Takasagoya (Castle Town Tottori Community Center) Kuraichi

Two Storehouses Behind a Cotton Merchant's Shop

Takasagoya Kura Ichi (高砂屋（城下町とっとり交流館）蔵一, also romanized Takasago-ya Kura-ichi) is a pair of connected two-storey earthen storehouses at 1 Motodaiku-cho, Tottori City, built in the late Meiji period and entered on Japan's national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 31 July 2007.

The pairing is what you notice first from the rear courtyard. One block runs nine metres along its ridge, the other six, and both are four metres deep. A shared roofed forecourt known as a kuramae links them at the front, so from one angle the two read as a single run of white wall and from another as two separate gabled boxes. Both are dozo-zukuri, thick-walled fireproof construction finished in lime plaster, with gabled roofs of pantile.

Their combined footprint is 70 square metres.

The house they belong to took its name from its last private owner. Takasagoya was a cotton dealer that moved here from Zaimoku-cho around the middle of the Meiji era, settling along the Yagenbori canal in Motodaiku-cho, a few streets from the site of Tottori Castle. The family later gave the whole property to the City of Tottori, which reopened it in 2007 as the Joka-machi Tottori Koryukan, a public cultural centre. The shop building, the residential wing and three storehouses were all registered together in the same year.

Why It Was Registered

Registration is not the same thing as designation. A Registered Tangible Cultural Property (toroku yukei bunkazai) sits below the two designated tiers, Important Cultural Property and National Treasure, and the system exists specifically for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that carry the character of a place rather than the exceptional artistic rank of a temple hall or a castle keep. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered these storehouses under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, with the registry number 31-0106 in the 55th round of registrations.

What earns them that place is the plasterwork.

The lower portion of both floors on the front elevation is finished in namako-kabe, a technique in which square tiles are set on the wall and the joints between them are raised in thick white lime ridges. Ordinary namako work runs the joints on a simple diagonal grid. Here the ridges are laid out in a shippo pattern, an interlocking design of overlapping circles borrowed from cloisonné metalwork and Buddhist decorative art. It takes noticeably more skill and more plaster to achieve, and a merchant who paid for it on a working storehouse was making a statement about the health of his business.

The same intent shows around the door frames and under the eaves of the window hoods, where the brackets carry modelled lime relief. These are not applied ornaments but sculpted plaster, shaped wet by hand. Storehouses in the region often have one decorated face and four plain ones; the effort concentrated on what visitors to the courtyard would see.

What to Look For, and How to Visit

Come through the shop building and out into the garden, and the storehouses appear across the gravel. Stand close enough to the wall to catch the raking light and the shippo ridges throw shadows that make the pattern legible; step back six or seven metres and the same wall flattens into a grey and white grid. It is worth doing both.

Look up at the window hoods. The small carved brackets that support them are the detail most people walk past, and they are the reason the registration file singles out the plaster sculpture as worth seeing.

The east block is used today under the name Hosai-gura, after Ozaki Hosai (1885-1926), the free-verse haiku poet born in Tottori. Calligraphers from the city have written out his verses for display inside. The other storehouse operates as a gallery that local groups can book without charge, so the exhibition changes; on one visit it may be textiles, on another photographs of the 1943 Tottori earthquake.

Admission to the whole complex is free. Opening hours are 9:00 to 17:00, and the centre closes on Mondays, moving to the following day when a Monday falls on a public holiday, with a further closure from 29 December to 3 January. The paid rental rooms upstairs in the main building run until 21:00. There is a small tea room, and the shop sells Inshu washi paper, Yumihama-gasuri cotton ikat and other Tottori crafts.

Reaching it on foot from JR Tottori Station takes about sixteen minutes heading south-west from the north exit. Four parking spaces are available on site. Because the storehouse interiors are used for changing exhibitions rather than as a permanent museum, photography rules vary with what is on show, and the reception desk in the shop building is the place to ask.

Two of the other registered buildings stand within a few paces. Kura Ni, added in the early Showa era, is entered on its long side, while Kura Ichi and Kura San are both entered under the gable. That contrast between the two orientations is easy to miss and gives the courtyard its uneven, accumulated look.