Miyake Family Residence Garden Gate and Fence

A Gate and a Wall on the Road to Seto

Walk the old Seto Kaidō where it threads through Owariasahi, a city on the northeastern edge of Nagoya, and you pass a gabled wooden gate set back behind a long tiled wall. This is the front of the Miyake family's house. The gate is an udemon, a bracket gate carried on timber arms projecting from its posts, roofed in pantiles and barely 1.4 meters across. From its southern side a wall runs about 30 meters west along the road, then turns north to close off the western edge of the grounds.

Gate and wall both belong to the early Meiji period, somewhere between 1868 and 1882. In February 2022 they were entered into Japan's national register of cultural properties, together with the main house and storehouse standing behind them.

Registered, not designated

Japan looks after its built heritage through two separate systems, and the distinction matters here. The older one reaches back to the nineteenth century and singles out the most exceptional buildings and objects as Important Cultural Properties or, at the highest rank, National Treasures. Alteration of these is tightly controlled.

The Miyake gate belongs to the second system, which began only in 1996. The Registered Tangible Cultural Property scheme was created for a far larger body of buildings, mostly from the Meiji period onward, that give ordinary streets their character. The rules are deliberately light: owners keep living and working in their buildings, and their chief duty is to give notice before making major changes. The gate and wall were registered under the criterion that they help preserve the historic landscape of the country. In practice that means the streetscape itself, the way a row of old frontages still reads as a nineteenth-century road, is what the listing protects.

The house of a country merchant

The Miyake were landowners from the mid-Edo period, holding fields around the former village of Nii in Kasugai district. Money from the land was put to work in trade. By the late Edo period the family ran a konya, a dyer's workshop that coloured cotton thread with indigo, and in the early Meiji years they added sake brewing. Their house, raised in early Meiji, was built to serve both businesses at once.

Country merchants of this kind, neither townsfolk nor farmers, are called zaigō shōka. Their houses tend to borrow the dignified look of an urban shop while keeping the deep working spaces of a farmhouse, and the Miyake residence does exactly that. The gate and wall are the public face of that arrangement, the part a traveller on the highway would have seen first.

What to look for

Stand in front of the gate and notice that it faces east, squarely onto the road, screening a small front garden laid out before the reception rooms of the main house. The roof is kirizuma, a simple gable, finished in sangawara pantiles. The opening is closed by double-leaf board doors, and a short wing wall, a sodebei, steadies the structure on either side.

The wall reads differently. It is built in shinkabe fashion, with the timber posts left visible rather than buried in plaster, and the lower section is faced with boards. Follow it west and then around its northward turn and you trace the original boundary of the property. None of it is grand. The pleasure is in the proportions, the unbroken sweep of grey tile, and the way the whole frontage still belongs to its road.

Behind the gate stand the other registered buildings. The main house presents an irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof and a row of low second-floor windows in the style called tsushi-nikai, its walls plastered white over an exposed frame. Inside, the earthen-floored work hall still holds the dyeing vats, the aigame, sunk into the ground where indigo was once prepared. Beside it is a two-storey plastered storehouse, long used to keep tools.

Around the site

The residence is a private home and remains closed to visitors. The gate and wall, however, front directly onto the public road, so the exterior can be appreciated from the street at any time; please view it from the pavement and respect the privacy of the people who live there. On occasion the house joins Aitate Haku, a special-opening event run by the Aichi association for registered cultural properties, when buildings normally shut to the public can be seen from closer to.

Owariasahi sits on the Meitetsu Seto Line, which links central Nagoya with the pottery town of Seto further east, the place that gave the old highway its name. A short walk from Owariasahi Station, the Skyward Asahi tower in Shiroyama Park offers a free observation room and, on its lower floors, a local history gallery. Among its exhibits are five Buddhist figures carved by the wandering Edo-period monk Enkū and displays on the district's folk performing arts. Seto itself, a half-hour or so down the line, rewards anyone curious about Japanese ceramics.