouse, and the doorway opens toward the south end of the west face. With low roofs around it, the white upper walls of the store show above them.

Sealed eaves and a double band

The walls are finished in shikkui lime plaster, carried right up into the underside of the eaves. Below the eaves two hachimaki bands of thickened plaster run around the top of the walls, and the lower walls are faced with tateita-bari vertical boarding to protect them from rain. Every element of a fire-ready storehouse is here, worked out on a building only 2 ken across.

Visiting

The Uchigura is part of a private home and is not open; as of October 2026 we found no announcement of open days. Set behind the main house at the back of the plot, it is probably hard to see from outside the property, though we have not confirmed this on site. Please stay off the grounds and respect the residents' privacy.

Photographs supplied by the Ando Town Board of Education in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database show the exterior.