Shiraishi Family Home Tool Storehouse and Food Storehouse

One Building, Two Storehouses

The Tool Storehouse and Food Storehouse of the Shiraishi Family Residence (白石家住宅道具蔵及び食物蔵, Shiraishi-ke Jūtaku Dōgugura oyobi Shokumotsugura) is a storehouse of about 1888 in Miyaichi-cho, Hofu City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, entered on Japan's Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 November 2018 under registration number 35-0101.

The name is a mouthful because the building does two jobs. A wall runs across the interior, splitting it north and south. The southern half kept food; the northern half kept tools and equipment, and that side was given a second floor. From outside it reads as a single gabled storehouse, plastered white, its ridge running north to south. On the register it counts as one structure.

It stands in front of the main house toward the east, so it is the storehouse nearer the street; Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property database places it to the southeast of the main house. The construction is dozo-zukuri, single-storeyed with the two-storey section noted above, tiled roof, 41 square metres of ground area. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to around 1888, the same period as the kimono storehouse behind the house, though without the ridge tag that fixes the other building's date precisely.

Why It Was Registered

Registration came under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, the same heading applied to the kimono storehouse on the same day. The Agency's assessment states that the building helps form the dignified compound layout appropriate to a long-established merchant house.

That phrase points at something easy to miss. The value here is not in a single room or a rare technique. It is in arrangement: a main house at the centre, one storehouse behind to the west, another in front to the east, all inside a wall on the approach street to Hofu Tenmangu. Remove any one of the three and the composition stops making sense. The Shiraishi family have traded in Miyaichi since 1765, and the compound is a diagram of how such a household organised itself, with the reception rooms at the centre and the working buildings ranged around them.

The division inside is itself the evidence. Food and equipment have different requirements, and a merchant household running a shop, a residence and a stock of goods needed separate controlled spaces for each. Building them as two halves of one shell was economical, and it is a solution documented less often than the grand storehouses of larger estates, because ordinary working buildings of this scale were usually the first to be demolished.

What to Look at on the Outside

The plaster is carried up to the eaves, as on the kimono storehouse, and finished with a hachimaki, the thickened band at the top of the wall. The difference is what comes below. Here a single narrow band runs immediately under the headband, where the other storehouse has a projecting drip course. Standing in the yard with both buildings in view, that one detail tells them apart at a glance.

The entrances repay a closer look. The Agency's record describes doorways on the west and north faces, each sheltered by a small roof carried on mochiokuri brackets cut with moulded profiles; the prefectural record instead describes openings on the north and south. The owners note that each of the two interior compartments has its own entrance, and that the brackets at doors and windows are carved with an arabesque pattern. Whichever faces are meant, the point holds: a service building has been given decorative brackets it did not structurally require, because it was visible from the front of the compound.

The owners give the dimensions as 8.685 metres along the ridge and 4.81 metres across, marginally shorter than the kimono storehouse but the same depth, which suggests the two were laid out to a shared module.

Seeing any of this takes timing. The compound is closed for most of the year and opens roughly twice annually, in spring and autumn, alongside exhibitions at Shiraishi Gofukuten, the kimono shop that fronts the site; dates go up on the shop's website and Facebook page. Yamaguchi Prefecture's tourism service lists bookable programmes at the property, including a guided tour of the registered buildings and a furoshiki-wrapping session held during a special opening. Photography indoors is at the household's discretion and worth asking about on arrival. Nothing is visible from the public street, since the storehouse sits behind the shop.

JR Hofu Station is about twelve to fifteen minutes away on foot from the Tenjin exit on the north side. Hofu Tenmangu, founded in 904 and counted among Japan's three principal Tenjin shrines, is further along the same street, and the site of the Miyaichi honjin, the official inn of the post station, lies between the two.