Built-in Fujioka Family Residence

A Storehouse Built Into the House Itself

Fujioka-ke Jūtaku Uchigura (藤岡家住宅内蔵, also written Fujioka-ke Jutaku Uchigura), the inner storehouse of the Fujioka family residence at Hirano-Uemachi in Hirano Ward, Osaka City, is a late Edo period earthen-walled storehouse that was added to the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 August 2015. It runs about four metres along its ridge and three metres across, a footprint of roughly 13 square metres.

That is small. Small enough that visitors who know Japanese storehouses from castle towns and sake breweries, where kura stand free in a rear yard and rise two full storeys, may take a moment to recognise this one for what it is.

The word uchigura makes the distinction. An uchigura is an interior storehouse, joined to the dwelling rather than separated from it, and this one attaches to a small room at the western end of the main house and runs north to south. Its walls are dozō-zukuri: a timber frame packed with thick layers of earth and finished in white lime plaster, a construction developed to keep fire out. The roof is gabled and laid in hongawarabuki, the formal tiling that alternates broad flat pan tiles with rounded cover tiles along each joint. A raised plaster band called a hachimaki, literally a headband, wraps the walls below the eaves.

The Fujioka house sits inside the old moated quarter of Hirano, a merchant town that governed much of its own affairs during the Edo period. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the storehouse and the main house alike to between 1830 and 1868, with alterations in the 1880s and 1890s.

Registered, Not Designated: What That Distinction Means

Japan's system for protecting buildings has two separate tracks, and the Fujioka storehouse belongs to the second one. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated, a process reserved for works of exceptional artistic or historical importance and carrying tight controls on any change. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties are registered, a lighter framework introduced in 1996 for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that still serve everyday purposes. Owners keep far more freedom to repair and adapt, and in return the state asks that the character of the building be respected.

The storehouse was registered under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country, and it carries the registration number 27-0615. Three other buildings on the same property were registered on the same day: the main house, a tool storehouse, and a tall boundary wall known as a takabei. The tool storehouse and the wall date to the later Meiji era, while the main house shares the storehouse's late Edo origin.

Reading those four entries together tells you why the property matters. The main house is a tsushi nikai town house, low in the eaves, with a lattice bay window projecting over the street, a komayose fence of thin vertical bars at ground level, and a row of horizontal mushiko windows, plastered grilles, set into the half-storey above. That combination was once common along the streets of Hirano and has grown rare. The registration files describe the main house as preserving the appearance of the old settlement well.

Hirano's street plan helps explain the survival. The land division carried out in 1616 has been inherited more or less intact, so the grid inside the former moat still follows early Edo lines. The moats themselves were filled in over the twentieth century; traces remain north of Kumata Park and in the earthen bank behind Akaru-hime-no-mikoto Shrine.

A Fortune-Teller's Verdict, and What Came After

The most curious thing recorded about this storehouse concerns the year 1895.

In that year the family obtained a kasō reading of the house. Kasō is house physiognomy, a body of practice for judging how a building's orientation, proportions and internal arrangement bear on the fortunes of the people living in it, and prosperous merchant families took it seriously well into the modern period. Following that reading, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs record, the storehouse appears to have been shortened by one bay at its southern end, and its interior appears to have been remodelled in Western style. The agency hedges both statements, and so should any account that follows it: the alterations are read from the fabric rather than documented directly.

Still, the pairing is worth pausing over. Here is a household in the 1890s consulting a traditional system of geomancy about a fireproof earthen storehouse and, having done so, cutting the building back and fitting out its inside in the manner of a Western room. Two habits of mind that a tidy history would place on opposite sides of the Meiji divide turn out to have operated in the same building in the same year.

Practical matters for anyone planning a visit. The Fujioka residence is a private home and remains lived in, so the interior is not generally open. The Osaka Cultural Properties Navi database lists it as partially viewable, with a public opening on the fourth Sunday of August each year and at other times as arranged, and even then access is limited to the front entrance earth floor and the shop room. The inner storehouse itself is not part of that circuit. What visitors can appreciate freely is the exterior and the street it belongs to, and photography from the public road is unrestricted. Anyone hoping to see more should contact the owner in advance rather than arrive unannounced.

Reaching Hirano-Uemachi takes about ten minutes on foot from either Hirano Station on the JR Yamatoji Line or Hirano Station on the Osaka Metro Tanimachi Line. Kumata Shrine, with its cluster of Important Cultural Property halls, stands roughly five minutes away, and Dainenbutsu-ji, head temple of the Yūzū Nembutsu school, lies a short walk further. A morning spent on these streets gives the storehouse its proper setting.