Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse

About the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse (天理教北阪分教会倉庫, Tenrikyō Kitasaka Bunkyōkai Sōko) is a storage building of around 1939 in Katayamacho, Kashiwara City, Osaka Prefecture, extended between 1945 and 1954, now two storeys high, and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs places it on the west side of the clergy residence. It is a gabled Kirizuma-zukuri building with its ridge running east to west, roofed in the same green-glazed tiles as the clergy residence, and it covers 104 square metres.

Why the Sōko was registered

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse was entered on the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on July 12, 2005, as registration number 27-0319, as a structure that would be difficult to reproduce.

Like its three neighbours, the Sōko has concrete walls built with the special wire mesh the agency calls the "Mora-system structural mesh" (モーラ式構成網). The method was used even for this utilitarian building.

The warehouse also records its own alterations. The national database gives its date as around 1939 with an extension in the decade from 1945 to 1954, making it the only one of the four with a documented later building phase.

What to look for at the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse

Traces of the original building on the gable wall

According to the agency, the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse began as a single-storey structure: a main block with a vaulted ceiling and a Geya lean-to along its south side. The outline of that first building survives as marks on the gable wall, the triangular end wall under the roof.

Reading those marks against the present two-storey building gives a sense of how low the original store was and how its roof was shaped.

Corinthian capitals at the door

The columns on either side of the ground-floor entrance carry Corinthian capitals, the acanthus-leaf tops of classical European architecture. Placing them beneath a green-glazed Japanese tile roof is a deliberate contrast, and it matches the cornice on the clergy residence and the balustrade motifs on the detached wing.

Visiting the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse

The Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse is not open to the public, and neither the interior nor the grounds can be entered.

Although the Tenrikyo Kitasaka Branch Church Warehouse is known to stand west of the clergy residence, no published source confirms that the gable-wall traces or the entrance capitals are visible from a public street. Stay on public land and limit photography to what is visible from there.