Space Oguraya Storehouse

A Three-Storey Vault on a Two-Bay Footprint

Space Oguraya Storehouse (すぺーす小倉屋蔵, also written Supēsu Oguraya Kura) is a three-storey clay-walled storehouse built in 1916 in Yanaka, Taito Ward, Tokyo, and entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 April 2000 under registration number 13-0078.

It was put up by Heizaburō, the third-generation head of the Oguraya pawnbroking house, alongside the family's shop building. Its purpose was specific: a shichigura, the vault where goods pledged against loans were kept. A pawnbroker's stock is other people's property, held in trust and expected back intact, which is why the trade built in dozō construction. Thick walls of clay applied in successive coats over a timber frame, small openings closed by heavy shutters, tiled roof. The point was fire.

The numbers are what make this one unusual. The building covers 20 square metres. Its hari-ma, the span across the beams, is two ken, roughly 3.6 metres. On that narrow base it rises three full storeys in proper dozō technique. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes plainly that it stood out for its height among the buildings around it.

The west gable faces the street; the entrance sits at the east gable under an attached eave. Anyone standing on the lane sees the blank end wall of the storehouse rather than its door, which is the correct arrangement for a building whose contents were meant to stay put.

Registered as Something Hard to Rebuild

Two criteria exist for registering a building on the national list, and the storehouse and the shop beside it were assessed under different ones. The shop qualified for contributing to the historic landscape. The storehouse qualified under the other heading: not easily reproduced.

That phrase carries a practical meaning. Dozō walls are built up in layers of clay over a lattice core, each coat left to dry before the next goes on, and a full job runs to many months of intermittent work. The craft survives, but the number of plasterers who can execute a three-storey vault of this kind has fallen steeply, and the cost of doing so at 1916 standards would now be prohibitive. What was ordinary trade practice in the Taishō era has become difficult to commission.

Registration is the lightest of Japan's three tiers of protection for buildings. Above it sit Important Cultural Property (重要文化財) and National Treasure (国宝), which impose permission requirements and heavier obligations. Registered properties, a category created in 1996, require only notification before alteration. The Oguraya storehouse belongs to this register, not to the designated tiers, and the same is true of the shop.

One record from the construction deserves mention. The Agency for Cultural Affairs states that the munafuda, the ridge tablet installed when the frame was raised, carries a verse about the view of Mount Fuji. In 1916 the roofs of Yanaka were low and the third floor of a storehouse of this height would have cleared them comfortably. The tablet fixes not just a date but a sightline that the builder thought worth writing down.

The registration was gazetted on 17 May 2000, in the twenty-third round of the programme.

Looking at It Now

The storehouse is closed and cannot be entered. It formed part of the gallery Space Oguraya, which ran from 1993 until the end of December 2020, and its upper floors were used for exhibitions. When the gallery shut after twenty-seven years, the future of the site was uncertain enough that neighbours expected demolition. Taito Ward acquired the land and both buildings in 2021.

Renovation is under way. The ward completed an archaeological survey of the ground through the 2025 fiscal year and has published a schedule that puts the start of public operation in July 2027, with interior fitting-out in the final year. Design material indicates black lime plaster for the external finish, restoring an earlier appearance. A consortium led by Daimaru Matsuzakaya will run the reopened buildings alongside a new public square on the adjoining plot, to be called Yanaka Hidamari Pocket, scheduled for March 2027.

For now the interest is entirely in the elevation. Walk the lane and the storehouse still does what it did in 1916, which is to be taller than everything immediately around it. The proportion is the thing worth pausing over: a building 3.6 metres deep and three floors high reads as almost impossibly narrow from the pavement, and standing next to the low two-storey shop it turns the site into a study in vertical contrast. The view of Fuji recorded on the ridge tablet is not available from the street today, and the buildings that now fill the western horizon make it unlikely from the upper floors either.

Photography from the public lane is unrestricted; the street is narrow and residential, so there is little room to back up for a full elevation. There is no admission gate and no charge, since nothing is currently open. Access is about six minutes on foot from the west exit of Nippori Station, which is served by the JR Yamanote, Keihin-Tōhoku and Jōban lines, the Keisei line and the Nippori-Toneri Liner. The street is called Asakura Chōsokan-dōri by the ward and Hatsune-no-michi by residents, and the Asakura Museum of Sculpture, the former house and studio of the sculptor Asakura Fumio, stands on it closer to the station with regular opening hours and nationally designated grounds.