Yoshimura Family Residence Costume Storehouse

A Merchant Family's Clothing Storehouse in Old Kaizuka

Walk a few minutes inland from Kaizuka Station, on the Nankai Line south of Osaka, and the grid of streets starts to behave oddly. Lanes jog and narrow; a low earthen wall ends in a lattice door; a white-plastered gable rises above the tiled roofs. This is what remains of a town that once governed itself, and one of the houses that grew up inside it belonged to the Yoshimura family, oil dealers and money-changers who traded here under the name Izumiya.

Behind their main house stands a small, sturdy building that rarely draws a tourist's eye: the ishōgura, the storehouse where the family kept its clothing. Two stories of thick mud walls finished in white lime plaster, a gabled roof of heavy clay tiles, a footprint of about 44 square meters. It was raised in the final decades of the Edo period, sometime between the 1830s and the 1860s, and it has stood through everything since.

It is not a temple or a castle. That is rather the point. Buildings like this one are how an ordinary prosperous household stored its wealth, and how a working town held its shape.

The Yoshimura Family and the Izumiya Name

The Yoshimura family settled inside the Kaizuka temple town from the middle of the Edo period. They went by the shop name Izumiya, also written Izumikyū, and for generations the head of the house carried the character kyū (久, "long-lasting") in his given name. Their trade was oil and money: they ran an oil business and acted as ryōgae, money-changers, which in practice meant they functioned as a small private bank for the merchants around them.

A household record kept by the family, the Bunsei Sannen Shoyōki of 1820, shows that they were not simply well-off shopkeepers. They held the standing of chōdoshiyori, town elder, and served as chūrōyaku, a senior administrative office, for Nishimachi, the western quarter of the town. In a self-governing community, that was real authority. The clothing storehouse, modest as it looks, belonged to a family that helped run the place.

Why the Storehouse Is Protected

The Yoshimura residence is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan, entered onto the national register on 1 July 2003. Three of its buildings carry the designation together: the main house, a tool storehouse (dōgugura), and this clothing storehouse. Unlike a National Treasure or an Important Cultural Property, a registered property is recognized chiefly for the way it contributes to the historic character of its surroundings, and that is exactly the criterion under which the Yoshimura buildings were listed.

The clothing storehouse earns its place through a detail of planning that an architectural historian notices at once. In the Kaizuka townhouses, the formal reception rooms, the zashiki, were normally added behind the house on the upper side. The Yoshimura family did the opposite. In the closing years of the Edo period they extended their reception suite onto the lower, southern side, an unusual choice, and the quality of that added zashiki is singled out for praise. The clothing storehouse was built to join the southern end of this newer wing.

Look at how the storehouse is arranged and the logic appears. Its entrance is set into the gable end on the north side, opening directly onto the corridor that runs along the south of the family's tea room. On the west side, a small toilet for the reception rooms is pushed out under a separate pent roof. With a frontage of four ken and a depth of two and a half ken (roughly seven meters by four and a half), it is a comparatively large storehouse, scaled to a household that had a great deal worth keeping dry and safe.

What to Notice When You Pass By

A traditional storehouse of this kind, a dozō, is a building turned inward. Its walls are not wood but earth: layer upon layer of clay packed over a bamboo lattice, sometimes a foot or more thick, then sealed with white lime plaster so smooth it can look almost ceramic. The point was fire. In a dense town of timber houses, the family's textiles, documents and valuables went into a box that flames could not easily reach.

From the lane you mostly read the storehouse as a clean white volume under a black-tiled gable, the heaviest and most permanent thing on its block. It helps to picture how it sits within the whole compound. The main house faces west toward the street; an attached wing runs back from its right side to the reception rooms; storehouses flank the inner zashiki on both sides, and a small courtyard, two ken square, opens in front of the northern one to bring light and air into the heart of a deep, narrow lot.

That courtyard tells you something true about a wealthy merchant's house. From the street it presents a plain working face. The refinement, the tea room, the well-made reception rooms, the careful little garden, was kept inward, for the household and its guests.

Around the Temple Town

The Yoshimura house makes far more sense when you understand the town it stands in. Kaizuka grew up as a jinaimachi, a temple town, around Ganshō-ji, the great hall known locally as the Kaizuka Gobō and affectionately as "Bokkan-san." For a little over two years, from 1583 to 1585, the chief abbot of the Hongan-ji, Kennyo, made his seat here, and for that brief moment this coastal town was the head temple of the Jōdo Shinshū school of Buddhism. Ganshō-ji is today an Important Cultural Property, its Edo-period main hall and bell tower still standing at the center of the old streets.

Through the Edo period the town was held by the Bokuhan family as a tax-exempt domain, and the Kishū Kaidō, the old highway running south from Osaka and Sakai toward Wakayama, passed straight through it and fed its commerce. The Yoshimura house sits just one street west of that highway, on the northeast corner of an intersection in Nishimachi. Walk the area and you will find stone-paved lanes, lattice fronts and white storehouse walls scattered through the blocks, several of them registered cultural properties like the Yoshimura buildings.

The town keeps its old rhythms in its festivals. Each July, on the weekend before Marine Day, Kanda Shrine holds the Kaizuka Taikodai Festival, a drum-float festival that has run for nearly three centuries and counts as the oldest of its kind in the Senshū region. Seven towns shoulder their floats through the streets, Nishimachi among them, to the rolling chant of "bēra bēra bera-sho-sho." In October the autumn danjiri carts take over, hauled at speed around the corners in the sharp turns the region is famous for, with far smaller crowds than the celebrated Kishiwada run nearby.