Shijonawate City History and Folklore Museum Exhibition Room

A Storehouse Facing an Old Pilgrimage Road

The Exhibition Room of the Shijōnawate City Museum of History and Folklore (四條畷市立歴史民俗資料館展示室, Shijōnawate Shiritsu Rekishi Minzoku Shiryōkan Tenjishitsu) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse built in 1907 in Tsukawaki-chō, Shijōnawate City, Osaka Prefecture, and it was entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 15 May 2007. The building began life as a branch office of the Hirakata Ward Court and now serves as the folklore gallery of the city museum.

It measures 7.6 metres across the front and 5.7 metres deep, giving a footprint of 43 square metres. The roof is hipped and covered in sangawara, the S-curved pantiles common across Kansai. The lower part of the walls is faced with vertical boards, and every window carries an iron shutter behind an iron grille.

The construction method is called dozō-zukuri, in which the timber frame is buried inside thick plastered earthen walls to resist fire. Japanese builders normally reserved it for storehouses holding rice, sake or valuables. Here it was applied to a government office, for a simple reason: the office held land registers, documents that could not be reconstructed once burned.

The address at the time was Kōka Village. Seven villages in Sasara District merged under the municipal reorganisation of 1889 to form it, and the name held until 1932, when it changed to Shijōnawate. That is why a court office built here in 1907 carried the name Kōka.

The building faces the old Higashi Kōya Kaidō, a road used for centuries by pilgrims travelling toward Mount Kōya. Public facilities went up along this line because it was the village's main artery. When the property was registered, the criterion applied was the one covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape, and its relationship with the old road counted toward that assessment.

From Court Office to Museum Gallery

Few small buildings carry a résumé this varied.

On completion in 1907 the ground floor held the clerks' office and the upper floor served as the document store. A residence for the branch chief stood immediately to the north, connected to the office by a private door. In 1949 the building passed to the Osaka Legal Affairs Bureau as the document store of its Shijōnawate branch, so registry work continued under a different sign.

Shijōnawate City bought the property in 1978 and ran it for a time as a book centre. The decisive change came in 1985, when the city designed a new museum around the old storehouse rather than beside it. The word "around" is literal. The west exterior wall of the storehouse now stands inside the newer building, iron window shutters still fixed in place, so a visitor walking the museum corridor is looking at what was once weathered outside wall.

Registration followed in 2007, in the fifty-fourth round of listings, under registration number 27-0420. The building turned a hundred that year.

One caution for researchers. Some secondary accounts give the construction year as 1899 and the registration date as December 2006. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database records 1907 and 15 May 2007, and this article follows the agency.

What to Look For Inside

Farm tools and household objects fill the shelves, but the room itself repays attention. A surprising amount of the court office survives.

The glazed section at the front was the public counter. People waiting their turn stood on the far side and received documents through the opening, and the grille above it was given an arched profile rather than a plain rectangular one. The shelving built to hold land registers is still in position.

Look closely at how the openings are made. Each window and door works in four layers: iron shutter, iron grille, wooden panel, glass pane. The demand to protect paper from fire and theft translated directly into a count of components. To the left of the office stands a pair of heavy wooden doors, the private passage to the branch chief's house, backed on the outer face by iron.

Upstairs the roof structure is open to view. Three pine beams, each more than 40 centimetres deep, carry the frame. The grain, the knots and the darkened traces where resin bled out are all readable at close range. These were sized to hold shelves loaded with paper, and the sizing shows.

The museum around it is worth the visit on its own terms. Its collection draws on excavations across Shijōnawate and includes a Christian grave marker counted among the oldest known in Japan, wooden geta sandals and a Yayoi-period wooden coffin. There are two galleries: this registered storehouse holds the folklore displays, while the newer wing shows archaeological finds.

Admission is free. Opening hours run from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and the museum closes on Mondays, or the following day when a Monday falls on a public holiday, over the New Year period from 28 December to 4 January, and during preparation periods for special exhibitions. Those preparation closures shift from year to year, so anyone travelling a distance should call 072-878-4558 first. Since April 2016 the museum has been operated by the Chiiki Bunkazai Kenkyūsho and Kentoku group.

Getting there takes about fifteen minutes on foot north from Shijōnawate Station on the JR Gakkentoshi Line. Buses stop closer: from the Tsukawaki stop, served by the community bus and by Keihan and Kintetsu services, the walk is three minutes. Walking from the station follows the old Higashi Kōya Kaidō, which makes the building's orientation easy to understand once you arrive. Shijōnawate Shrine and the tomb of Kusunoki Masatsura lie in the same direction and combine well into one outing.