Former Umezu Dental Clinic Storehouse

A Storehouse Built to Be Sat In

The Former Umetsu Dental Clinic Parlour Storehouse (旧梅津歯科医院座敷蔵, also written Kyū Umetsu Shika-in Zashikigura) is a two-storey earthen-walled storehouse of 1922 at Tōkamachi in Kaminoyama City, Yamagata Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (登録有形文化財) on 17 February 2022 under number 06-0199.

The name needs unpacking. A zashikigura is a storehouse whose interior has been fitted out with formal reception rooms instead of, or as well as, storage. The building type belongs largely to the snow country of northern Honshū, and it turns the usual logic of a Japanese house inside out: the room a family was proudest of sat not in the main house but inside the thick-walled outbuilding at the back of the garden.

Here the ground floor holds a run of connected rooms, a butsuma for the Buddhist altar and ancestral tablets alongside a zashiki fitted with a tokonoma alcove. The second floor, by contrast, stayed a storeroom. Formality below, sacks and boxes above.

The reasoning behind the type is usually explained in practical terms. A storehouse was the most fire-resistant structure on any property, its timber frame packed in earth and finished in lime plaster. What a household could not afford to lose went inside, and in a family of standing that meant the ancestors as much as the rice.

Construction and Fittings

The building measures 73 square metres in area, with a gabled roof of sheet iron entered from the long side. A plaster band called a hachimaki runs beneath the eaves, a detail found on storehouses across the region and worked with some care on this one.

The doorway and windows carry kakego-nuri shutters. These are heavy doors whose edges are rabbeted so that leaf and frame overlap, then plastered over, sealing the opening against flame and smoke when closed. Storehouse doors of this kind were made by specialist plasterers, and the quality of the work tended to reflect the standing of the household.

Overhead is the feature the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out. A massive ushibari tie beam crosses the space, carried on curved beams that are themselves described as thick. Snow-country framing had to accommodate loads that houses further south never faced, and roof structures grew correspondingly heavy. The official description calls the result imposing in the manner of the snow country, which is unusually direct language for a government database entry.

The Side That Faces the Garden

Storehouses are normally blank. This one is not, on one side.

The kuramae, the frontage of the storehouse, faces a pond garden, and across it runs a veranda closed with glass doors. Glass was still an expensive material for a provincial household in 1922, and using it here shows what the space was for. Somebody sat on that veranda and looked at the water.

Set that against the second-floor reception rooms of the residential wing, built five years later in 1927 and described in the official record as being in good contrast with this storehouse. The house offered a bright, open room high up with a view outward. The storehouse offered a dark, solid room at ground level looking into an enclosed garden. Between them a host could pick the room to suit the guest, the errand and the weather, and in a Yamagata winter that last consideration was not trivial.

The storehouse also predates the two main buildings. When it was completed in 1922 the earlier main house still stood, and the clinic and residence that now flank it were five years off. The compound as visitors see it today was assembled in stages across the Taishō and early Shōwa years rather than laid out at once.

Access and What You Can Actually See

The property is privately owned and closed to the public. There is no admission, no schedule of opening and no interior access, and Kaminoyama City's list of cultural-property buildings open for viewing does not include it. The pond garden and the glass-fronted veranda cannot be seen from outside.

Given that, the honest advice is to treat this as one stop on a walk rather than a destination. The site is about five minutes on foot from Kaminoyama-Onsen Station on the JR Ōu Main Line, some 20 minutes from Yamagata Station by local train. Keep photography to what is visible from the public road.

Travellers interested in the storehouse tradition of northern Japan have better luck elsewhere in the city. Registered properties in Kaminoyama include the former Hasegawa silk mill cocoon storehouse and the Kaisendō, which is open as a museum, while the samurai houses on Nakachō street a short walk north include the Miwa residence with public interior access. Kaminoyama Castle, founded in 1535 and rebuilt as a local history museum, gives the wider story of the castle town that Tōkamachi belonged to.