Inoue Family Main Building

Inoue Family Residence Main House

Most of Inuyama's old merchant houses keep their doors closed to visitors. The Inoue main house is one of the exceptions. Standing on the west side of the castle town and facing east onto the street, this Meiji-period townhouse now holds a pickle shop and tearoom, which means you can do here what you cannot do at most of its neighbors: walk in, look up at the beams, and sit down for a while in a building well over a century old.

The house was built in the early Meiji era, between 1868 and 1911, on a long, narrow lot of the kind that defines Honmachi-dori. Its front is only about 6.4 meters wide, while the building runs back roughly 13.6 meters, the deep, slender footprint that townspeople adopted partly because street frontage was taxed. It is a two-story timber structure with a gabled pantile roof and lean-to additions front and back.

A house that kept changing

The Inoue house has been reworked over its life, and that history is part of what makes it worth reading. As first built, the north side held a tori-niwa, the through-passage of packed earth that ran from the street to the rear, while the south side held four rooms in a single file. Later the layout was turned around the other way, with the front given over to an earthen-floored space and the living rooms moved to the back, and the ground-floor street face was remodeled to suit.

One older feature survived all this. On the second floor, the windows keep their original form, framed by horizontal nageshi rails above and below, a small but telling detail that fixes the upper story in the Meiji period even as the ground floor changed beneath it.

Why it carries protection

The main house was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in July 2004, listed together with the family's storehouse and an annex on the same property. The criterion is the one that governs most registered buildings: it contributes to the historic landscape of the nation.

What gives the house its value is not a single rare feature but its role on the street. It is a Meiji townhouse still standing on its original deep lot, still in daily use, and still part of an unbroken row. The fact that it now earns its keep as a working shop, rather than sitting empty behind a barrier, is itself a model of how these buildings can carry on.

What to look for, and what to taste

The building is run by a maker of Moriguchi-zuke and Nara-zuke, pickles that are a specialty of this part of Aichi. Moriguchi-zuke is made from the Moriguchi radish, an extraordinarily long, thin root grown in the fertile soils the Kiso River laid down near Inuyama, cured for around two years in beds of sake and mirin lees. The shop sells the pickles and pours them into dishes you can eat on the spot.

Step in from the street and the plan of a deep machiya opens up in front of you: a front counter for takeaway snacks, a sales floor of pickles behind it, and table and tatami seating toward the rear, where a small courtyard garden lets light into the middle of the long building. A popular order is the okoge-gushi, a grilled rice ball brushed with soy and paired with pickle on a skewer, easy to carry as you walk the town. The shop keeps to roughly 10:00 to 17:00 and opens daily, though hours can change, so it is worth checking before a special trip.