Kobatake Family Residence East Storehouse No. 1

A storehouse from 1828

The Kobatake Family 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.

Visiting

The Kobatake Family Residence East Storehouse No. 1 stands at the middle of the eastern boundary, facing the road, and its exterior can be seen from public ground. East Storehouse No. 2 stands immediately to the south, with the Nagayamon Gate beyond it, so the whole three-building frontage can be taken in from the lane. The white plaster, the boarded skirt and the plaster-wrapped eaves of the placed roof are all easy to make out from there.

The interior is not open, the grounds cannot be entered, and there are no opening hours or fees. The lane is the village's everyday road and runs past the family's front door, so stand where you are not in the way and keep photographs to the exterior.