Sugata Family Residence Costume Storehouse

Built in 1855, and Still There Eleven Years Later

The Sugata Family Residence Costume Storehouse (菅田家住宅衣装蔵, Sugata-ke Jūtaku Ishōgura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse at Sewamachi 1854-1 in Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, built in 1855 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 June 2017.

The date matters more than it usually does. In 1866 a fire that began in a carpenters' shed at the neighbouring temple of Yōshōji swept through Sewamachi and left the district as bare ground. Almost every historic building on this stretch of the old Hokuriku Kaidō postdates that afternoon. This storehouse does not. It went up eleven years before the fire and came through it, which makes it one of a very small number of surviving pre-1866 structures in the old commercial quarter of Namerikawa.

Storehouses were built to do exactly that. A dozō is a timber frame buried under thick walls of earth, layer on layer, finished in lime plaster and closed by heavy earth-clad doors. The walls are slow to heat and the openings can be sealed from inside. When a merchant town burned, the family house went and the storehouses often did not, which is why the goods, the ledgers and the deeds lived in the storehouse rather than the parlour.

An ishōgura is the storehouse for clothing and cloth. The Sugata family dealt in kimono fabric and bolt goods by the fourth generation, alongside medicine peddling and pawnbroking, so this was working stock as much as household wardrobe. Textiles are vulnerable to damp, insects and fire in roughly that order of frequency and reverse order of consequence, and a purpose-built earthen store answered all three.

White Plaster, Black Plaster, and Windows in Torii Frames

The registration criterion applied here differs from the one applied to the main house at the front of the same plot. The main house was listed for its contribution to the historic landscape. The storehouse was listed under the criterion reserved for buildings that set a standard in design, which is the register's stronger aesthetic category and an unusual thing to award to a back-lot store.

The reason is in the surface treatment and the openings. The exterior is finished in white shikkui, the lime plaster that gives Japanese storehouses their characteristic pale sheen. Black plaster is used at two points: on the inner faces of the earthen doors, where it would be seen only when the doors stood open, and along the upper part of the wall base. Black plaster is harder to lay well than white and was expensive, so its placement is a decision rather than an accident. Placing it where the doors open means the household paid for an effect visible only to itself.

On the front elevation, a doorway occupies the left of the ground floor. To its right, and at two positions on the upper floor, are windows framed in large torii-waku, so called because the two uprights carrying a horizontal head resemble a shrine gate. The form is functional, holding the earthen jambs of a deep-set opening, and it is also the storehouse's main piece of visual composition: three heavy frames set into a plain white field, with a two-storey gabled volume behind them.

Structurally the building is straightforward: two storeys of dozō construction, a gabled roof entered on the long side, and a building area of 40 square metres. The roof surface is sheet iron rather than tile, and it belongs to an ōya, a protective outer roof thrown over the storehouse and the separate store behind it as a single covering. Repairs were carried out in 2015.

Four Storehouses, and What Became of Them

The Sugata plot once held more than this. Namerikawa City records four earthen storehouses on the property at the height of the family's trade: the costume store, a pawn store immediately behind it, a medicine store to the west, and a rice store south of that. The names track the businesses. Salt, timber and cotton in the first three generations, then farmland, cloth, medicine and pawnbroking in the fourth.

Two of the four are gone. The medicine store and the rice store were taken down. The pawn store still stands, but the land it sits on passed to another household, so a building that was designed as one member of a group now belongs to a different owner. It is the store sharing the outer roof described in the registration record, which means the covering structure now spans a property line.

The costume storehouse itself sits behind the main house, across an interior courtyard, well back from the road. That position is worth being honest about: this is private ground, the interior is closed, and very little of the storehouse can be seen from the public street, since the main house occupies the frontage. Anyone travelling to Sewamachi will in practice look at the main house, read the interpretive board Namerikawa City has installed, and take the storehouse on trust.

The compensation is that the district shows the same building type elsewhere at closer range. The former Miyazaki Sake Brewery, twenty-odd metres across the road, was registered in 2010 as a group of four structures that includes its own costume storehouse alongside the shop-residence, the sake store and the malt store; part of the complex now operates as a café. The Ozawa house shop-storehouse at Aramachi 1618, built in the late Meiji years by a kimono merchant, carries black plaster across its whole wall surface and a set of hinged double doors, and shows what the Sugata storehouse's black-and-white scheme looks like when the proportions are reversed.

Getting there is simple enough. Naka-Namerikawa Station on the Toyama Chihō Railway main line is about eight minutes on foot; Namerikawa Station, where that line meets the Ainokaze Toyama Railway, is around twenty. There is no admission charge, because there is no admission.