The Nakashima family, "Mitaka-armor-store" is said to come from the Shimazu in Kyushu, which used to be called "Satsuma", about 400years ago. It is said the family had the purpose of collecting information of the Eastern district as an antenna, a kind of spy. There is no evidence like some documents, but there is some circumstantial evidence that they lived near the river of the Karasugawa along Nakasendo Highway, which was a key river equal to the river of Ohigawa along Tokaido Highway.

　　　

They lived near a ferry on the Karasugawa and they divided their name of Shimazu into Nakashima and Takatsu. They truned a family crest into a different design from（＋）to（[＋]）. It was propably because they wanted to avoid the suspicion by the Shogunate. They returned the family crest on a tomb to the original, a bit in the Meiji era. Where they lived was called Nakajima village, in Tano County in Joshu, which is now Nakajima-town, Fujioka-city, Gumma Prefecture. The village prospred as a post town with a ferry.

　　　

The main family names in Nakajima village were Nakashima and Takatsu. The head family, Nakashima was a big farmer and the headman of the village. The master of the head family succeeded to not only farming but also practicing medicine. On the other hand the branch families were a farmer with such a home manufacturing as dyeing，fabrics and smithery. Since they owned fertile land in the northermost fo the Kanto plains, they had prospered as a landowing farmer with a lot of tenancy until the emancipation of farming land after war.

　　　

Another head family Takatsu was also a landowing famer. Moreover they ran an inn，managed a ferry and let their houses along Nakasendo Highway as inns or shops. Due to "the Great Famine of Edo" in 3 of Temmei, a lot of refugees came there. the family made a large fortune by sellin the people toasted rice cake mixed with rice bran, wheat bran, cereals tree barls, and wild grass.

　　　

A lot of refugees who wanted to buy the rice cake stood in line to the outside of the area for more than a half month. By using the fortune the family built a three-story-house, which was said to be more splendid than a tower of Takasaki Castle. There rose the Nakashima head family house and kannonji a Buddhist temple in the south of Nakasendo Highway, and in the north rose the Takatsu head family house.

The Miki armor store was built by the father of the present master's as a doctor's office. When the father was a master, the family moved to Takasaki city and left Nakajima village. They left their land to their tenants and kept the building as a branch office. Then they gave all of the building and the land to the tenants when the "emancipation of farmland" was put into effect.

The father was a doctor and was well-known as an oil painter. He was also well-known for collecting objects of art and curios because he had got acquainted with Setuya Nakamura and Kijo Murakami, who come from the region, since they were unknown to the world. The doctor was very kind to support the unknown artists in the days with no full medical insurance equipped until they became famouse. He took part in "Yumoa Kurabu(Humor Club)" , one of the members of which was Musei Tokugawa, and then he had collected more.

Because the Nakashima family has had 400-year-old history since they started to live there, there were various kinds of collections stuffed in the warehouse. But even if they were precious to a natural history or ethnology, they were not valuable as an old art or an antique. The curios and the art objects collected by the father probably guarantee the high qualty of various goods dealed in Miki-armor-store.