Kojima Family Residence Main House

A brewer's house that faces the street

Kojima Family Residence Main House (小島家住宅主屋, Kojima-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a merchant town house of about 1897 in the castle town of Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, added to Japan's register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2005.

The building is timber-framed, two stories high, tiled, with a floor area of 150 square meters. Its roof is a Kirizuma-zukuri gable finished in Sangawara-buki pantiles, and the entrance runs along the eaves side in the Hirairi manner. The upper floor is a low Tsushi-nikai half-story. On the ground floor a wide earth-floored Toriniwa passage runs from the street toward the back of the plot, with six rooms arranged in two rows along its south side.

The Kojima family has brewed sake in Inuyama since 1597 by its own reckoning, and its speciality is nindōshu, a medicinal liquor flavoured with honeysuckle. Kojima Family Residence Main House is the commercial face of that business. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the property as a brewer's house standing on a plot of roughly 1,000 tsubo, the tsubo being a traditional unit of about 3.3 square meters.

A 2019 paper read to the Society of Architectural Historians of Japan put the plot at 57 meters of street frontage and some 50 meters of depth, and reported that these boundaries changed little through the Edo period. Few houses in the castle town command that much ground, and the main house occupies its eastern edge, hard against the street.

Registered for what it does to the streetscape

The criterion under which Kojima Family Residence Main House was registered is contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The test is not the age or rank of a single building but the part it plays in the street around it. The registration number is 23-0173.

Registration took effect on 9 February 2005. Seven Kojima buildings entered the register together that day: the main house, the guest wing, the south storehouse, the north sake brewery and north storehouse, the west sake brewery and preparation room, the reception room and the roofed wall. The list published by Inuyama City records 19 registrations in the Higashikoken district on the same date, among them the Mano, former Isobe, Endo and Ito residences. Whole streets, rather than isolated houses, were what the register set out to protect here.

Width is what distinguishes this house. Town houses in castle towns usually present a narrow face to the street and run deep into a long plot; this one stretches along the street instead, its lattice front and heavy tiled roof setting the scale that neighbouring buildings answer to.

What to look at on the spot

The lattice comes first. Slender vertical members stand close together across both floors, so the front reads as a single woven surface. By day almost nothing of the interior is visible from outside, while from within the street is perfectly legible. That asymmetry is the point of a town-house lattice.

Look up and the second floor turns out to be unusually low. A Tsushi-nikai was never meant for standing room; it held goods, or servants asleep. Built in the Meiji era, this house kept a form inherited from Edo-period practice, and the low band of upper lattice is where that inheritance shows.

Through the doorway the earth floor runs back into shadow. In a brewing household the Toriniwa was a working corridor: rice, tools and casks all came and went along it. Here it is broad, and the six living rooms sit to one side of it rather than around it.

The roofed wall enclosing the plot carries a coat of bengara, the red iron-oxide pigment. The family tradition holds that the colour imitates a Korean palace, a story repeated in the 2019 conference paper, though no document has been produced to support it. It travels alongside the household's account of how the nindōshu recipe reached Inuyama from the Korean peninsula, and is best heard as tradition rather than record.

To the southwest the guest wing joins the main house directly, so that the building where business was done and the building where guests were received stand connected but distinct.

Visiting

Kojima Family Residence Main House is privately owned and the interior is not open to visitors. The exterior can be seen from the street at any hour, which is enough for the lattice front and the roofline.

Kojima Jozo still sells nindōshu on the premises. Inuyama Tourist Association gives the shop's hours as 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with a break from noon to 1:00 p.m., closed on Sundays and on Wednesday mornings; the telephone number is 0568-61-0165 and parking is available for 10 cars. Entering the shop to buy a bottle is possible, but the living quarters are not part of that.

Since 2025 part of the compound has been in use as lodging. The operator's website presents the Kojima property as the Neriya wing, with guest rooms and a Japanese restaurant, so guests and diners do spend time inside the buildings.

Getting there is straightforward: about 10 minutes on foot from the west exit of Meitetsu Inuyama Station, which is roughly 30 minutes from Meitetsu Nagoya Station. The house sits on a natural walking route between the station and Inuyama Castle.

Photography from the street is unproblematic. Inside the gate the ground is private, and doubles as the working space of a shop and an inn, so entering or photographing there needs the owner's or the operator's agreement.