Kawarada Family Residence Main Building

A 1937 House on the Yagoto Hills

The Kawarada Family Residence Main Building (川原田家住宅主屋, Kawarada-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is a two-storey timber house of 1937 in Minamiyama-cho, Showa Ward, Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on 3 April 2020. It occupies a corner plot on the slope below Irinaka subway station, a few hundred meters to the southwest.

The building area is 144 square meters. The timber frame rises two storeys over a partial reinforced concrete basement, under an Irimoya-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles, with copper sheeting on the lower pentroof at ground floor level. Repairs were carried out in 1981 and again in 2018.

The neighbourhood itself came out of a wave of residential development that spread across the Yagoto hills between the Taisho years and the early Showa era. Nagoya City describes it as subdivision carried out under a woodland city concept, which kept the contours and the trees while cutting unusually generous plots. The Kawarada Family Residence Main Building sits on one of them.

Registering the Boundary, Not Just the House

Four separate items at the Kawarada property were registered on 3 April 2020: the main building under number 23-0542, the front gate with its fence under 23-0543, the rear gate with its fence, and the retaining wall under 23-0545. What went on the register was the outline of the plot as much as the house inside it.

Nagoya had acted first. On 5 September 2019 the city certified the Kawarada residence as its Certified Regional Building Asset No. 76, citing the generous plot division, the greenery, and an exterior that shows how the development of the period worked with the shape of the hillside. Municipal certification came first; national registration followed the next year.

The perimeter works date from 1938, a year after the house. The family spent that year finishing the edges of the site with gates, fences and a wall.

What to Look For

Tatami Rooms Facing the South Garden

The plan turns on the rooms that face the garden to the south. On both floors, two tatami rooms sit in a row behind a veranda. A south-facing slope was available, and the layout uses it twice over, once at each level.

Beside the entrance there is a Western reception room with chairs. Guests could be received on tatami in the formal Japanese manner or seated in the parlour a few steps from the door, and the house accommodates both. The Agency for Cultural Affairs reads this arrangement as characteristic of suburban housing in the early Showa period. Nagoya City adds a further observation: the terrace projecting from the veranda recalls the years when this hillside was villa country rather than a residential district.

The Oya Stone Wall Along the Street

A retaining wall 33 meters long wraps the western side of the plot and part of the southern side. Its structure is a reinforced concrete L-section, faced with Oya stone cut and laid to read as coursed ashlar. Oya stone is a tuff quarried around Oya in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, soft enough to work easily and prone to weathering into a mottled surface, which made it a favourite of modern Japanese domestic architecture. Coping stones run along the top, and above them a hedge of mixed species.

The front gate at the northwestern corner is a bracket gate facing north, with a gabled pantile roof and an opening 2.1 meters wide, a wicket set into the wing fence on its eastern side. The fence carries its own tiled roof on brackets, and its earthen wall is boarded vertically on the outer face and clad in cedar bark on the inner one. Different finishes for the side that faces the street and the side that faces the garden: that is the level of care this boundary received.

The house itself stays out of sight behind a black board fence and mature trees. The wall, the fence and the gates are another matter. They front the public road, and they can be examined as the elements that give this street its character.

Visiting and Access

The Kawarada Family Residence Main Building is a private home and is not open to the public. Nagoya City lists the owner as a private holding. The interior cannot be visited and the grounds cannot be entered.

What can be seen is the exterior boundary: the stone wall, the board fence, the front and rear gates. Photograph from the road if you photograph at all, keep the lens out of the gateway, and do not linger. This is a quiet residential street where people live.

Questions about openings go to the Historic Townscape Promotion Division of the Nagoya City Tourism, Culture and Exchange Bureau, which administers cultural properties and certified regional building assets and publishes its contact details online.

Irinaka Station on the Tsurumai subway line is the nearest, about 450 meters away, six or seven minutes on foot down a gentle slope. Yagoto Station, where the Tsurumai and Meijo lines meet, is about 1.4 kilometers off, roughly twenty minutes. The Western-style buildings of the Nanzan Gakuen campus stand nearby, and walking between them gives a reasonable sense of how this hillside district was laid out in the early Showa years.