Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House

A 1925 Suburban House on the Chita Hills

The Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House (久野家住宅（愛山居）主屋, Kuno-ke Jūtaku Aizankyo Omoya) is a suburban dwelling built in 1925 in the Kagiyamachi district of Tokai City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 6 March 2024. The house sits on high ground above the eastern shore of Ise Bay, near the base of the Chita Peninsula.

It is a two-storey timber building with a single-storey wing, roofed in natural slate over a Kirizuma-zukuri frame. The floor area comes to 176 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs carries it under registration number 23-0599.

The designer was Nishimura Isaku (1884-1963), born in Shingu in Wakayama Prefecture, who in 1921 founded the Bunka Gakuin school in the Surugadai district of Tokyo. He worked as an artist and designed a large number of buildings without ever practising architecture as a profession. The Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House is one of those commissions.

The house replaced an older dwelling on the same land. Soon after completion part of it was altered and a lookout room with a long view was added on the upper floor. That room can be traced to 1930, and in the same year a member of the imperial family travelling through the Chita Peninsula stayed in the house and used it. The national database records an extension around 1930 and repair work in 1972.

Why the Building Was Registered

Japan's registration system for cultural properties uses stated criteria, and the Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House was accepted under the first of them: that a building offers a model of design. The gateposts and the garden gate on the same grounds came in under a different clause covering work that would be difficult to reproduce.

Nishimura designed many houses and churches across the Kanto and Kansai regions during his lifetime. Earthquakes and later demolition removed most of them. Tokai City describes this house as one of the few examples left anywhere in the country, which is the practical reason a private home in a quiet suburb attracted national attention.

The plan reflects a Taisho-era idea of domestic life. On both floors the sunlit south side holds the family rooms together with the reception room and study. Japanese-style rooms with tatami and Western-style rooms with chairs are used according to purpose, with the ground floor mainly Japanese and the upper floor mainly Western. This mixing was the defining feature of what Japanese writers of the 1920s called the culture house.

The main house, the gateposts and the garden gate were all registered on the same date in March 2024, so the property is protected as a single household seen through three structures.

Arches, Slate and Two Kinds of Wall

Arches carry the exterior of the Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House. They run across the south-facing windows and between the veranda posts on both floors, and they are the first thing a visitor notices from the garden.

The roof turns its gable to the south, and a semicircular dormer window sits in that gable. The curve of the arches below is answered high up in the roofline.

The two floors are finished in different materials. The ground floor uses what Japanese builders call a German wall, a cement mortar render mixed with fine gravel that leaves a coarse, granular surface. The upper floor is clad in horizontal weatherboarding. Rough below, smooth above: the wall itself divides the elevation.

Verandas were provided on both storeys. Giving every floor its own open, south-facing space was an unusual move for a Japanese suburban house in the 1920s, and it explains much of the building's light interior.

Two smaller structures share the grounds. Stone-faced gateposts stand at the eastern entrance from the street, and a garden gate of moulded concrete stands to the south-east of the house. Both were registered on the same day, and the gateposts face the public road, so their design can be seen from outside.

Visiting

The Kuno Family Residence (Aizankyo) Main House is privately owned by a company and is not a visitor facility. The grounds are normally closed, and there are no regular opening hours or admission charge.

The building has taken part in Aitatehaku, an annual programme in which owners of registered cultural properties across Aichi Prefecture open their buildings for a limited period, sometimes with a guided tour by the owner. Participation changes from year to year. Anyone planning a trip around it should check the organiser's website or contact the Social Education Division of the Tokai City Board of Education beforehand.

Photography inside the grounds, when an opening is held, follows the instructions of the owner and the organiser. From the street the eastern gateposts are visible at any time. This is a lived-in house in a residential neighbourhood, so lingering on the road outside is not welcome.

The nearest station is Minami-Kagiya on the Meitetsu Kowa Line, roughly 500 metres to the north of the house and about a ten-minute walk. From Meitetsu Nagoya Station the trip takes around 30 minutes, changing at Otagawa for the Kowa Line.