Former Uchida Saheiji Family Retirement House

A Two-Storey Annexe in the Back Corner of a Shipowner's Compound

The Former Uchida Saheiji Family Retirement House (旧内田佐平二家住宅隠居屋, Kyū Uchida Saheiji-ke Jūtaku Inkyoya) is a small wooden two-storey building of the early Meiji period standing in the Utsumi district of Minamichita, Aichi Prefecture, and it was entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 November 2018. Its footprint measures just 22 square metres.

The building sits in the northeast corner of the compound. Enter through the front gate, pass along the flank of the main house, and it appears at the quiet back of the property. The ridge runs east to west in the Kirizuma-zukuri gable form, the entrance is on the long side in the Hirairi manner, and the roof is tiled. The west end butts directly against the east wall of the storehouse.

Inside there are only two rooms. The western one is an anteroom that doubles as the kuramae, the working space in front of a storehouse door where goods were set down as they came out of storage. The eastern one is a six-mat sitting room fitted with a suspended alcove. Upstairs is a plank-floored loft used for storage.

Inkyo, the Japanese term behind the building's name, describes the arrangement by which the head of a household formally handed the business to the next generation and moved into separate quarters. The old couple stepped back from the main house but kept the storehouse keys within reach. That balance of retirement and continued responsibility is written into the plan of these two rooms.

The compound itself was built by the Uchida Sashichi family, the leading shipowners of Utsumi, for a branch of the household. Saizō, the first head of the branch line, had managed the Sashichi family's outlying shop at Yano in what is now Tsu, Mie Prefecture. When he returned to Utsumi, the main family provided him with the land and the buildings. A house-divination plan dated the fifth month of 1872 survives and fixes the main house to around that year. The retirement house is recorded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as early Meiji, a span given as 1868 to 1882.

Why This Building Was Registered

The registration criterion applied here is contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The Former Uchida Saheiji Family Retirement House carries registration number 23-0533 and was part of the ninety-first round of registrations. It was listed on the same day as four companions on the same site: the main house, the storehouse, the front gate with its barns, and the openwork fence.

That grouping matters for how the building should be read. The value identified by the Agency for Cultural Affairs lies less in the annexe as an isolated design than in what it does inside a larger whole. The official description makes two claims. The building shows how a shipowning household actually lived, and it forms part of a traditional residential compound. The first points to the interior, the second to where it stands on the site.

Next door is the Sashichi family's own house, the Former Uchida Family Residence, designated an Important Cultural Property in 2017. Built in 1869, it is among the larger surviving shipowner residences on Japan's Pacific coast. The branch family's compound is said to have been put up using timber left over from that construction, and the two share several features of plan. Main line and branch line, standing side by side, with the difference in rank still legible in the buildings: that combination is uncommon.

Utsumi-bune were the cargo vessels of the Bishū coastal shipping trade based at Utsumi and its neighbouring ports. They worked differently from the better-known taru-kaisen and higaki-kaisen fleets of the Edo period, which earned freight charges for carrying other people's goods. Utsumi operators bought cargo at the source and sold it at the destination on their own account. Independence from merchant houses and financiers made the margins large, and at the height of the trade the fleet is said to have numbered around a hundred vessels. Those profits paid for compounds like this one.

Tea-House Details in a Six-Mat Room

The eastern room is what rewards a slow look. Its alcove is a tsuridoko, a small Tokonoma suspended from above rather than framed by a post set on the floor. It is the solution a builder reaches for when the floor area will not spare the space a full alcove demands.

On the south side, a koshi-shōji, a sliding screen with a solid panel along its lower portion, opens directly onto the inner courtyard. Immediately west of it sits a Shitaji-mado, a window made by leaving a patch of wall unplastered so that the bamboo lath beneath shows through. Windows of that kind belong to the tea room. Someone deliberately imported the vocabulary of Sukiya-zukuri into a retirement annexe of twenty-two square metres.

Sit in that room and look south. The view crosses the courtyard and stops at the rear of the main house. Closing the east side of the courtyard is the openwork fence, 2.4 metres high and 5.6 metres long, its bays filled with vertical round bamboo and finished at the top with a clustered lattice. It screens the neighbouring plot while letting light and air through. It reads as a composed foreground, designed for exactly this seated view.

Step into the western room and the mood changes completely. The storehouse door opens in the middle of its east wall, facing straight into this space. Goods brought out of the store were set down here. A sitting room with tea-house detailing and a working loading floor sit on either side of a single partition. The elegance suggested by the phrase "shipowner's retirement quarters" and the practical business of a merchant household turn out to share the same small building.

From outside, the contrast with the storehouse to the west is easy to read. That building is Dozo-zukuri, two storeys, its walls finished in white plaster with weatherboarding on the west and north faces. Timber annexe and white-walled store stand together as a single mass on the street corner. The Former Uchida Saheiji Family Retirement House was repaired in 2013, so what stands today has been through conservation work.

Visiting: Days, Hours and Getting There

The building is shown to the public together with the neighbouring Former Uchida Family Residence, under the single site name Bishū Kaisen Utsumi-bune Shipowner Uchida Family Residence. Opening days are Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays, excluding the New Year period. Hours run from 9:30 to 16:30 between March and September, with last admission at 16:00, and from 9:30 to 16:00 between October and February, with last admission at 15:30.

Admission is 300 yen per person, free for junior high school students and younger. Groups of twenty or more pay 270 yen each. On Sundays, volunteer guides from the Minamichita tourism association are on hand.

One closure is easy to be caught out by. Normal opening is suspended from July until mid-September because of the heat risk, and the site also closes without notice when storm or heavy rain warnings are issued. Check the town's schedule page before travelling. No caretaker lives on site, so if you need to visit outside the published days, contact the Minamichita Town Education Division on 0569-65-0711 or the volunteer guide office on 0569-62-3100.

How much of each individual building can be entered varies from day to day. If seeing the interior of the Former Uchida Saheiji Family Retirement House is the point of your trip, ask the Education Division in advance. The official pages state no photography policy either way, so follow the signage on site and any instruction from the guides.

For transport, take the Meitetsu Chita New Line to its terminus at Utsumi Station. From there, the Umikko community bus on the Minamichita and Mihama loop route, running anticlockwise, reaches the stop named Uchida Sashichi-ke Mae, two minutes on foot from the gate. By car it is about ten minutes from the Minamichita interchange on the Chita Peninsula Road, heading towards Utsumi, with parking for roughly ten vehicles in front of the site. Minibuses and larger coaches cannot park there, so groups should arrange access with the Education Division beforehand.