Omotani Family Residence, Former Sugar Storehouse

Omotani Family Residence Former Sugar Storehouse: A Western Room Inside an Earthen Shell

The name tells you what to ask about. A household does not build a storehouse for sugar unless sugar is worth locking up.

This one stands at the south end of the Omotani property in Hanamachi, Sakaiminato, its ridge running on from the main house so that the two roofs read as a continuous line along the road. Two storeys, dozo construction, tiled roof, 47 square metres. It is the smallest of the four registered Omotani buildings and it holds down the southwest corner of the lot.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the late Meiji period, between 1898 and 1912, and records a remodelling in 1944.

Why Sugar Needed a Storehouse

Sugar in Meiji Japan was not a pantry staple. It was an import, it was expensive, and it was fragile in ways that mattered to a merchant. Sugar draws water out of the air. Leave it in a damp room on the Sea of Japan coast and it cakes, weeps and loses weight, and weight was what you sold it by. A dozo, with earthen walls thick enough to hold humidity steady across a season, is close to the ideal container for it.

The timing invites a question that the record does not quite answer. Sakaiminato was designated a port open to foreign trade in 1896, with a branch of the Kobe Customs House established here, and this storehouse went up in the years immediately following. Whether the family's sugar came through that trade or through domestic wholesalers, the sources do not say. What is documented is that a brewing house on this street thought sugar valuable enough to give it its own fireproof building.

The Omotani were brewers, described in local accounts as producers of sake and soy sauce. A brewing compound with a sugar store in it is a compound that had more than one line of business.

The Room That Does Not Belong

Inside, the building splits in two. The south half is doma, an earthen floor, with a room built above it on the second storey. The north half is a yoma, a Western-style room.

That is an odd thing to find in a Meiji storehouse. Dozo interiors are usually plain to the point of severity: boarded or earthen floors, exposed structure, nothing that a fire could take hold of and nothing that costs money to maintain. A Western room means a finished floor, a ceiling, joinery, the whole vocabulary of a room meant to be sat in rather than stacked in.

The west front carries a projecting bay window and a lattice window, and a bay window is likewise not standard equipment on a fireproof box. Every opening weakens the shell, and a bay pushes glass out beyond the wall line, which is the opposite of what a dozo is for.

So something changed here, and the storehouse stopped being only a storehouse. The Agency's record notes the 1944 remodelling without saying which features it produced, and it would be guesswork to assign the Western room and the bay window to that year rather than to some earlier alteration. What can be said is that both belong to a second life, laid over a building that began as a strongbox for a commodity.

Worth sitting with, though: 1944 was not a year for comfortable renovations. Whatever was done to this building, it was done in the middle of a war, in a port town that would lose a third of its built-up area the following April, when a requisitioned ship carrying explosives detonated at the Taishomachi quay and the fire it started took 115 lives. That the Omotani buildings are still standing is part of why the Agency can call the main house one of the few surviving brewers' houses in Sakaiminato.

What the Registration Says

The storehouse was registered on 25 April 2014, number 31-0190, in the seventy-seventh round, on the criterion of contributing to the historic character of the national landscape. The Agency's assessment is that it tightens the appearance of the lot's southwest corner.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is the lighter of Japan's two protective categories for buildings. Introduced by a 1996 amendment to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, it was designed for fabric the designation system was never going to cover: privately owned Meiji and Taisho buildings, still in use, lost more often to redevelopment than to disaster. Owners report substantial alterations rather than applying for permission, which keeps the buildings usable and therefore keeps them standing.

It is a category that suits this building particularly well. A storehouse that has already been remodelled once, that has a Western room where a Meiji dozo should have bare walls, would sit awkwardly under a system built to freeze buildings at a moment. The registration takes it as it is, alterations and all.

Visiting

The property belongs to Omotani Gomei Kaisha and is closed to the public. From the road at Hanamachi 8 you can see the west front, which is where the bay window is, and you can follow the ridge line north to where it joins the main house. Stay on the road and do not enter the grounds.

Sakai Daiba Park is at Hanamachi 10, holding the earthworks of the Sakai battery, a national Historic Site raised in 1863 as the largest of the Tottori domain's eight coastal gun emplacements, and now planted with some 240 cherry trees. Next to it, the Sea and Life Museum occupies a converted Meiji sake warehouse, roughly 1.8 kilometres east of Sakaiminato Station. It is the practical way to see what the inside of a building like this one feels like.