Sato Family Residence East Storehouse

Sato Family Residence East Storehouse: the tool store behind the farmhouse

Directly north of the main house, facing south toward it, stands the smaller of the two plastered storehouses on the site. This is the dogu-gura, the store where the farm kept its tools, and at about twenty-seven square metres it has the most compact footprint of the four registered buildings.

It is a two-storey dozo, the thick-walled fireproof storehouse type, roofed with heavy tiles in a gabled form. A lean-to runs across the front, with the doorway set toward the west. The walls are finished in plaster, and here the vertical boarding protects the gable ends as well as the lower courses, a sensible guard for the exposed faces of a building on an open plain.

Why it was registered

The east storehouse joined the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in March 2019, in the same listing as the main house, the gate, and the west storehouse. It was registered under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape, the basis shared with the gate and the neighbouring store.

Registration is a lighter protection than the Important Cultural Property or National Treasure designations, and it weighs a building by the role it plays in a larger scene. Set close behind the main house, the tool store is part of the working core of the farm. It helps complete the estate layout of a leading household on the Bizen plain, and it has been kept up across the generations, with a repair carried out in 1990.

What to notice

For all its small size, the store is built like its larger neighbour. Both floors are boarded, and the roof rests on sloping beams, the noboribari, which clear the loft of obstruction and let the upper floor be used in full. A tool store had to take the daily traffic of a working farm, and the plan keeps the access simple, with the single west doorway under the front lean-to.

One detail is worth a closer reading of the records. The cultural-property entry lists the building under the Meiji era in one field while giving its date as late Edo in another, with a repair in 1990. The figures point to a late-Edo store, of the same generation as the west storehouse, kept in service long enough to need modern repair.

The east storehouse belongs to a private home and is not open to the public. It can be seen from the roads around the site. The nearby Kurashiki City Fukuda Museum of History and Folklore, which is open to all, sets the working life of such a farm in the context of the reclaimed plain.