Suzuki Family Residence Main House

A prewar suburban house above the Yamazaki River

The Suzuki Family Residence Main House (鈴木家住宅主屋, Suzuki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a wooden house of the early Shōwa period at Gokenyachō in Showa Ward, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties on 17 November 2015.

Its site lies on the east bank of the Yamazaki River, on the slope of the Yagoto hills. Land readjustment reached this district in the Taishō era, laying out streets around six metres wide and converting farmland into building plots. The area is a product of prewar Nagoya spreading outward, and the Suzuki Family Residence Main House was one of the houses put up in that new suburb.

The building is timber-framed, single-storey with a two-storey portion, roofed in tiles, with a floor area of 255 square metres. A single-storey reception wing joins a two-storey wing containing the Western rooms, and an entrance wing projects at right angles. At the entrance to the grounds stands a gate roofed in cypress bark. The house was remodelled around 1953.

One caution for anyone searching. A different registered property in the same prefecture, at Suicho in Aisai City, carries exactly the same Japanese name; that one is a house of 1890 and is unrelated to this one.

The central corridor, a modern idea in 1930s Japan

The plan of the Suzuki Family Residence Main House turns on a long corridor running east to west through the middle of the building. Aichi Prefecture's registration papers describe three rooms along its south side, a living room, a reception room with a broad veranda, and an inner reception room, with a dressing room and bedroom, washroom and bath to the north, and a utility room and a combined kitchen and dining room continuing east.

The central corridor plan spread quickly through Japanese houses between the Taishō era and the early Shōwa years. Before it, rooms opened directly into one another through sliding screens, so reaching an inner room meant walking through the one in front of it. Run a corridor down the spine of a house and every room gains its own door. A single line in plan carries a whole modern attitude: private space for each member of the family, and separate paths for guests and household.

Placing the formal and reception rooms to the south and the dressing room, bedroom and wet rooms to the north follows sunlight and function without fuss. The corridor does the work of a boundary between the two.

A gas fire downstairs, a tatami room above

The two-storey wing attached to the reception range repays attention. Its ground floor is a Western room, where a gas heater set on stone paving was arranged to read as a fireplace. Gas rather than logs dates the house as precisely as any document could.

The ceiling of that room was raised to stress the vertical, in the manner of a European interior. Yet traces of a handrail survive at the windows, and paper screens were fitted on the inside. The shell is Western, the fittings Japanese, and the prefectural description treats the result as a Japanese design decision rather than a compromise.

Above it is an independent tatami room built by the technique called kagura-tsukuri. When a second storey is added to a single-storey house, kagura-tsukuri dispenses with posts running the full height of the building and frames the upper floor on its own shorter posts instead. The history of an addition is written into the structure itself.

The entrance wing, and the annexe north of the reception range containing a tea room and a children's room, were added between 1952 and 1953. The owner at that time was Ōsumi Kōichi, president of the Ōsumi Iron Works, and the prefectural record attributes the additions to him. A house built before the war reached its present form under a postwar owner.

Why it was registered, and why you cannot go in

The Suzuki Family Residence Main House was registered under the criterion concerning contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Aichi Prefecture's statement of reasons calls it a refined example of modern Japanese-style architecture with Western rooms attached, and a house of quality that shows the character of a prewar suburban district in Nagoya.

On visiting, the position needs stating plainly. This is a privately owned house in ordinary occupation. There is no public opening, no admission hours, no fee, and no arrangement for viewing the interior. Nagoya's own list of registered properties gives the owner simply as a private individual and publishes the location only to the level of the neighbourhood name. Visitors should not enter the grounds or attempt to photograph through the gate.

Anyone who wants a sense of the district can walk the riverside path along the Yamazaki instead. The nearest station is Kawana on the Tsurumai subway line, about ten minutes on foot from Gokenyachō, with Irinaka a similar distance away. The point bears repeating: this is somebody's home, not an attraction.