Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse

What the Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse Is

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse (永瀬孝男家住宅土蔵) is a two-storey household strongroom of 1905 in Honmachi 1-chome, Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019. Built in the thick-walled Dozo-zukuri method, it joins the Western-style building on the west and covers 20 square metres. It went up in the same year as the Japanese-style wing on the same estate.

The roof is gabled on a north-south ridge and laid with pantiles, Sangawara-buki. There is a single doorway, at the centre of the east face. A storehouse of this kind keeps openings to a minimum in order to protect what is inside, so for a footprint of only 20 square metres the proportion of solid wall is high. From outside, wall is essentially all there is.

What it held was household property. A separate brick storehouse on the same grounds served as the tool store, so the two functions were kept in different buildings. Splitting domestic goods from the goods of the trade suits an estate where a family's home and its foundry business shared one address.

Why It Was Listed

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse was listed for its contribution to the historic character of the landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry values it as standing in line with the Japanese and Western wings and forming part of a formal estate. It was listed as one element of a three-building row, not as a storehouse on its own.

The order matters. The Japanese wing and this storehouse went up in 1905; the Western building was inserted between them around 1922. The storehouse is some seventeen years the older. The later insertion produced the sequence visitors see now: Japanese wing, Western building, storehouse.

Its own interest lies in the finish. The upper wall is plastered in Shikkui lime, the lower part rendered in mortar and washed back, Araidashi, to look like masonry. In the washed finish the surface is rinsed before the mortar has fully set so that the aggregate stands proud, giving the face the grain of cut stone. Here is a storehouse in late Meiji Kawaguchi given a stone-look plinth under a white lime body.

What to Look For

Read the wall in two halves. On the Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse the texture changes partway up: smooth white lime above, grey and granular below. The height of that line sets the whole character of the elevation. Giving a traditional storehouse a masonry-style base is a way of importing Western detailing into a Japanese building type, and it is no accident on an estate where a Western house stands next door.

Note also that the single doorway sits at the centre of the east face and nowhere else. One opening in the middle of a wall, everything else closed. That plainness is the building type stated without ornament.

Inside, both floors are boarded and the roof frame is a Wagoya, the Japanese assembly of horizontal beams and short struts. While the former power plant and the brick storehouse on the same grounds carry masonry frames, this building was kept in traditional construction throughout. By 1905 the household was clearly choosing its structural method building by building.

Visiting

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Storehouse is part of a private home and the interior is closed. The owner's introductory site lists no visiting hours and no booking procedure (checked 13 September 2026). You cannot go inside the storehouse.

The exterior is awkward as well. Sitting at the centre of the grounds on the west side of the Western building, the storehouse is screened by both the boundary wall and the house in front of it. From the public road you get the upper part of the gable and some pantiling; the plaster and washed render that make the building interesting are out of sight. If the finish is what draws you, look first at the plans and photographs published on the owner's introductory site.

No notice prohibiting photography was found, but keep the lens off the grounds.

Directions to the estate and the conditions for seeing it are set out on the Nagase Takao Family Residence page.