Former Kato Family Residence, Main Building

A Landlord's House on the Owari Plain

On the northern edge of a walled compound in the Mutsushi district of Kitanagoya, a broad wooden house keeps the steady, unhurried profile of a wealthy farming family's home from the early Meiji years. This is the main house of the former Kato residence, built around 1880, when the country was barely a decade into its rush toward modernization yet rural Aichi still lived by older rhythms. The Kato family had farmed and prospered here for generations, and the house they raised was meant to last.

What sets the place apart today is not only its age but its second life. The city of Kitanagoya uses the old residence as a working setting for reminiscence therapy, inviting older residents to sit in its rooms and talk through their memories. The house is less a sealed exhibit than a quiet room where the past is still spoken aloud.

The Kato Family and the Making of the House

Local people knew the Kato family as the Ō-Katō, the "Great Kato," a measure of the standing they held in the area. During the Edo period they served as shōya, the village headman of Mutsushi, the official who managed land records, taxes, and disputes on behalf of the domain. From the late Edo years until around 1892 they also brewed sake, and into the Meiji era the head of the family went on to serve as village mayor. Few households on the Owari plain combined administrative authority, landholding, and commerce so completely.

The main house is recorded as having been built in either 1880 or 1886; the date is given by tradition rather than fixed by a surviving document, and cultural-property records bracket its construction to the years between 1877 and 1886. It is a two-storey timber building roofed in sangawara, the interlocking pantiles that became standard for substantial Meiji houses, with a building area of about 212 square metres. The upper floor is a tsushi-nikai, a low half-storey tucked under the roof and used for storage rather than living. Downstairs, the plan runs to three rooms across the front, four to the rear, and a working doma, the earthen-floored space where a farming household cooked, worked, and received the day's business.

In March 1998 the family gave the residence, together with the household objects and documents they had kept, to the town of Shikatsu, which later merged into present-day Kitanagoya. That gift is the reason the house survives intact rather than as a memory.

Why It Is Registered, and What That Means

The main house carries the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property, a category worth understanding clearly, since it differs from the better-known "designated" tiers such as Important Cultural Property or National Treasure. Japan introduced the registration system in 1996 to protect the large number of buildings from the Meiji period onward that fall outside the stricter designation framework. Registration applies a lighter touch: it encourages owners to keep using and maintaining a building rather than freezing it, which suits a house meant to be lived in. The Kato main house was registered on 18 November 1999, under the criterion that it contributes to the historic landscape of the nation.

It did not enter the registers alone. The compound preserves a cluster of structures from the same family, each registered the same day: the long nagayamon gate that runs along the south edge, a sizeable dozō storehouse the family called the okura, a middle gate, a north boundary wall, and a detached room and tearoom added in the Taishō and Shōwa decades. Together they fill a site of roughly 370 tsubo, close to a forty-metre square, with the buildings packed densely in the manner of a working estate. The value officials recognized lies in this completeness: an intact picture of how a prosperous landholding family in this region built and arranged its world.

What to Look For

Begin with the roofline. The main house sits low and wide, its pantiled roof sheltering the half-storey loft, and the proportions read as deliberately restrained for a family of such means. Inside, the sequence of rooms repays slow attention: the front rooms were the formal, public face of the house, while the rear rooms and the doma carried the actual labour of the household. Standing in the doma, with its packed earth underfoot and the kitchen arrangements nearby, gives the clearest sense of how the place once worked.

Step around to the north side to find the boundary wall, which doubles as a deep eave for the main house. Its builders set vertical lattice windows along the upper portion to draw in light and laid vertical boarding below, a practical solution that also gives the wall a quiet rhythm. The storehouse, relocated within the grounds when the detached room was built, stands two full storeys under a gabled pantile roof, broad and plainly dignified in the way a long-established family's strongroom was expected to be.

The reminiscence work shapes the visit too. Because the rooms are used for conversation and recollection rather than kept behind ropes, the house has an inhabited stillness. Visitors are welcomed by staff who can explain the rooms and the family's history, and the atmosphere rewards anyone willing to slow down.

Around the Residence

The Kato house is one node in an unusual local project. Kitanagoya has built a regional reputation around reminiscence therapy, the practice of helping older people stay mentally active by drawing out memories, and the residence serves as one of its bases alongside the city's reminiscence centre on the same grounds.

A short distance away stands the partner to this work, the Kitanagoya City Museum of History and Folklore, better known by its nickname, the Museum of Shōwa Everyday Life. Occupying the third floor of the east library beside the city hall's east building, it has filled its galleries with the ordinary objects of mid-twentieth-century Japan: home appliances, toys, shopfronts, and recreated streetscapes from the Shōwa decades. Admission is free, photography is allowed, and the museum's approach earned it the inaugural Japanese Association of Museums prize in 2020. Seeing the Meiji house and the Shōwa museum on the same trip draws a clear line through a century of how families in this corner of Aichi actually lived.

The residence lies in the Mutsushi area of Kitanagoya, reachable from central Nagoya by the Meitetsu Inuyama Line toward Nishiharu Station, then by the city's community bus or a short taxi ride. Because the house is staffed as part of a care programme rather than run as a standard tourist site, anyone planning a visit should confirm the day and arrangements with the reminiscence centre beforehand.