Former Moriryu Textile Factory

Four Saw-Tooth Roofs at the Front of the Plot

The Former Moriryu Textile Factory (旧森龍織物工場, also written Kyū Moriryū Orimono Kōjō) is a timber weaving shed built in 1920 in the Angyoryo-Negishi district of northern Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, and it was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 29 March 2019.

The shed occupies the front of its plot, nearest the lane. Four single-storey ranges run east and west, set side by side, and each one carries the stepped profile known in Japanese as a nokogiri-yane, or saw-tooth roof: one short steep face followed by one long shallow one, the pair repeated across the width of the building. The national database lists the roofing as metal sheet, while the commentary attached to the same record describes it as iron plate. Building area is 310 square metres.

Work was divided along the row. The southernmost range held stores. The three ranges north of it took the looms, and doorways were cut into the west face of the two middle ranges, so that anyone coming in from the lane stepped straight onto the weaving floor rather than into the storeroom.

Look up inside and the structure explains itself. Posts stand along each ridge line at intervals of three ken, a traditional measure of roughly 5.5 metres, and the roof above rests on trusses. Japanese post-and-beam carpentry below, imported truss geometry overhead: small Japanese factories of the 1910s and 1920s repeatedly arrived at this hybrid, and few of them survive.

The saw-tooth form was not chosen for its silhouette. Its steep faces are normally glazed and turned toward the north, which gives a weaving floor even daylight all day without the moving glare of direct sun. Colour can be judged, and a dropped thread shows up. Where electricity was still costly and unreliable, a roof was the cheapest lighting a mill owner could buy.

The Second Industry of a Casting Town

Kawaguchi built its name on iron. Casting workshops clustered here from the Edo period, supplying pots and kettles to the city of Edo down the Arakawa and Shibakawa rivers, and by the late Meiji era around 150 foundries were at work. Weaving was the other trade, and the local chamber of commerce places it second only to casting in the industrial history of modern Kawaguchi.

That trade began just outside the present city. In 1825 Takahashi Shingoro of Tsukagoshi village, now part of Warabi, refined the local loom and produced a finely made indigo-striped cotton called aoshima. The craft spread through Yokosone, Shiba and Maekawa, and by the early Meiji years households weaving as their sole occupation had appeared. The districts of Kamine, Shiba and Aoki became the strongest centres. Angyoryo-Negishi, where the Moriryu compound stands, belonged to Kamine village from its creation in 1889 until Kawaguchi absorbed it in 1940.

The peak came in the first half of the 1930s. More than 100 weaving factories were operating in Kawaguchi, employing over 2,700 people, a workforce dominated by young women at the looms. Cotton came under wartime control in 1940, the business consolidation order of 1943 closed most of what remained, and fewer than 20 factories were still standing at the end of the war. Postwar recovery brought a second run of prosperity, ended by the textile trade dispute with the United States and the currency shock of 1971. Almost nothing of the industry is now visible in the city.

This is what the 2019 registration was protecting. The criterion applied to the factory is the one covering buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape, and its register number is 11-186, taken in the 92nd round of registrations.

Registered is not the same as Designated

Two separate systems are easy to confuse. Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures are designated: selected for outstanding artistic or historical value, and held under tight legal control over any alteration. The register of Tangible Cultural Properties, introduced in 1996, is a lighter instrument. It covers buildings roughly fifty years old or more that remain in ordinary use, and it leaves owners considerable freedom, requiring notification rather than permission for most changes. The system exists precisely so that working buildings like a weaving shed can stay in service while gaining a measure of recognition and protection.

Before You Go

The factory and the house behind it remain private property, and neither is open to the public. There is no admission gate, no visiting season, no interior access and no published opening hours. Kawaguchi's own cultural property list records the owner simply as a private individual. Anyone travelling out to see the buildings should plan on a view from the public road and nothing more, and should not enter the grounds or point a camera into the private parts of the site.

The compound sits in the western part of Angyoryo-Negishi, close to the Shibakawa river. The nearest railway station is Araijuku on the Saitama Rapid Railway Line, about two kilometres east in a straight line, which makes for a walk of roughly half an hour; there is no station within the district itself.

For anyone who wants the story rather than the façade, the better destination is the Kawaguchi City Cultural Properties Center's local history museum at 2-1-22 Hatogaya-honcho, a short walk from Hatogaya Station on the same railway line. Its second floor covers the city's history and its local industries, weaving and bamboo fishing rods among them. Opening hours run from 9:30 to 16:30, and it closes on Mondays, on the following weekday when a Monday falls on a public holiday, and over the new year period. Admission is modest.

The Former Tanaka Residence, Kawaguchi's only Important Cultural Property building complex, would normally be the other stop on such a route. It has been shut since January 2025 for seismic strengthening work, with no reopening date announced, so check the Cultural Properties Center website before building a day around it.