Ito Family Residence Barn

The Small Building West of the Tall One

The Ito Family Residence Barn in Ushita, Gosen City, Niigata Prefecture, is a single-storey timber building of the early Meiji era that was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 12 July 2005.

It stands immediately west of the three-storied storehouse. At 43 square metres it is the smallest of the six buildings. The Kirizuma-zukuri roof is tiled in Sangawara-buki pantiles, and a Geya lean-to shelters the doorway set toward the east end of the north face. Inside, the eastern half is Doma, beaten earth, and the western half is boarded.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database assigns the barn to the early Meiji era and enters a span of 1868 to 1911 in its column for western dates. Where no ridge tablet or building record survives, a range of that kind is the usual answer.

A Working Building That Survived

A barn holds tools and materials. It is not built to be looked at, as a house or a strongroom is. Among the six listed buildings the Ito Family Residence Barn stands closest to daily work, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs is careful to call it plain but well made, which is not the same as rough.

The listing criterion is contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Attention at a landowner's estate usually goes to the house and the storehouses, but only when the working buildings survive can the whole place be understood as a machine that ran. That the Ito Family Residence Barn faces the road beside the three-storied storehouse says something too: the working side of the estate was not hidden away.

Count the Posts

The clearest thing from outside is the spacing of the posts. Around the perimeter they stand at intervals of about 2 shaku, roughly 60 centimetres. The upper wall is Shikkui lime plaster in Shinkabe, with the frame left visible, and below the waist the wall is Shitami-itabari, weatherboarding held by battens. Because the posts come so close together, the white plaster reads as a series of narrow vertical panels.

Plaster above and boards below is a snow-country arrangement: the timber takes the height that snow reaches, and damaged boards can be replaced. Standing next to the heavy white walls of the three-storied storehouse, the barn shows how a single estate graded its buildings by rank and by construction.

Visiting the Barn

The Ito Family Residence Barn lines up west of the three-storied storehouse and can be seen from the road. Look at the tall white walls of the storehouse first, then move the eye west to this low, plain building.

The interior is closed and the grounds are private. Keep photography to exterior shots from the public road. In winter, snow cleared to the verges narrows the space where a visitor can stand.