Isego Main House

A Rice Merchant's Shopfront in Sengoku

The Isego Main House (伊勢五主屋, read Isego Shuoku) is the shop building of a rice merchant at 3-38-9 Sengoku, Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo, built in the early Meiji period and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 September 2003. It sits on a quiet residential street, still open for business, still selling rice.

The shop takes its name from its first proprietor, Imai Goroemon, who traded under the house name Iseya. Isego is a contraction of the two. The family cannot date its own beginning with certainty; the account handed down in the business places it in the Kyoho era, 1716 to 1736, when this district north of Koishikawa held the suburban villas of daimyo households and a rice dealer had steady custom. The counter has stayed with the same family ever since.

The registered building is timber-framed, two storeys tall, roofed in sangawara pantiles, with a footprint of 124 square metres. The main block carries a gabled roof, and a single-storey hipped section joins it on the south. On the ground floor the street gets the chōba, the merchant's counter, with rooms of six, eight and four and a half tatami mats set behind it. Upstairs the front was arranged as a zashiki reception room and the rear as storage. This was the ordinary plan of a Tokyo shopkeeper's house before the twentieth century began rearranging such interiors.

Why the Building Is on the Register

Japan's registration system for tangible cultural properties began in 1996 and works on a different principle from designation. Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures are selected sparingly and protected through a permit system. Registration is lighter, built on notification and official advice, and was introduced to carry large numbers of modern buildings through a period when redevelopment was removing them faster than they could be assessed. Bunkyo Ward, which lists the property, explains that what registration covers is the exterior as seen from the road.

Isego Main House was accepted under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Its registration number is 13-0157, granted in the thirty-eighth round of registrations. The entry was recorded on 19 September 2003 and notified on 17 October of the same year. The storehouse immediately north of it, registered the same day as 13-0158, was assessed as part of the same composition, so the two buildings are read together rather than separately.

The value in that assessment becomes clearer with a map of wartime Tokyo in mind. The firebombing of March 1945 erased most of the city's wooden commercial streets, and Bunkyo Ward today counts 65 registered cultural properties across its whole area, a modest figure for a ward with this much history. Sengoku escaped the fires. An early Meiji rice shop that has kept its low eaves and its lattice windows while continuing to trade is not a common survival here.

What to Look at from the Street

Stand on the opposite pavement and the first thing you notice is how low the eaves come down. The frame uses dashigeta construction: the purlin that carries the eaves is pushed out past the line of the posts and held on brackets, so the roof reaches over the pavement and keeps the shopfront in shade for most of the day. Lattice windows run along the upper storey. The timbers are heavy and left plainly visible, with almost nothing applied for decoration.

Not everything in view is Meiji work. The family's own account puts a remodelling around 1959, when the front was reglazed with sliding glass doors, more of the ground floor was given over to earthen floor, and the signboard hanging there now was cut new. The registration system does not treat that kind of change as damage. A building that keeps working accumulates alterations, and these are part of its record.

If you go in to buy rice, give the machine at the back a moment of attention. Isego mills with a recirculating polisher, an older type that passes the grain through repeatedly instead of finishing it in a single run. The process takes far longer than a modern mill needs. The shop's reasoning is that gentle repeated passes leave the grain unbroken, and machines of this type are now rare in daily commercial use.

Some practical notes. Isego is a working shop, not a museum, and there is no admission desk or guided route. Listings give opening hours of roughly 8:30 in the morning until 6:30 in the evening, Monday through Saturday, and there is no car park. The exterior can be viewed and photographed from the public street at any hour. The interior is a place of business, so ask at the counter before pointing a camera at the chōba or the mill. Sengoku Station on the Toei Mita Line is the nearest stop, six to ten minutes on foot from exit A4; Myogadani and Shin-Otsuka on the Tokyo Metro Marunouchi Line are each about fifteen minutes away. Two further registered buildings stand within walking distance in Sengoku 2-chome: the shop Shinkaiya and the chapel of Tokyo All Saints' Church.