A single-bay gate on a Meiji street
The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate (旧堀田廣之家住宅門, Kyū Hotta Hiroyuki-ke Jūtaku Mon) is a timber gate with a tiled roof in Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, built as part of a compound begun in 1912 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. It measures 2.0 metres across and carries a wing wall on one side.
Structurally it is an udegimon, a bracket-arm gate. Two main posts carry short arms projecting forward and back, and those arms take the purlins that hold up the roof. No separate posts are raised to support the roof, which is what distinguishes the type from the heavier gates used at temples and samurai residences. It is the plainest respectable gate a Japanese house can have, and at a single bay of 2.0 metres it was built for people rather than for carts.
The roof is a Kirizuma-zukuri gable under Sangawara-buki pantiles. A pair of boarded doors hangs in the opening. The gate became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016.
Stone where the timber would have rotted
The detail worth crossing town for stands behind the main posts. Because a bracket-arm gate takes the whole weight of its roof on a single line of posts, it wants to tip forward or back, and the usual remedy is a pair of raking struts set against the rear face of each post. Those struts are normally timber. At the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate they are stone.
The reasoning is not hard to reconstruct. A timber strut rots from the foot, where end grain meets damp ground, and it takes the gate's stability with it. Stone does not. Somebody, either the client or his carpenter, looked at the one member most likely to fail and substituted a material that would not. That is the same instinct that produced a brick wall along the west boundary of the plot for fire protection. Stand in front of the gate and look at the base of the posts before you look at anything else.
A wing wall runs from the gate toward the main house. Its lower section is finished in sasarago shitami itabari, horizontal boarding whose joints are pinned by notched vertical battens. The official commentary describes this boarding as a deliberate move to unify the gate with the other structures of the compound. The same treatment appears on the exterior of the storehouse and along the base of the boarded fence further west, so the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate sits at the eastern end of a repeated motif rather than standing on its own.
Reading the street frontage
The compound presents its north side to Negicho street. Working along that frontage from west to east: twelve metres of boarded fence, with a small wicket door opening toward its eastern end; then the main house set back behind it; then, east of the house, the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate. A brick wall closes the western boundary of the plot. Two openings, in other words, of which this gate is the formal one.
The registration criterion the Agency for Cultural Affairs applied here is contribution to the historic landscape of the country. That is a different criterion from the one used for the main house, which was registered as a model of its type. Gate, fence and brick wall were listed for what they do to the street, which suggests reading them together as a single composition rather than as three separate monuments.
One gap in the record is worth stating plainly. The Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko, the family archive published by the Tsushima City Library, dates the brick wall to 14 January 1913, the boarded fence to May and June of that year, and the completion of the main house interior to May 1914, but the extracts made public contain no construction date for the gate. It presumably went up during the same campaign. The precise date awaits further work in the archive.
Access and what you can see
You cannot walk through this gate. Tsushima City's cultural heritage archive lists the compound as closed to the public, with no entry to the grounds, no interior visiting, and no advance-booking or special-opening scheme.
What you can do is look at it properly, and that matters here more than at most closed properties. Of the five registered structures on this site, the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate is one of only three that front the street, along with the boarded fence and the brick wall. Everything about it is within reach of the pavement: the projection of the bracket arms, the way the purlin sits on them, the pitch of the pantiles, the end grain of the boarded doors, and those stone struts. Photography from the public road is unrestricted, though this is a private home and pointing a lens through the opening is not on.
Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines lies about one kilometre east, fifteen minutes on foot along the route toward Tsushima Shrine. The Hotta Family Residence immediately to the west is city-owned and open on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00 (300 yen for adults, 100 yen for schoolchildren, checked August 2026). Comparing the entrance of that mid Edo Machiya, an Important Cultural Property, with the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate shows how one family adjusted its public face across roughly two centuries.
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Q&A
- Can you see the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate, and can you go through it?
- The compound is closed to the public, so no entry is possible, but the gate faces Negicho street and can be examined closely from the pavement. Tsushima City's heritage archive records the property as not open.
- What kind of gate is the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate?
- A single-bay bracket-arm gate, or udegimon. Arms project forward and back from two main posts to carry the purlins of the roof, without separate roof-bearing posts. The opening is 2.0 metres wide.
- Why are the rear struts of the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate made of stone?
- A bracket-arm gate needs raking struts behind its posts for stability, and timber struts decay from the foot where they meet the ground. Stone removes that weak point.
- When was the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate built?
- The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date as 1912. The published family archive gives dates for the brick wall, the boarded fence and the main house but not for the gate, which was most likely built during the same works of 1913 to 1914.
- How do you reach the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate from the nearest station?
- Walk about one kilometre west from Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines, roughly fifteen minutes. The gate stands on Negicho street, east of the main house.
Basic Information
| Name | Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate |
|---|---|
| Location | 68 Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture |
| Designation | Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) |
| Year Designated | Registered in 2016 |
| Quantity | 1 structure |
| Dimensions | Timber, tiled roof, opening 2.0 metres wide, with wing wall |
| Owner | Unknown (not listed in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database) |
| Public Access | Not open to the public (exterior visible from the road) |
References
- National Cultural Properties Database, Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate (Agency for Cultural Affairs)
- https://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/bsys/maindetails/101/00011320
- Cultural Heritage Online, Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Gate
- https://online.bunka.go.jp/heritages/detail/221247
- History and Cultural Heritage of Tsushima, Former Hotta Hiroyuki Residence (Tsushima City Board of Education)
- https://www.tsushima-bunka.jp/map/kunitouroku/map000462.html
- Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko exhibition material (Tsushima City Library)
- https://www.lib.tsushima.aichi.jp/wp/wp-content/uploads/201706_hotta_re.pdf
- About the Important Cultural Property Hotta Family Residence (Tsushima City)
- https://www.city.tsushima.lg.jp/shokai/bunka/bunkazai/jyuuyoubunnkazai.html
Last verified: 2026.08.31