Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse

What Is the Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse?

The Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse (川崎光雄家住宅北蔵, Kawasaki Mitsuo-ke Jūtaku Kitagura) is a 2-storey Dozo-zukuri earthen-walled storehouse built around 1912 on the Kawasaki family estate beside the old Tōkaidō highway in Tehara, Ritto City, Shiga Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 21 April 1998. At 17 square meters, it is the smallest of the three registered buildings on the estate.

It has a tiled roof and stacks a second floor on a footprint of roughly 10 tatami mats: a compact building, but a full two-level storehouse.

Joined to the South Storehouse

The South Storehouse stands joined to the Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse. The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary on the South Storehouse says the two are built the same way, and that the South Storehouse, though larger, keeps its ridge slightly lower.

Read that way, the North Storehouse, with less than 60 percent of its neighbor's floor area, carries the higher ridge. Size on the ground and height at the ridge run in opposite directions across the pair.

The North Storehouse was registered under number 25-0034 for its contribution to the historic landscape of the country, on the same day as the main house and the South Storehouse and in the same run of numbers.

A Caution About the Official Description

The descriptive text that the national Database of Cultural Properties gives for the Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse is identical, word for word, to the text for the North Storehouse of the Kawasaki Mutsuo Family Residence (川﨑睦男家住宅), a separate registered estate in the same part of Tehara. Cultural Heritage Online repeats the same wording.

That text mentions a detached annex and an east storehouse. Both belong to the Kawasaki Mutsuo estate; neither is among the three registered buildings of the Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence. Its remark that the storehouse is twice the size of the east storehouse also matches the Mutsuo buildings, whose north storehouse measures 40 square meters and east storehouse 20 square meters. The date, structure and floor-area fields, by contrast, differ between the two entries, and for the Kawasaki Mitsuo North Storehouse they read around 1912 and 17 square meters.

For that reason this article does not use the shared description. It relies instead on the database's date, structure and area fields and on what the South Storehouse commentary says about its northern neighbor. Finer details such as the windows or the treatment of the lower walls could not be confirmed from a reliable source.

Visiting the North Storehouse

The Kawasaki Mitsuo Family Residence North Storehouse stands inside a private estate, and its interior is not open to the public. Please stay off the property and view it only from the public road.

How much you can see depends on where you stand. If the two storehouses are visible together, compare their ridges: the smaller North Storehouse should rise a little above its larger partner.