Okumura Family Residence Main House

A merchant house rebuilt after the fire of 1842

Okumura Family Residence Main House (奥村家住宅主屋, Okumurake Jūtaku Shuoku) is a late-Edo merchant house at 395 Higashikoken in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 23 August 1999. It faces north onto the old road that ran east from the castle town of Inuyama toward the Nakasendō highway. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the fabric to between 1830 and 1867 and records that the house is said to have been rebuilt not long after the great Inuyama fire of Tenpō 13 (1842).

The Okumura family dealt in kimono cloth. Their frontage measures seven ken and the depth six and a half, a ken being roughly 1.8 metres, which in a castle town was the plot of a household with serious commercial standing. An earth-floored service passage, the tōriniwa, runs the full depth of the east side. West of it sit two rows of six rooms, the arrangement a fabric dealer needed for receiving customers at the front and keeping the family's life further back.

Above those rooms is a tsushi nikai, a low upper storey used for storage rather than living. Its ceiling height tells you at a glance that nobody was meant to stand upright there.

The whole exterior is finished in nuriya-zukuri, a technique in which the timber frame is coated in plaster so that no bare wood is exposed to a passing ember. After 1842, that was not a matter of taste in Inuyama.

Why the Main House carries a registration number

Okumura Family Residence Main House was registered under number 23-0024 on the criterion covering buildings that would be difficult to reproduce. Registration is a lighter instrument than designation as an Important Cultural Property: it was introduced in 1996 for buildings that remain in ordinary use, and it accepts alteration as part of a working building's record. The Okumura house needed that flexibility. A large-scale repair in Meiji 32 (1899) reworked parts of the structure, and the result is a building in which the late-Edo townhouse plan and the Meiji revision are both legible.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs files the house under tertiary industry rather than under housing, which is a small but telling classification. The register is treating it first as a place of business. Its value in the official assessment lies in preserving the form of a wealthy Inuyama merchant's establishment, and the phrase carries weight because so little of the pre-1842 castle town survived the fire that made this rebuilding necessary.

Eight further structures on the same plot were registered on the same day, among them the safe storehouse, the gate, the rice storehouse and the detached wing. The Main House is the one that fronts the street, and the others sit behind it in sequence.

What to look at from the road

Stand on the north side of the street and the first thing to read is the roof. The Main House is hirairi, entered on the long eaves side rather than the gable end, and the ridge runs parallel to the road. That single decision governs the whole elevation, because it gives the building a wide, low face instead of a tall triangular one.

The second storey front is finished in black plaster. The Agency's record for the adjoining safe storehouse describes that building as plastered in the same black lime work as the front of the Main House upper floor, which is a useful confirmation that the dark upper band you see today belongs to the historic scheme rather than to a later repaint.

Look west along the frontage and the safe storehouse comes next, its ridge deliberately aligned with the Main House. Its eaves sit higher. The Okumura family built the storehouse so that the view from the western approach would resolve into a single composed frontage rather than two unrelated buildings, and standing at that angle is the way to see the intention.

Building area is 208 square metres across two timber storeys under a tiled roof, and 208 square metres of enclosed floor is a large footprint for a townhouse on a street of shopfronts.

Visiting Okumura Family Residence Main House

The house is in private ownership and is not a museum. It now operates as a licensed restaurant under the name French Okumuratei, and the interior can be seen by people who have made a booking. There is no admission ticket and no separate tour of the building.

The exterior can be looked at freely from the public road at any hour, and the street elevation is the part of Okumura Family Residence Main House that most repays a visit in any case. The operator publishes opening hours of 11:00 to 21:00 with a Tuesday closure, which becomes a trading day when Tuesday falls on a public holiday. Bookings are preferred at midday and required in the evening, and the operator asks visitors to telephone in advance because the building may be closed when no reservations are held. These details were checked on 30 August 2026 and are worth confirming again before travelling.

From Meitetsu Inuyama Station the walk is about five minutes. Leave by the west exit, follow the old road west, and the building stands on the south side near the Yosaka junction, where the operator's car park is located. The street in front is one-way.

Photography of the exterior from the public road is unrestricted. Inside, the building is occupied by a business and by other guests, so photography is a matter for the staff on the day rather than something governed by a published rule.