Miyata Family Residence Wall

A Tiled Wooden Wall in Inuyama's Old Castle Town

A low wall of timber and clay tile runs for roughly 48 meters around a residential plot on Higashi-koken, a street in the former castle town of Inuyama in northern Aichi. The property belongs to the Miyata family, whose forebears served the lords of the Inuyama domain as financial officers during the Edo period. The walls that survive today were raised in 1931, when the physician Miyata Jokichi rebuilt much of the household. They were entered onto Japan's national register of cultural properties in 2006.

It may seem unusual that a boundary wall, rather than a temple hall or a castle keep, carries a national heritage listing. The Miyata wall earns its place precisely because of where it stands. Inuyama's grid of streets has changed little since the seventeenth century, and the wall is one of the elements that keeps the old samurai quarter looking as it once did from the street.

Registered, Not Designated: Two Tiers of Heritage

Japan protects historic buildings through two separate systems, and the distinction matters here. The older one is designation, which produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. It applies to a relatively small number of buildings of the very highest value and brings strict legal controls. Inuyama Castle, a short walk away, sits at the top of that system.

The Miyata wall belongs to the second system, registration, introduced in 1996 under a revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. Registration was created to cover a far wider range of buildings, particularly those from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that give towns their character. It is a lighter framework that encourages owners to keep using and maintaining their properties. One of its criteria recognizes structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country, and the Miyata wall was listed under exactly that heading.

How the Wall Is Built

The enclosure is not a single uniform barrier. Lower walls stand at the main gate near the center of the western edge and to the north and south of the former storehouse, while taller walls rise at the northwest corner and along the northern boundary. The lower walls are built in the shinkabe manner, with the wooden posts left visible on the wall face rather than buried under plaster. They sit on the cobblestone bank of a small water channel that once ran beside the plot, and their lower halves are clad in horizontal boards held by notched battens, a weatherboarding technique known as sasarago shitami. A narrow tiled roof caps the run.

The high walls are built differently, on a foundation of cut and fitted stone, with a small pantile roof of their own. Walk the lane and the change in base, from rounded river stones to squared masonry, is easy to read once you know to look for it.

The wall was never meant to stand alone. It is one piece of a coordinated household that the tea-minded Jokichi assembled in the 1930s and 40s. The two-story earthen storehouse went up in the same year as the walls. The main house, called Taiiken, is a refined sukiya-style residence shaped by a master of the Omotesenke tea tradition and built by a Kyoto specialist carpenter, finished in 1944. A modest well shelter from the Meiji era completes the group. Seen together, the registered structures explain why even the wall was judged worth protecting.

Seeing It, and What Lies Around It

The Miyata residence is a private home and is not open to visitors, but the wall does its work from the outside. It is meant to be seen from the street, and walking past it is the way to appreciate it. The plot lies within easy reach of Inuyama's main sightseeing route, so it fits naturally into a day spent on foot in the castle town.

The obvious anchor is Inuyama Castle, whose keep is one of the oldest surviving in Japan and one of only five castle keeps designated National Treasures. From the castle, Honmachi-dori leads south through the old town, lined with merchant houses now occupied by cafes and craft shops. For a building you can actually enter, the former Isobe Residence, a registered Edo-period merchant house, is open to the public free of charge and shows the deep, narrow plan typical of these townhouses. The Donden-kan museum displays the towering festival floats of the Inuyama Festival, a spring event inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. A little apart, the garden of Urakuen holds Jo-an, a National Treasure teahouse, which sits well with the Miyata family's own devotion to tea.