Storehouse Behind the Hozumi Family Residence

The Storehouse Behind the House

The Sedo-no-kura of the Hozumi Residence (稲積家住宅背戸の蔵, Hozumi-ke Jūtaku Sedo-no-kura) is a late Edo-period earthen-walled storehouse at Ibara 1189 in Ōnan Town, Ōchi District, Shimane Prefecture, entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2007. Its name is a plain statement of position: sedo is the back of a farmstead, the ground behind the house, and the building stands directly against the north rear wall of the main house with its ridge running east to west. The family name 稲積 is read Hozumi rather than the Inazumi the characters suggest, a point on which the Agency for Cultural Affairs and Cultural Heritage Online agree.

The structure is two storeys of dozō construction, timber framing sheathed in thick earth plaster, roofed in Sekishū tile over a gable. It measures five ken by three ken with a building area of 56 square metres, and it sits on a base of dry-laid stone. Doors open on the south face, towards the house, and on the west.

Nothing about that summary is unusual for a wealthy farming household of the period. What makes this storehouse worth a paragraph of its own is the roof, and the count of posts inside.

An Okiyane Plastered to the Eaves

A dozō is a fire defence before it is anything else. The point of packing a timber frame inside twenty or thirty centimetres of clay is to give the family's grain, tools, documents and lacquer a chance of surviving the night if the thatch of the main house catches. The weakness is water. Earth walls that stay wet fail, so the standard answer across Japan was the okiyane, a second roof set on its own light frame above the plastered shell, shedding rain clear of the earth and replaceable without touching the walls themselves. Air moves through the gap between the two.

The Hozumi rear storehouse has that okiyane. It also does something the Agency for Cultural Affairs calls a special specification: the plaster is carried right up to the eaves. The usual okiyane leaves the top of the wall open to the gap, which is what lets it breathe. Closing that line off means committing to a sealed shell and accepting the risk that comes with it, a decision presumably taken for the sake of fire or vermin or both. The Agency singles this out, and it is the detail that separates this building from the hundreds of other registered farm storehouses in western Japan.

Inside, the framing is dense to a degree that surprises visitors who expect a barn. On the ground floor the posts stand at intervals of one shaku five sun, roughly 45 centimetres. On the upper floor they open out to half a ken, about 91 centimetres, which is still tight. Overhead, sloping beams called noboribari rise to meet a jimune, a ridge beam carried on posts rather than on a truss. The effect at ground level is closer to a stockade than a shed.

Reading the Building on Site

Approach from the main house and the first thing to check is the wall head. Follow the plaster upward and watch where it stops. On most storehouses of this era it stops short and a shadowed gap runs beneath the eaves. Here it does not stop, and the tiles come down onto a solid plastered line. Once you have seen the difference, you will look for it on every kura you pass in Iwami.

The stone base repays attention too. Storehouses raised on dry-laid stone are lifting their earthen walls clear of ground damp, and the coursing here is worth a minute at eye level.

Then the doors. Two openings on two different faces, south and west, is a generous provision for a building this size, and it says something about how the storehouse was used day to day rather than as a strongbox opened twice a year.

The rear storehouse cannot sensibly be visited alone. It stands within a farmstead that holds four registered buildings: the main house of the late Edo period, re-roofed in Meiji 43 (1910); this storehouse; the Shita-no-kura to the east; and a gate of Shōwa 5 (1930) with an opening 2.1 metres wide. All four were registered on the same day in 2007.

Visits are arranged in advance. The Ōnan Town Tourism Association lists the residence as open on prior contact and gives the Ibara Community Centre (0855-95-0301) for enquiries, adding that the buildings are used for town events. Parking is available. There is no rail service to this part of Shimane; allow about thirty minutes by car from the Mizuho interchange on the Hamada Expressway, reachable by highway coach from Hiroshima. As the storehouse interiors are not fitted out for display, ask when booking what can actually be entered and photographed.