Konishi Co., Ltd. (formerly Konishi Gisuke Shoten) Three

At the Back of a Medicine Merchant's Compound

Konishi Sankaigura (コニシ株式会社（旧小西儀助商店）三階蔵, read Konishi Kabushiki-gaisha Sankaigura) is a three-story earthen storehouse at Doshomachi 1-6 in Chuo Ward, Osaka, completed in 1903 and placed on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 20 December 1996, in the system's opening round. Its footprint is 45 square metres, its structure the thick mud-walled kura construction that Osaka merchants trusted with anything they could not afford to lose to fire.

The compound around it belongs to Konishi Co., Ltd., a company most Japanese households know without knowing the name. Konishi makes Bond, the woodworking adhesive found in school classrooms and toolboxes across the country. Long before the glue, the firm dealt in medicine. Doshomachi has been the pharmaceutical wholesalers' street of Osaka since the Edo period, and it remains one, with drug companies still holding addresses along it.

The second-generation Konishi Gisuke built the main house here over roughly three years from 1900, finishing in 1903. He laid it out as an omoteya-zukuri townhouse, a plan that puts the shop block on the street and connects it through a courtyard to the living quarters behind. The lot runs deep, from Doshomachi-dori through to the next street north, and three storehouses stand at its rear. This one is the northeastern of the three.

The One Building That Stayed on the Register

Four buildings on this lot were registered together on 20 December 1996: the main house, the clothing storehouse, the two-story storehouse and this three-story storehouse. The registration numbers ran in sequence, and Konishi Sankaigura holds 27-0004, the fourth number issued in Osaka Prefecture. The registration system had only just been created that year, so these were among the first buildings anywhere to enter it.

Then the compound split in two. On 15 June 2001 the main house, the clothing storehouse, the two-story storehouse and the land itself were designated Important Cultural Properties, a considerably higher tier that carries permission requirements for alteration and stronger public support for repair. Japanese law removes a building from the register once it is designated, since the two statuses are alternatives rather than a ladder to be climbed while keeping the lower rung. The three-story storehouse was not part of that designation.

So it stays where it began. Walk the lot today and you cross a boundary that exists only on paper: buildings a few metres apart, built by the same family in the same decade, sitting in different legal categories. Nothing about the storehouse changed in 2001. The assessment simply drew its line elsewhere, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs database still lists this building as registered rather than designated.

A Cornice Where You Would Not Expect One

The elevation splits horizontally into two different architectural languages, and the seam is easy to find. The ground floor is faced in stone. Above it, the second and third floors are finished in white lime plaster laid as okabe, the technique that buries the timber frame completely inside the wall so that no post or beam shows on the outside. That much is ordinary storehouse practice.

The eaves are not. Instead of the exposed rafters or simple tiled edge a Meiji-period kura would usually carry, the building wears a nokijabara, a horizontal moulded band running beneath the roofline. A cornice, in other words. The device comes from Western classical architecture, and its appearance on a Japanese mud-walled storehouse in 1903 is a small piece of evidence about what Osaka merchants wanted their premises to say at that moment. The Agency's own description calls it characteristic of its period.

On the gable ends the treatment shifts again: the band there is stepped in two courses of flat noshi ridge tiles rather than run as a single moulding, which breaks the horizontal and keeps the two faces of the building from reading identically. Small decision, deliberate effect.

Visiting takes some explaining. The designated main house reopened in 2020 as the Kyu-Konishike Jutaku Shiryokan, a company museum, and admission is free but by advance web reservation only, with enquiries taken on 06-6228-2847 between 10:00 and 12:00 and 13:00 and 17:00 on weekdays. The museum interprets the main house and its collection. The three-story storehouse itself is recorded in the Osaka prefectural cultural property database as not open for viewing, so treat it as part of the compound's fabric rather than a room you will walk into. Kitahama Station on the Osaka Metro Sakaisuji Line puts you at the corner in about a minute from exit 5, and the Keihan Main Line platform of the same name is roughly six minutes away via exit 27.