Yamamoto Family Residence Interior 2

Yamamoto Family Residence: Inner Storehouse No. 2 (Uchigura Ni)

The two inner storehouses of this merchant compound sit at right angles to each other. Where its neighbour runs north to south, this one is turned to run east to west, the ridges deliberately crossed rather than aligned. The shift is easy to miss until you stand among the buildings, and then it reads as a piece of planning rather than chance.

This is the second of two inner storehouses, or uchigura, in the residence of Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shōten, the palm-fibre and medicinal-herb merchants of Sakai in Kainan, Wakayama Prefecture. Like its companion it is a private storehouse for the household's own goods, kept behind the shop frontage. It went up in the middle Taishō years, between 1912 and 1925, a little after or alongside the first inner storehouse next to it.

How it differs from its neighbour

Built east of Inner Storehouse No. 1, this is again a two-storey dozō, the fireproof earthen-walled type, three and a half bays long and two bays across, raised on the same kind of tall granite base and finished in the same white plaster with a vertical-board skirt at the foot. The roof framing is once more carried on noboribari, sloping beams that follow the pitch.

The differences are in the roofing and the gable. This storehouse is covered in sangawara pantiles, the lighter single-piece tile, rather than the heavier formal hongawara of its neighbour. The doorway opens on the south, under a small pent roof clad in sheet iron. And the gable end is worked to show the moya-gata, the stepped profile of the purlins expressed on the wall, a quiet bit of finish on what is otherwise a plain working building.

Why it is registered, and what makes it valuable

Inner Storehouse No. 2 became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 October 2007 (registration number 30-0125). The registration system, brought in during 1996, protects modern buildings through notification and guidance rather than the strict permits attached to Important Cultural Properties, and is meant to keep a broad range of recent structures from slipping away unrecorded. This storehouse meets the test of contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

Paired with the first storehouse, it shows how the Yamamoto household composed the back of its property. The crossed ridges, the matched granite bases and white walls, the small variations in tile and gable: these are the marks of an owner thinking about how a cluster of plain storehouses would sit together, not just how each would stand alone. That care is the point of preserving the set rather than a single celebrated building.

What to look for

Compare the two inner storehouses side by side. One ridge crosses the other; one roof is formal hongawara, this one the lighter pantile; this gable carries the stepped purlin profile its neighbour lacks. Then look down to the matching granite bases that lift both clear of the ground. The variations are small, but they are the kind a careful builder makes on purpose.

As elsewhere in the residence, this is a working business and not a museum. The storehouses can be appreciated from the public road, while the interiors are not on regular public view, so the streetscape is what a visitor comes to see.