Nabechaya Brick Warehouse

A Single-Story Brick Storehouse from around 1910

The Nabechaya Brick Storehouse (鍋茶屋煉瓦蔵, Nabejaya renga-gura in the Agency for Cultural Affairs register) is a single-story brick storehouse at the Nabechaya restaurant in Higashibori-dori, Chuo Ward, Niigata City, built around 1910 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 28 April 2000. It covers 63 square meters under a tiled roof and stands in the eastern part of the compound, between the detached tatami wing and the plaster storehouse.

Seven Nabechaya structures went onto the register together, and this is the only one built primarily of brick. The main house is timber, three stories tall. The detached tatami wing is timber. The detached storehouse uses earthen-wall construction. The front gate and its perimeter wall are reinforced concrete. Wood, earth, stone, and concrete line up across the property, with one brick outlier among them.

Its date accounts for most of the explanation.

Two Fires in One Year, and an Answer in Brick

Niigata burned twice within six months in 1908.

The first fire broke out on 8 March in the eighth block of Furumachi-dori. It started at a geisha lodging house called Wakasaya, and the blaze is still known by that name. Flames spread through the seventh and eighth blocks of Higashibori-dori and through much of Hommachi-dori, and the original Bandai Bridge went down with them. On 4 September the city burned again, this time losing the city hall, the police station, and the normal school. Casualty figures for property vary between accounts, but the March fire consumed well over a thousand houses and the September fire more than two thousand.

Furumachi-dori's eighth block, where the March fire started, sits directly behind Higashibori-dori's eighth block, where Nabechaya stands. The fire began inside the pleasure quarter and burned the pleasure quarter down.

Nabechaya rebuilt in 1910. The frame of the main house dates from that campaign, and both the plaster storehouse and this brick one were raised around the same time. It takes no great leap to guess what an owner rebuilding storehouses in 1910, after watching the town burn twice the year before, put at the top of the list. Fire-resistant construction in Japan then meant one of two things: thick earthen walls, or brick. Brick was the newer option, spread through the country by a Meiji government that used it for ministries and factories, and it kept its reputation for modern solidity until the 1923 Kanto earthquake exposed how unreinforced masonry behaves in a quake. In 1910 that reckoning was still thirteen years away.

Building both a plaster storehouse and a brick one on the same site reads almost like a trial of two methods against each other. Both are still standing after more than a century.

Header Bond, and a Wall Standing Above the Roof

The walls are laid in header bond. Only the short end of each brick shows on the face; no stretchers appear at all. Set beside English bond or Flemish bond, which alternate long faces and short ones, the pattern repeats at a tighter interval and the surface reads as a single even fabric. Step close and identical rectangles march sideways without a break.

The roof is a mono-pitch of sangawara pantiles, sloping one way only. Above that roof, a brick wall continues upward.

The register lists two purposes for it: fire protection and screening. A wall carried above the roof plane catches embers blown from neighboring buildings, which is close to the job done by the udatsu firebreak walls of older merchant houses. The same wall blocks the view over the roof from the street. A restaurant of this kind keeps some parts of its grounds on display and others out of sight.

This storehouse meets Higashibori-dori directly, with no perimeter wall in front of it, as the plaster storehouse does too. The eastern side is handled quite differently from the west, where a gate and a wall compose a formal frontage. Here the storehouse wall simply is the street wall. Three timber stories, a sukiya wing, white plaster, and brick, one after another. That sequence is what the register means by the varied streetscape the building helps create.

Seeing It from Higashibori-dori

The exterior can be studied from the pavement on Higashibori-dori. The building is private property and its interior is closed. Nabechaya operates as a restaurant, and guests who reserve a meal are sometimes shown through the older rooms, though that is a different matter from getting inside a working storehouse. Reservations and enquiries go through 025-222-6131. The restaurant's site gives Mondays and Sunday evenings as closures, with Sunday lunch only; published hours differ between listings, so check directly.

For looking rather than dining, distance helps. Standing at the base of the wall puts the roofline at too steep an angle to judge how far the brick parapet rises. Cross to the far pavement and the relationship between the sloping roof and the wall carried past its upper edge becomes legible. Late afternoon light deepens the color of the brick.

From Niigata Station, the Bandaibashi Line (route B1) runs from the bus terminal to Hommachi, about six minutes' walk away; a taxi takes eight to ten minutes. No visitor parking exists, so use a paid lot nearby. Photographing from the street is unrestricted, but the place is somebody's business and worth treating accordingly. After Higashibori-dori, walk around to Nabechaya-dori on the other side to see the gate and perimeter wall, and how one establishment prepared a different face for each street.