Kobatake Residence East Storehouse No. 1

A storehouse from 1828

The Kobatake Residence East Storehouse No. 1 (古畑家住宅東一の蔵, Kobatake-ke Jūtaku Higashi Ichi-no-kura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse in the Nakahata district of Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, built in 1828 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 July 2008.

It is small: 4.0 metres along the ridge, 3.8 metres deep, 15 square metres of floor. It is also the oldest of the eight registered buildings on the Kobatake site, predating the main house by the better part of a century. The date comes from the eleventh year of the Bunsei era, when Ienari still sat as shogun and the village belonged to a different province.

The storehouse stands at the middle of the eastern boundary, facing the road.

Its walls are dozō construction, the fireproof method used for Japanese storehouses: a timber frame built up with successive coats of clay until the mass is thick and dense, then finished in white shikkui lime plaster. A skirt of vertical boarding runs along the base of each wall, taking the splash and the knocks that would otherwise chip the plaster at ground level. The plaster carries all the way up and over the eaves, so that no exposed timber is left for a flame to catch.

A roof that sits on top, and a wall of storehouses

The roof is an okiyane, which translates roughly as a placed roof. Instead of framing the rafters into the storehouse itself, the carpenter builds a separate light gabled frame, tiles it in sangawara pantiles, and sets the whole assembly down over the finished clay box. Air passes between the two. Rain sheds well clear of walls that lose their strength when they stay damp. When tiles need relaying, the work happens above the storehouse rather than through its fabric. In many examples the join reads as a shadow line where the plastered wall stops and the roof frame begins.

East Storehouse No. 1 was registered under the third of the three criteria used for the register: contribution to the historic landscape of the country. That is a different clause from the one applied to the Detached Wing on the same site, which was recognised as a model of form. The distinction is worth noticing, because it says what the assessors were actually looking at.

They were looking at the row.

Storehouses line the eastern edge of the compound. Standing beside East Storehouse No. 1 is East Storehouse No. 2, larger at 25 square metres and dated to the late Edo period, somewhere between 1830 and 1867. The two share a vocabulary: the same white lime finish, the same boarded skirt, the same tiled roof set on rather than built in. Seen from the road they register as a single composition rather than as separate outbuildings, and it is that continuous plastered frontage, not any one feature of any one shed, that the criterion is reaching for.

The registration number is 27-0487. The decision was taken on 8 July 2008 and gazetted on 23 July, in the sixtieth round.

From Tanba to Osaka without moving

In 1828 this was not Osaka. Nakahata was a village in Kuwata District of Tanba Province, and for most of the Edo period the area is understood to have fallen under the Tanba Kameyama domain. When the modern municipal system arrived in 1889, Kuwata District was split in two and Nakahata merged with the four neighbouring hamlets of Tanō, Idehai, Sugiu and Niryō to form Kashida Village, in Minami-Kuwata District, Kyoto Prefecture.

Kyoto held the village for sixty-nine years. The basin sits at around 350 metres, its streams run south, and its road and bus links pointed towards Takatsuki rather than towards Kameoka, the district town on the Kyoto side. In 1958 Kashida petitioned to leave, and on 1 April it was absorbed into Takatsuki. No Japanese municipality had crossed a prefectural border in a merger before.

The storehouse was never moved or rebuilt elsewhere. Tanba Province, then Kyoto Prefecture, then Osaka Prefecture: the frame around it was redrawn three times while the building stayed where its clay was packed.

The Kobatake house is still a private home, occupied and in use. Interiors are closed, and no public opening arrangements have been published for any of the eight buildings. What a visitor can see is the eastern frontage from the road, where the two east storehouses stand together, and that view asks for the discretion owed to any lived-in house. Municipal buses from JR Takatsuki Station take around forty minutes to the Kashida district on a climbing forest road. Departures are sparse enough that the timetable governs the shape of a visit.