Manabe Family Residence Inui-gura

An Island Storehouse Named for the Northwest

The Manabe Family Residence Inui-gura (真鍋家住宅乾蔵, also written Inuigura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse at 4026-1 Manabeshima, Kasaoka City, Okayama Prefecture, built in 1893 and entered on the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2006.

The name is a compass bearing. In the older Japanese system of orientation, borrowed from Chinese cosmology, inui (乾) marks northwest, and that is precisely where the building stands: the far northwest corner of the Manabe family's walled plot, hard against the lane. Rural households across Japan named outbuildings this way as a matter of routine bookkeeping. Read the names of an old estate's structures and the plan of the estate assembles itself in your head before you have walked it.

The storehouse runs north to south beneath a gabled roof of sangawara pantiles, its single doorway set in the south wall so that it opens back toward the family's main house rather than onto the public lane. The footprint is 21 square metres. That is small by mainland standards, and the smallness is the point: land inside the old village of Honura is scarce, the plots are tight, and everything the household needed to store had to fit into buildings raised vertically rather than spread out.

Manabeshima lies roughly 18 kilometres off the Okayama coast, one of the Kasaoka Islands scattered across the Seto Inland Sea. About 235 people lived there as of 2015.

What Registration Recognised

The Inui-gura was registered under registration number 33-0109 in the fiftieth round of listings, gazetted on 12 April 2006. It came in as one of five Manabe buildings entered on the same day, alongside the main house of 1870, the former post office building of 1917, the warehouse-and-shed pair of 1874, and the front gate of the early Meiji period.

Registration is not the same instrument as designation. Japan's register for tangible cultural properties was created in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that remain in everyday use, and it works by notification rather than by the tighter controls attached to Important Cultural Property status. Owners keep considerable freedom to repair and adapt. The trade-off is that registered buildings tend to be ordinary rather than exceptional: farmhouses, shops, bridges, breweries, the fabric of daily life rather than its monuments.

The criterion cited for the Inui-gura is contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes that the exterior was repaired in recent years but follows the earlier condition closely, which is the reason the building still reads as part of a continuous street frontage rather than as a restoration set among neighbours.

Its immediate neighbour makes a small piece of local history legible. The Inui-gura stands just north of the former post office building, which served as Manabeshima's post office from 1918 until 1962, and the present-day Manabeshima Post Office operates directly beside it. Postal service on this island has moved perhaps thirty metres in a century.

Reading the Wall

Stand on the lane and look at the lower half of the wall first.

The skirt is finished in namako-kabe, a technique in which flat square tiles are fixed to the wall and the joints between them built up into raised ridges of white plaster. The resulting grid of dark squares crossed by pale diagonal bands takes its name from the sea cucumber, namako, whose rounded profile the ridges resemble. The method began as pure defence. Tile and lime armour the vulnerable base of an earthen wall against splashing rain and salt spray, which on an island fifteen minutes' walk across matters a great deal. Craftsmen then discovered they had produced a pattern, and the pattern became the reason to use it.

Above that, the Manabe storehouse does something less common. The Agency for Cultural Affairs description records that tiles on the second-storey section are laid horizontally while those at the corners are set vertically, a deliberate change of direction that sharpens the edges of the building and gives the upper wall a banded rhythm. It is a plasterer's decision, made for the eye, and it survives because the recent repairs kept it.

The white lime render across the rest of the surface has a practical logic too. Lime plaster over a thick earthen core resists fire, and in a village of timber houses packed shoulder to shoulder, the storehouse was where a family put the things it could not afford to lose.

Practical notes for anyone planning the trip. The Manabe residence remains private property and is lived in; there is no admission, no opening hours, and no interior access. What you can do is walk the lane, which passes within a couple of metres of the storehouse, and look. Photographing the exterior from the public lane is not restricted, though the courtyard and the family's celebrated horutonoki tree deserve the same discretion you would show at any private house. Boats leave from Sumiyoshi Port, about seven minutes on foot from JR Kasaoka Station, on the Kasaoka to Sanagi-Honura route; the ordinary service takes roughly seventy minutes to Honura Port on Manabeshima, and the Manabe buildings are about two minutes' walk from the pier. Sailings are cancelled in rough weather, so check the operator before travelling.