Ichida Family Residence

Ichida Family Residence Storehouse: A Brick Kura Wearing a Coat of Artificial Stone

Twenty-five square metres. That is the entire footprint of this building, and it is the smallest of the four registered structures standing on the Ichida property in Ueno Sakuragi. It is also the strangest, because almost nothing about the way it looks tells you what it is made of.

From outside, the storehouse reads as stone. The exterior is finished in jinzoseki, artificial stone render, and the surface has been scored with false joints so that the wall appears to be built up of dressed blocks. Passers-by have long taken it for a stone kura. Cut into the wall, and you would find brick: the Agency for Cultural Affairs records the construction as mokkotsu rengazo, a timber frame with brickwork laid one and a half bricks thick against the outside of the posts. Timber skeleton, brick skin, stone costume, three materials in a wall roughly as thick as a forearm is long.

The building is two storeys, roofed with sangawara pantiles in hipped form, and set on a north-south axis with its entrance in the gable end, an arrangement called tsumairi. It measures two and a half ken along the ridge and two ken across. It was put up around 1907, at much the same time as the main house.

The Room Inside, and the Room in Front

A kura in a Meiji merchant household was ordinarily where the valuables went: ledgers, textiles, lacquerware, the things that had to survive a fire. This one does something else on its ground floor. It holds the butsuma, the room where the family Buddhist altar stood and where the ancestors were attended to.

That decision explains the plan of the whole northern end of the property. On the far side of the main house's eight-mat guest room, a kuramae, a fore-space serving the storehouse, connects the two buildings. So the sequence runs from the guest room, through the fore-space, into the altar room, and the family's dead are reached by walking north through the house rather than by crossing a yard. The storehouse is not an outbuilding. It is the end of a corridor of rooms.

The upper floor kept the storage function, which is why the fire-resistant construction was worth its cost. Brick and render on a timber frame is a Meiji compromise: brick masonry without the expense and structural difficulty of a full brick building, applied where fire mattered most.

Local tradition holds that the storehouse was built by Shimizu-gumi, the contractor behind the main house and an ancestor of today's Shimizu Corporation. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records this as something handed down rather than documented, and the attribution is best treated that way.

Registration, and How to See the Building

The storehouse was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 26 December 2005, announced the following day, under registration number 13-0192 in the 48th round of registrations. The criterion applied was that the building is a model of its form and construction. Registration is the lighter of Japan's two systems for protecting historic buildings, established by the 1996 revision of the cultural properties law and intended for privately owned structures that remain in use; it works by notification rather than permission, which is what allows a building like this to keep standing in an occupied household instead of being emptied out and preserved.

Since 2001, the property has been leased by the Ichida family to the Taito Historic City Study Group, a nonprofit founded by neighbourhood residents and people connected with the Tokyo University of the Arts. Members live in the main house and maintain the buildings. The storehouse is not open on any regular schedule, and its interior is not part of ordinary event access.

The exterior can be glimpsed from the lane on the north side of the plot, near the kitchen gate. Look for the scored render and the hipped tile roof, and then consider the wall thickness at the opening. That is where the artificial stone stops pretending.