Sugimitsu Pottery Store Ichinokura

The Storehouse That Once Faced the River

Ichi-no-kura of the Sugimitsu Porcelain Shop (杉光陶器店一の蔵, Sugimitsu Tōkiten Ichi-no-kura), the First Storehouse, is a late Edo-period earthen-walled warehouse in the Shiotatsu district of Ureshino City, Saga Prefecture, entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 September 1998 under registration number 41-0006.

It stands behind the main house, aligned along the lane that runs down the southern edge of the property. The roof is kirizuma, a plain gable, and the walls are those of a dozō, a storehouse whose timber frame is buried under thick layers of mud plaster. Cut stone blocks form the base on which the whole thing rests. Vertical boards clad the outer face, a weathering skin fixed over the mud to take the brunt of rain.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records a building area of 89 square metres and a tiled roof. The same database describes the storehouse as two storeys in its commentary while listing the structure as single-storey in the technical field, and the discrepancy sits unresolved in the national record.

What matters more than the count of floors is where the back wall used to look. The rear of the site once met the Shiota River directly. In the era when river traffic carried the town's commerce, goods are said to have moved in and out of this storehouse straight from the water.

A Building Registered for the Landscape It Makes

Japan's registration system, established in 1996, admits buildings under one of three criteria. Ichi-no-kura was registered under the one covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. Its sibling buildings on the same property were treated the same way, apart from the main house, which was registered as difficult to reproduce.

Four buildings of the Sugimitsu property carry registration numbers: the main house at 41-0005, Ichi-no-kura at 41-0006, Ni-no-kura at 41-0007, and San-no-kura at 41-0008. All four entered the register together in September 1998. Reading them as a set rather than as individual structures is the point of the landscape criterion. A single storehouse means little; four buildings holding the line of a lane, with the river behind and the highway in front, describe how a river port actually functioned.

The stone base deserves a look of its own. Shiotatsu has a stonemasonry tradition of some depth, and local accounts connect it to the arrival of Anō masons, the specialists in castle stonework who worked in Kyushu during the Momoyama period. The same craft produced the embankments along the river and the Ebisu figures set at street corners. Cut stone under a storehouse is not decoration. It lifts the mud walls clear of standing water, which in a town that has flooded repeatedly is a structural decision rather than an aesthetic one.

The surrounding district was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings in 2005, and repair and townscape work has been under way since the following year.

Reading the Back Lane

Most visitors approach Shiotatsu from the old Nagasaki Kaidō and photograph the white plaster fronts. The rear lanes tell a different story, and Ichi-no-kura sits on one of them.

Shiota is a tidal river. The Ariake Sea has one of the largest tidal ranges in Japan, and boats used that rise to work their way upstream. Porcelain stone quarried on Amakusa arrived this way; finished ware left the same way. The town's water mills ground the stone into the body clay for Yoshida and Shida wares. Ichi-no-kura held the stock that moved through that cycle.

Stand in the lane and the vertical boarding reads clearly against the white plaster elsewhere on the site. The contrast is not stylistic inconsistency. Boards face the weather; plaster faces the street. Japanese storehouse building has always made that distinction, and here it is legible in a single glance across the property.

The storehouse itself is not open as an exhibition space, and it should be viewed from outside. The main house at the front operates as a ceramics shop with a café and can be entered during business hours, so a visit usually combines the two. Exterior photography from the public lane is unrestricted; before pointing a camera into a private yard, ask at the shop.

Reaching Shiotatsu means a bus from Hizen-Kashima Station on the JR line, roughly ten minutes on the Yūtoku bus toward Ureshino. Ureshino-Onsen Station on the Nishi-Kyushu Shinkansen lies about ten kilometres off by road. The local preservation NPO runs volunteer guided walks by advance booking, and a guide will point out the former landing site and inspection station along the river, both a short walk from the storehouse.