Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura (Red Storehouse)

The Red Outbuilding of a Kainan Merchant Family

The Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura (Red Storehouse), written 山本家住宅赤倉 and read Yamamoto-ke Jūtaku Akagura, is a two-storey timber building of 1937 in Sakai, Kainan City, Wakayama Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 2, 2007. It gets its name, aka-gura or red storehouse, from the red paint on its exterior woodwork.

As the Wakayama Prefectural Board of Education describes the estate, the main buildings line National Route 370, the inner storehouses stand behind them, and a little farther off are the retirement house and the Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura, at the north end of the property.

The Akagura is reached by a covered corridor from the north veranda of the retirement house, or inkyojo, which was also built in 1937 and stands on its own plot across a lane north of the second inner storehouse. Built in the same year, the two are joined by that single corridor.

A Small Two-Storey Building with a Big Personality

The Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura is timber-framed, two storeys high, with a tiled roof and a building area of 35 square meters. Both floors are square: 3 bays per side downstairs, 2 bays per side upstairs. The upper floor steps in from the one below, so from the side the roofs read as two tiers.

The roofs are hipped and covered in pan tiles, and the lower roof carries a Chidori-hafu, a triangular decorative gable set into the roof slope. You expect that flourish on castle keeps and temple halls; on a building of about 35 square meters it is a small act of showmanship.

Inside there is one room per floor, with no partitions. The woodwork indoors is painted pale sky blue, a cool counterpoint to the red outside. Despite the gura in its name, the national database says nothing about how the building was used, and its function has not been published.

Why It Was Registered

The Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura was registered on October 2, 2007 (registration no. 30-0127; gazetted on October 22) under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. The main house, retirement house, two inner storehouses, gate and stone wall of the Yamamoto residence were registered the same day, and Wakayama Prefecture presents them as a group of 7 buildings.

The national database calls the Akagura a building loved for its unusual appearance. The prefecture values the group for how completely it preserves the setting of a leading merchant house in a local industry. Among buildings spanning the late Edo period to the early Shōwa years, the Akagura belongs to the latest phase, a glimpse of what a prosperous merchant household chose to add once the Shōwa era was under way.

What to Look For

Color first. The exterior woodwork of the Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura is painted red, and among neighbors dressed in white plaster and black stucco it stands out. This paint is the reason the national database gives for the name.

Then the form: a 3-bay square ground floor, a 2-bay square upper floor, hipped roofs on both, and a chidori-hafu on the lower roof. Stacked roofs and a decorative gable on so small a structure, together with the red paint, make up the look the building is known for.

Seeing the Akagura

The Yamamoto Family Residence Akagura is privately owned and is not a visitor attraction; neither the interior nor the grounds are open. Going by the prefecture's description of the layout, it sits deep in the property behind the retirement house, and what you can readily see from the road is mostly the main house and stone wall. Directions are on the Yamamoto Family Residence page.

The pale blue interior cannot be seen from outside, and how much of the red exterior is visible from public land has not been confirmed. Please view the area only from public roads and keep noise down around this working household.