Kikkawa Family Residence

A Merchant House at Murakami with Three Registered Buildings

The Kikkawa Family Residence stands at 195 Omachi, Murakami City, Niigata Prefecture, a merchant house whose main house and storehouse were entered on the register of tangible cultural properties on 23 August 1999, and whose shop followed on 31 January 2003. They are registered properties rather than designated ones. The oldest, the storehouse, dates from 1841.

The 3 are the main house, the shop and the storehouse.

The name is read Kikkawa. The Yoshikawa residence at Taketa in Oita is a different household's property, read differently.

Rebuilt After Great Fires

The dates of building are bound up with fires that swept the town.

The Agency records the main house as the dwelling of merchants who processed and sold salmon, said to have been rebuilt directly after the great fire of 1879. Its date field reads about 1879.

The shop is said to have been rebuilt after the great fire of 1892; its date field reads about 1892.

The storehouse dates from 1841, before both fires. The Agency records it as a valuable survival from before the Meiji restoration in the old town of Murakami.

Within one property, the dates of the buildings divide at the fires.

The Obaraya shop storehouse was drawn back on rollers when the road was widened: there a road moved a building.

Here fire made the buildings be replaced. Only the surviving storehouse shows what stood before.

The Trade Changed from Sake to Salmon

The present trade differs from the trade of the time the store was built.

The Agency records the storehouse as a store for sake from the time the family brewed it.

The main house, meanwhile, is the dwelling of merchants who processed and sold salmon, and its southern part is an earth-floored through passage used for that work.

A store built in the brewing years remains within the grounds of a house that deals in salmon. The building stays while the goods change.

At the Yoshikawa brewery at Taketa, which shares the written name, the warehouses went on serving as brewing rooms and a mould room.

Here a brewing store serves within a property given over to another trade.

A through passage runs with an earthen floor from front to back; here it is where salmon was worked.

A Recent Refitting at the Heart of the Streetscape

Work that returned a building toward older forms is written into the assessment.

Of the shop, the Agency records that in recent years, when it was extended to the north, its front was refitted in traditional design, and that it has become central to the ordering of the streetscape along the main street.

The front is the face a building turns to the street. At the time of the extension, that face was remade in traditional form.

The assessment of a registered building thus rests not on its state when built but takes in a recent refitting.

Uno Pharmacy is valued as the only signboard-style building left among its neighbours.

This shop is valued for the part it plays in the making of a street's prospect.

It stands on the main street of the old merchants' quarter below Murakami castle.

Visiting

The property is at 195 Omachi, Murakami City, Niigata Prefecture. All 3 carry the same address.

The main house covers 315 square metres, the storehouse 161 and the shop 37.

The main house stands in the middle of a plot long from east to west between two streets, the storehouse behind it, and the shop on the street.

The main house is roofed in sheet iron, the shop and storehouse in pantiles.

No owner is recorded, and opening and terms follow the owner's arrangements. Check before travelling.