Kawamura Family Residence Main House

A Merchant House Built in 1938

The Kawamura Family Residence Main House (川村家住宅主屋, Kawamura-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) stands at Higashikoken in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, was completed in 1938, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 18 October 2006. It occupies the south-east corner of a crossroads and presents its face westward to the street running north and south.

The dimensions are those of an urban merchant's building. The frontage measures three and a half ken, roughly 6.4 metres, while the plot runs eight ken deep, close to 14.5 metres. A gabled kirizuma roof of sangawara pantiles covers around 102 square metres of floor area across two full storeys of timber construction.

Inside, the southern strip of the plan is given over to earth floor along its whole length. The northern strip carries earth floor at the front and two rooms behind it. Anyone who has walked through an old shop in a Japanese castle town will recognise the arrangement immediately: the working passage on one side, living and receiving space on the other, everything stretched back from a narrow street frontage.

Why a 1938 Building Counts as Heritage

Registration was granted under the criterion for buildings that serve as a model of form and design. That wording deserves unpacking, because visitors sometimes assume a house from 1938 is too recent to matter.

Inuyama's castle town retains its original land division almost intact. The plots laid out below the castle in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are still the plots people build on, narrow at the street and deep behind, and Honmachi-dōri, the merchants' main street, still follows its old line. What changed was the buildings themselves. Fire, commerce and the twentieth century removed most of the Edo-period fabric.

The Kawamura house belongs to the generation that replaced it. Its builders kept working within the inherited discipline of the plot rather than abandoning it, and the result records how a merchant family below Inuyama Castle actually lived and traded on the eve of the Pacific War. Registered examples of that particular moment are scarce.

One difference from the Edo model deserves a second look. Older machiya in the region often carried a low mezzanine upper floor, the tsushi-nikai, ceilinged too tightly to stand in comfortably. This house rises to two proper storeys, a change that came with modern building practice and altered how the street looks from below.

The fittings across the front elevation have been replaced over the years, which the register notes plainly. What survived the alterations is the tōri-doma, the earth-floored passage cutting through the depth of the building, and above it a void open to the roof frame. That void is the feature the assessors singled out.

Seeing It on Honmachi-dōri

This is a privately owned house, and the interior is not open to visitors. There is no ticket desk, no set of opening hours and no arrangement for booking a look inside. What you can do is stand on the street corner and read the exterior, which repays a few minutes of attention: the way the gable end meets the crossing, the proportion of frontage to height, the roof line running back into the plot.

An account published around the time of registration records the family still dealing in sake and soy sauce at the premises, which fits the plan of the building; a visitor should not assume the trade continues today.

Photograph the outside if you like, from public ground, and keep in mind that people live here.

The house sits within an easy walk of most of what brings travellers to Inuyama. From Inuyama Station on the Meitetsu network, head west for about ten minutes and turn north at the Honmachi crossing to enter the old main street, which runs roughly 600 to 700 metres toward the castle and now holds some eighty shops and eating places. Overhead cables along the street were put underground in 2009, so the roof lines read cleanly against the sky. The keep of Inuyama Castle, a National Treasure, closes the view at the north end. The Kyū-Isobe Family Residence, an Edo-period machiya that is open to the public, gives an idea of what the older generation of buildings on this street looked like, and the Donden-kan houses floats from the Inuyama Festival, a UNESCO-listed intangible heritage event held each April.

Come early. Honmachi-dōri fills up by mid-morning at weekends, and the corner is easier to look at when there is space to step back from it.