Kojima Family Residence Roof Fence

The Roofed Wall of the Kojima Residence

Step one lane back from the main street of Inuyama's old castle town and a long, low wall keeps pace beside you for the better part of a block. The upper half is finished in white plaster, the lower half clad in dark weatherboarding, and the whole run is capped by a tiled roof of its own. Set into it, easy to walk past, is a small gabled gate that once swung open only for guests of rank. This is the roofed wall of the Kojima Residence, the street face of a sake-brewing family whose trade in Inuyama goes back more than four hundred years.

The wall runs roughly 56 metres and turns a right angle to enclose the eastern and southern sides of the property. Its woodwork dates to the middle Meiji period, somewhere between 1868 and 1911, which makes it younger than the residence it guards: the reception hall behind it was built in 1847, and the main house around 1897. A wall of this length and finish was not cheap to put up, and it was never meant to be merely a barrier. It was the formal frontage of a prosperous house, the first thing a visitor read about the family before a single door opened.

How It Is Built

Look closely at the construction and the logic of the wall becomes clear. The upper portion is nurikome, the timber frame sealed under a coat of plaster that gave a measure of protection against fire. Below the plaster line runs shitami-ita, overlapping wooden boards that shed rain away from the base. Short projecting brackets, called udegi, reach out from the wall to carry a purlin, and on that timber sits the run of pantiles that gives the structure its name. It is a wall, but it is roofed and framed like a building, and the registry files treat it as one.

The set piece is the gate placed diagonally in front of the shikidai, the formal stepped entrance to the reception room. This is an onarimon, an honored gate, built in the munemon style with two principal posts carrying a small ridged roof of pantile. An onarimon was not for daily comings and goings. It was opened for a guest of standing, and its presence here signals just how high the family once sat in the social order of the castle town. Two smaller wicket gates, the kuguri-do, pierce the wall to the north of the main house and the anteroom, and these handled the everyday traffic of a working brewery.

Registered, Not Designated

The wall carries the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property, entered in the national register on 9 February 2005 under registration number 23-0179. The distinction matters. Japan protects its most exceptional buildings by designation, the tier that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Registration is a lighter, broader instrument introduced in 1996, aimed at the large stock of historic buildings that shape the character of a place without each one being individually irreplaceable. The criterion cited for this wall is that it contributes to the historic landscape of the country, and anyone who walks the lane can see the point.

The roofed wall is one of seven Kojima structures registered together on the same day, alongside the main house, the reception hall, three storehouses and breweries, and the anteroom. Read as a set, they preserve the full working layout of an Edo and Meiji sake house. The wall is what holds that layout together at the street, which is why the register calls it indispensable to the formal face of the estate.

The Brewery Behind the Wall

The family is Kojima Brewing, founded in 1597 and still in business under the fifteenth generation of the line. Its signature product is niindoshu, a medicinal sake brewed from rice and the honeysuckle plant. The family's own account traces the recipe to the Korean campaigns of the late sixteenth century, when an early head of the house is said to have been taught the method by a Korean captive he had helped; by tradition the drink was later offered up the chain from the Naruse lords of Inuyama Castle to the shogun, and Tokugawa Ieyasu is said to have valued it. These are family traditions rather than documented fact, and they are best read as such, but they explain a good deal about the residence, including its honored gate.

The connection reaches the wall itself. By local tradition the long screen was once finished in a red bengara iron-oxide pigment chosen to evoke the look of Korean palace architecture, a quiet echo of the sake's claimed origins. The red surface seen by visitors today is a restoration of that older scheme.

What to Look For

Give yourself a few minutes to walk the full length rather than glancing and moving on. The pleasure of the wall is in its rhythm: the long plastered band above, the dark boarding below, the line of pantiles unbroken across the top, then the sudden formality of the onarimon breaking the run. Stand back from the honored gate and notice how its small roof and squared posts announce a different register from the plain wicket gates nearby.

The everyday detail rewards attention too. Each of the small openings along the wall has its own modest waiting recess set toward the street, a practical touch for a house that once received deliveries, brewery workers, and callers of very different standing through the same long frontage. Today those same openings serve as the separate entrances for the inn, the restaurant, and the staff of the property's current life, so the wall still sorts its visitors much as it always did.

Around the Wall

The Kojima Residence sits in the lanes just behind Inuyama's main street, an easy walk from the castle that gives the town its name. Inuyama Castle keeps the oldest surviving keep in Japan and is one of only five castle towers ranked as National Treasures; its top floor opens onto a wraparound balcony with a long view over the Kiso River and the Nobi Plain. The Naruse family who once received the Kojima family's sake held this castle through the Edo period.

A short walk away at the Urakuen garden stands Jo-an, a tea house built by Oda Uraku and also ranked a National Treasure, counted among the three most celebrated tea rooms in the country. Time your visit for the first weekend of April and you can watch the Inuyama Festival, when thirteen tall, three-tiered floats carrying mechanical karakuri puppets are hauled through the streets; the festival is inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. The main street between these sights has become one of the region's better-known places to eat as you walk.

Reaching Inuyama is simple. A Meitetsu train from Nagoya runs to Inuyama Station in around 25 to 30 minutes, and the castle town and the Kojima Residence are a walk of 10 to 15 minutes from there.