Ohashiya Main House and Storehouse

A Three-Storey Timber Restaurant on Honcho-dori

Ohashiya Main House and Storehouse (大橋屋主屋及び土蔵, Ōhashiya Shuoku oyobi Dozō) is a timber restaurant building of 1935 at Honcho-dori Juichibancho in Chuo Ward, Niigata City, entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 1 July 2003. It rises three storeys, with a two-storey portion, under a tiled roof, and covers 323 square metres of a long, narrow merchant plot running back from the street.

Plots of that shape, called tanzaku after the slender paper strips used for poems, were the standard unit of the old commercial quarter. They gave every shop a slice of street frontage and pushed everything else backwards. Ohashiya answers the constraint by turning its gable end to the road, an arrangement known as tsuma-iri, and by going up.

The facade repays a slow look. On the second floor, semicircular arched openings sit in a row beside rectangular ones, an unexpected pairing on a Japanese timber building of the 1930s. The wall surface is clad in copper sheet laid in ajiro, a plaited basketwork pattern, so that the metal reads as woven rather than flat. Above all this the roof breaks into two tiers of irimoya, the hip-and-gable form, stacking one over the other.

The national database files the building under tertiary industry, a reminder that this is commercial architecture and was always meant to be entered by paying guests.

Registered as Something That Could Not Be Built Again

Of the criteria available for registration, the one applied here reads "difficult to reproduce". Take that phrasing literally. The interior places guest rooms on the second and third floors, and the survey record singles out the ceilings and the treatment of openings in each room, which change in character as you move between them.

The rooms carry names, and the names governed the materials. The Ogon no Ma, the Golden Room, was finished with gold paper in the ceiling paintings, a stepped arrangement of joinery, hemp-leaf lattice on the shoji of the surrounding corridor, and a bamboo blind of the kind associated with Heian court interiors. Tsuru no Ma and Kame no Ma, the Crane and Tortoise rooms, take the two standard emblems of long life; their ceilings are built up in tiers, with a crane painted into the upper field of one. Umetake no Ma takes plum and bamboo.

Work of this kind depended on named specialists in joinery, plaster and cabinetry, and on the timbers being selected room by room to suit the theme. Assembling the same team and the same materials now would be close to impossible, which is the point the criterion makes.

How registration differs from designation

Registered Tangible Cultural Property status, created in 1996, sets a lighter obligation than Important Cultural Property designation. Owners notify the authorities of major alterations rather than applying for permission, which allows a building to stay in commercial use. Ohashiya's register number is 15-0156, from the thirty-seventh round; registration took effect on 1 July 2003 and was gazetted on 17 July.

The Business Behind the Building

Ohashiya dates its founding to 1866, the second year of the Keio era, when the first of the line acquired the villa of Kawamura Nagataka (川村修就), the shogunate's first magistrate of Niigata, and set up as a wholesale fish dealer. Kawamura, known in his lifetime by the personal name Seibei, held the post from 1843 to 1852 and left a substantial record of the town's customs.

The shift from fish to food came in 1919, when the fourth-generation head, Ohashi Shintaro, began taking on cooking and catering alongside the trade, building a reputation in Buddhist vegetarian cuisine and wedding banquets. In July 1933 he travelled to Tokyo to see Meguro Gajoen, then a national talking point for its lavish decorated interiors. He returned resolved to build. Construction began the following month and the building was completed in December 1935.

A three-storey wooden banquet house was unusual then and is rarer now. It came through the Second World War and the Niigata Earthquake of 1964 without being lost, in a district where a great deal else went.

The kitchen has kept a longer memory than the architecture. The sesame tofu served since the founding, under a sweet-savoury sauce that reads as distinctly local, is still on the menu, alongside prawn shinjo dumplings made with Niigata's sweet shrimp and shaped to the season.

Practical points. Ohashiya operates as a ryotei, a reservation-based restaurant, and is not a building you can walk into and look around. A separate barrier-free annexe, Honcho Saryo, opened in 2002 across the way and handles a good share of ordinary bookings, so a reservation at Ohashiya does not by itself guarantee a table inside the registered main house. Ask specifically for the honkan when you book, and confirm what the house can offer for your party size. Lunch and dinner sittings both run; closing days are irregular. Niigata Station is roughly fifteen minutes away by bus or taxi, in the Furumachi and Honcho quarter west of the Shinano River, and the Bandai Bridge is a pleasant walk from the door.