Shioya (Taketa)

About Shioya

Shioya (塩屋) is an Edo-period merchant house in the old castle town of Taketa, Oita Prefecture: its main house of 1865 and two storehouses from the last decades of the Edo period were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on December 1, 2003, and a fourth building, the former large storehouse, followed on October 28, 2011 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). The name, read "Shioya", is written with the characters for salt and shop.

Material compiled by the Timber Structures Laboratory at Oita University notes that a merchants' licence register of 1828 records Shioya acquiring a licence to deal in miso and soy sauce, and that a house register of 1845 lists it as a townhouse. The family has been trading on the same plot since at least then, and the laboratory describes the Shioya storehouses as the oldest surviving townhouse buildings in the city.

Taketa City refers to the main house and its two storehouses together as the Shioya Dozo and cites them as a fine example of Edo-period merchant architecture.

How the Buildings Are Laid Out

The Shioya Main House faces Honmachi, the main street of the merchant quarter. Behind it, roughly in the middle of a long, narrow plot, stands the Middle Storehouse, and at the far end of the plot stands the Old Storehouse (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Seen from the street they form a single line: the house and the Middle Storehouse make up the merchant frontage, while the Old Storehouse closes off the back of the property.

The Former Large Storehouse is separate from the three, a large two-storey building on the west side of a side lane (Agency for Cultural Affairs). It held rice until the war years, was turned into a public bathhouse with men's and women's baths in about 1958, and after work in 2011 now houses a cafe and a gallery (Agency for Cultural Affairs; official site).

The Shioya Dozo stand in Shimo-Honmachi, and Taketa City's plan gives, as an example of the summer Nagoshi festival route, a procession that carries the portable shrine past their front. Each building is described in detail on its own page.

Visiting Shioya

The nearest station is Bungo-Taketa on the JR Hohi Line. The official site of Art Space Cafe Okura Shimizuyu, which occupies the Former Large Storehouse, gives the walk from the station as about 10 minutes and mentions paid parking nearby.

The Shioya Main House and the two storehouses behind it are privately owned, and no official information on interior access was found; the front of the main house can be seen from Honmachi street. The Former Large Storehouse operates as a cafe; its official site lists opening hours of 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., closed on irregular days (checked November 12, 2026). No official guidance on photography was found.