Storehouse Below the Hozumi Family Residence

A Storehouse Built Around a Bent Beam

The Shita-no-kura of the Hozumi Residence (稲積家住宅下の蔵, Hozumi-ke Jūtaku Shita-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. It stands east of the main house with its ridge running north to south, the opposite orientation to the other registered storehouse on the plot. The surname 稲積 is read Hozumi, not the Inazumi the characters would suggest; the Agency for Cultural Affairs and Cultural Heritage Online both give the former.

Shita means below, and the name is a household label that separated this building from the Sedo-no-kura standing behind the house. Two storehouses on one farmstead needed two names, and farming families rarely reached for anything fancier than position.

The building is two storeys of dozō construction, five and a half ken by three ken, with a building area of 60 square metres and a gable roof in Sekishū tile. Two doorways open on the west face, towards the house. The ground floor is divided into two rooms.

Leaning Posts and a Curved Pillow Beam

Two things in the Agency's description of this building repay attention, and both concern how the frame was put together rather than how it looks from the lane.

The first is the posts. They stand at three shaku intervals, about 91 centimetres, on both floors, and they are set uchikorobi: leaning slightly inward at the top rather than rising plumb. Carpenters used this batter on storehouses for practical reasons. A frame that tapers resists the outward push of grain and goods stacked against it, settles more predictably, and holds its earth plaster better on the outer face. It also does something to the eye, giving the wall a stability that a vertical face does not quite achieve. The technique appears on pagodas and castle walls for related reasons.

The second is a single piece of timber. Overhead, sloping beams called noboribari rise to a jimune, a ridge beam carried on posts rather than on a truss, and the jimune in turn rests on a makurabari, a pillow beam laid across the frame to receive it. Here the makurabari is a curved member. Not a straight beam that has warped, but a timber chosen because it grew that way and set to work with its bend doing something useful.

That choice is worth pausing over. Sawn straight stock was available in the late Edo period, and a carpenter working to a pattern book would have used it. Selecting a bent tree for a structural member means reading the individual piece, judging where the grain runs and where the load will fall, and cutting joints to suit a shape that will never repeat. It is the kind of decision that leaves a building slightly unlike every other building, and it is the reason the Agency's short entry finds room to mention it at all.

Seeing It, and Getting There

Stand back on the west side, where the two doorways are, and look along the wall rather than at it. The inward lean of the frame shows in the plaster as a faint taper towards the eaves. It is subtle. On a grey Shimane afternoon it can be hard to catch at all, and then the light moves and the line appears.

The roof is Sekishū tile, the iron-glazed ware fired along the Iwami coast that gives this whole district its red-brown colour. On the storehouses the tiled area is small enough to read as a single object, unlike the broad sweep over the main house.

Inside, if access is granted, the two ground-floor rooms and the pillow beam above are the things to look for. Storehouse interiors here are not fitted out for display, and that is part of the interest: the frame is doing its job rather than explaining itself.

Four buildings on this plot carry registration, all from the same day in December 2007: the main house of the late Edo period, re-roofed with tiles in Meiji 43 (1910); the Sedo-no-kura behind it, notable for plasterwork carried up to the eaves; this storehouse; and a gate of Shōwa 5 (1930), 2.1 metres across the opening. The Hozumi were headmen of Ibara village, and the farmstead reads as one working unit rather than four entries.

Visits are made by prior arrangement. The Ōnan Town Tourism Association lists the residence as open on contact, with enquiries handled by the Ibara Community Centre on 0855-95-0301, and notes that the buildings are used for town events. Parking is available and no admission fee is listed. Ōnan Town has no passenger railway: reckon on about thirty minutes by car from the Mizuho interchange on the Hamada Expressway, which highway coaches from Hiroshima also serve. Confirm photography when you book.