Endo Family Residence Main Building

A townhouse built to be seen from two streets

The Endo Family Residence Main Building (遠藤家住宅主屋, Endō-ke jūtaku shuoku) is a merchant townhouse built in 1900 on Honmachi-dori in the castle town of Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, and it was entered on Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2005. The building is timber-framed, two storeys, tiled, with a footprint of 119 square meters.

Its plot follows the pattern used across Inuyama: four ken wide and seven and a half ken deep, roughly 7.3 meters of street frontage running back about 13.6 meters. The ken is the traditional Japanese building module used to set out a plan, and townhouse plots were taxed on frontage, which is why they run so deep.

What makes this plot unusual is the corner. Honmachi-dori is the road that ran from Inuyama Castle south toward Nagoya, and it meets here a cross street linking Sakashita in the west with the temple quarter in the east. Most Machiya present one face to one street. This one opens west and south.

Aichi Prefecture's heritage records state that the Endo family ran a restaurant business on this corner from the Edo period. The building standing today was put up in 1900, and it was designed for that trade.

Alterations, losses, and what survived upstairs

In 1951 the Endo Family Residence Main Building passed to the Endo Glass Shop. A sheet-iron parapet went up across the front, and the ground floor was reworked into a counter and kitchen. The prefectural survey is blunt about the result: the original ground floor became unreadable.

The upper storey fared better. A corridor was inserted along the north side of the guest room, but the cedar ceiling boards, cut from buried and mineral-stained timber known as jindai-sugi, stayed where they were, along with the unusually wide paper screens. The atmosphere of the old dining rooms survived one floor above the alterations that erased it below.

More recently the projecting lattice window on the second floor of the Endo Family Residence Main Building was rebuilt using salvaged timber taken from another old building, and lattice doors were fitted in front of the aluminium sashes on the ground floor. That second measure is not restoration. It is a screening job, meant to settle the frontage back into the street.

Why it is on the register

Registration took effect on 9 February 2005, with the official gazette notice following on 28 February. The property carries register number 23-0180. Only one of the three possible criteria was applied: that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. The judgement was about the street, not about architectural refinement in isolation.

Japan runs two parallel systems for built heritage, and the distinction matters here. Designation, the older and stricter of the two, freezes a building and its setting. Registration, introduced in 1996, is deliberately lighter: owners may remodel interiors and run businesses inside, provided the exterior is not substantially altered. A house that spent half a century as a glass shop and now holds a retail tenant can hold this status precisely because registration was built to allow it.

Four properties of the Mano family, five of the former Isobe residence, seven of the Kojima family and two of the Ito family were all registered on the same February day in 2005. Inuyama registered its townhouses as a group rather than one at a time.

Inuyama City has separately listed the building as a structure that forms the city's historic character under the Historic Townscape Law, so a municipal listing sits on top of the national one.

What to look for from the street

The corner site is written into the roof. The north gable, which no one on the street sees, is a plain Kirizuma-zukuri gable. The south gable, which faces the cross street, is the more formal hipped-and-gabled Irimoya-zukuri. The building gives its better face to the side people look at. Below, the ground-floor eaves run round from the west elevation to the south so the shelter does not stop at the corner.

Then there is the height. Because a full formal guest room was placed on the upper floor, the storey height is generous, and the house rises noticeably above its neighbours, most of which keep low second floors under eaves-side entrances. Walking north along Honmachi-dori, this is the building that interrupts the roofline.

The roof is Sangawara-buki, laid with the pan-and-cover tiles that became standard for townhouses in the Edo period. On the second floor, compare the colour and weathering of the projecting lattice with the timber around it. The rebuilt section reads differently once you know to look.

Visiting

The Endo Family Residence Main Building is privately owned and there is no heritage tour of the interior. A retail business occupies the ground floor, so during opening hours you can step inside as a customer and see the earthen-floored front space. Tenants change, so a shop may or may not be trading when you arrive. The upper-floor guest rooms are closed.

The exterior can be viewed and photographed freely from the pavement. If you photograph inside the shop, follow whatever the current occupant asks.

From the west exit of Meitetsu Inuyama Station, walk north along Honmachi-dori for about ten minutes. From the entrance to Inuyama Castle it is roughly 700 meters south, about nine minutes on foot. The former Isobe residence, open free of charge, stands about 50 meters further south, and Dondenkan, which displays the tall festival floats, about 110 meters south. The building sits on the natural walking line between the station and the castle.

Honmachi-dori is the route of the Inuyama Festival, held on the first Saturday and Sunday of April, when thirteen wheeled floats are hauled through the town and this corner becomes a pinch point. Crowds make it hard to stand and study the building on those days. A weekday visit suits anyone here for the architecture.

Access details here were checked on 30 August 2026. Retail occupancy changes, so check signage on site.