Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office

Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office

Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office (山本勝之助商店事務所, Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shōten Jimusho) is a two-storey timber shop and office built in the middle of the Taisho era (1912 to 1926) on National Route 370 in Sakai, Kainan City, Wakayama Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 2, 2007.

The walls are black. Across the road, the firm's storehouses show the usual white lime plaster, but the office was finished in black Shikkui, and its south front is glazed on both floors. On this quiet stretch of road through the Nokami valley, that pairing of dark plaster and glass is the first thing you see.

The business behind it dates from 1880, when Yamamoto Katsunosuke took over his family's vegetable-wax trade in Sakai and turned it into a wholesale house for mountain produce. Medicinal goods such as Japanese pepper (sanshō) and cassia bark came first. Then he moved into hemp-palm fibre, or shuro, grown all over the valley and twisted into rope that ship owners and fishermen bought across Japan. The trade name was Kaneichi. The office was built during the Taisho boom that followed, as the public front of the firm.

Two roofs and a black front

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office a frontage of 3 ken and a depth of 8 ken (the Ken is the standard bay of Japanese carpentry), with a building area of 89 square metres. The block facing the road runs east to west under a hipped roof (Yosemune-zukuri) of light pantiles (Sangawara-buki). Behind it a north-south block carries a gabled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri) of heavier round-and-flat tiles (Hongawarabuki). From the pavement you read one building; in fact two blocks with different roofs are joined front to back.

Both floors of the south face are glazed, and the entrance is not in the middle of the front but at the southern end of the east wall. The ground-floor office inside uses iron columns. Glass on this scale and iron supports place the office firmly in a different age from the late-Edo core of the family house next door, and show a Taisho merchant reaching for new materials.

That house, the main house of the Yamamoto Family Residence, stands just to the east, set back from the road and also plastered in black. According to the Wakayama Society of Architects, its living quarters connect to the office (which the society calls the shop) across an earthen-floored Doma. The home kept its distance from the street; the office met it head on.

Why it was registered

Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office was registered under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. It was one of eleven Yamamoto buildings registered on the same day: the office, three shop storehouses, and seven structures of the Yamamoto Family Residence, among them the main house, two inner storehouses, a retirement cottage, a red-painted outbuilding, a gate and a stone wall. Their registration numbers run in sequence from 30-0119 to 30-0129, and the office holds the first.

Taken alone, a black two-storey office is not showy architecture. The value is in the layout. A Taisho-era palm-fibre merchant put his dark, glazed office on the road where buyers and carriers arrived, a merchandise storehouse beside it and two more storehouses across the street. Walk the block and the whole arrangement is still there to read.

Nor is it a museum. Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten, now a company, is run by Katsunosuke's three great-granddaughters and their family, and still trades in palm-fibre brooms and sanshō under the Kaneichi name.

What to look for

The front from across the road

The best view of Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office is from the south side of Route 370, roughly in front of Shop Storehouse No. 3. With a white storehouse at your back and the black office facing you, the contrast that defines this streetscape is obvious.

The door and the upper windows

There is no wide central shop door, so your eye goes to the small entrance at the east corner. The upper floor is glazed too, unlike older townhouses that opened only at street level and kept the upper storey shuttered. Compare the two rows of windows and the building reads as a bright office block rather than a shop with rooms above.

Layered roofs

Walk a few steps east or west and the gabled roof of heavy tiles appears behind the hipped front. The agency's description takes the trouble to distinguish the two tile types, and it is worth pausing to see why.

Visiting

Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten Office is a working company building and the interior is not open to the public; you view it from National Route 370. The road narrows as it passes the Yamamoto buildings, so keep to the edge and watch for traffic. We found no stated restriction on photographing the facades from the road, but this is also a family home, so stay off the property.

The official website directs individual shoppers to the firm's shop in Ise, Mie Prefecture, and to its online store, and it gives no retail opening hours for the Kainan premises.

By public transport, take the Orange Bus bound for Tozanguchi from stop 6 at JR Kainan Station and ride about 10 minutes to Kameike Koen; the stop is right in front of the shop. By car, leave the Hanwa Expressway at Kainan-Higashi Interchange and drive east on Route 370 for about 3 kilometres, roughly 5 minutes. The website does not mention visitor parking.