Sugimitsu Pottery Store Third Warehouse

A Brick Face in a Street of White Plaster

San-no-kura of the Sugimitsu Porcelain Shop (杉光陶器店三の蔵, Sugimitsu Tōkiten San-no-kura), the Third Storehouse, is a late Edo-period earthen-walled storehouse 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 41-0008.

It sits north of the main house, set back from the street line rather than flush with it. The roof is a plain gable, and the building is entered from the gable end, the arrangement Japanese carpentry calls tsuma-iri. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records a building area of 69 square metres under a tiled roof, and its commentary describes a two-storey storehouse, while the structural field of the same record lists single-storey timber construction.

The reason to look at this building rather than walk past it is the wall facing the street. It is brick. Along a run of townhouses finished in white lime plaster, a brick frontage announces itself, and the doorway surround shares the same alien quality. Neither belongs to the original Edo-period fabric.

Six Years as a Bank

For a brief span in the late Meiji and early Taishō eras, this storehouse was not a storehouse. It housed the premises of a bank founded with capital raised by local backers. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives the name as Shiota Bank and dates the arrangement to the closing years of Meiji; records held by the Japan Tourism Agency put the period at 1910 to 1916, after which the building returned to its earlier function. Some regional accounts render the bank's name differently, as Shihota, and the variation has not been settled in published sources.

The brick wall and the reworked entrance are understood to date from that conversion. The choice is legible enough. A bank in the 1910s needed to look like a bank, which in provincial Japan of that decade meant looking Western, and brick was the shorthand. A merchant family's mud-walled warehouse could be made to serve by rebuilding one face of it.

Shiotatsu had reason to want a bank. The town had grown wealthy on river transport, moving porcelain stone from Amakusa upstream on the tide and sending finished ware back down, and it sat on the Nagasaki Kaidō, the highway that carried imported sugar inland. By the Meiji period that trade needed credit and settlement services closer to hand than the prefectural centres could offer.

Registration in 1998 was made under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Four Sugimitsu buildings entered the register together: the main house (41-0005), Ichi-no-kura (41-0006), Ni-no-kura (41-0007), and San-no-kura (41-0008).

Still in Use

The building did not become a museum piece. Sugimitsu continues to trade in ceramics on the property, and part of the premises now operates as a café, which local coverage associates with the former bank building. Television features on Japan's converted old houses have picked up the story, and the interior includes a boat-bottom ceiling, the gently curved funazoko form used in older Japanese rooms of some pretension.

Practically, this means a visitor can see inside during business hours without arranging anything in advance. Hours and closing days are set by the businesses rather than by the city, so a check before travelling saves disappointment. Exterior photography from the street is free of restriction; ask before photographing indoors.

Come in the morning if the light matters to you. The brick face points toward the street and takes direct sun early, and the contrast with the plastered walls on either side is at its sharpest then.

Access is by bus from Hizen-Kashima Station on the JR line, about ten minutes on the Yūtoku service running toward Ureshino, or by road from Ureshino-Onsen Station on the Nishi-Kyushu Shinkansen, roughly ten kilometres away. The Nishioka Family Residence, an Important Cultural Property designated in 1974, stands beside the Sugimitsu property and admits visitors to its interior. Volunteer guides can be booked in advance through the local preservation NPO, and an hour on foot covers the riverside stonework, the old landing site, and the Ebisu figures set at intervals along the street.