Suzuki Family Residence Main House

A landlord's house of 1890 in the Nobi plain

The Suzuki Family Residence Main House (鈴木家住宅主屋, Suzuki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden house of 1890 at Suicho in Aisai City, Aichi Prefecture, entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties on 7 March 2008.

The site occupies the west side of a local street, and the Suzuki Family Residence Main House stands in its north-west corner, facing south. It measures roughly 16 metres along the ridge and 15 metres across, with a floor area of 241 square metres. The great hipped-and-gabled roof, an irimoya form, is covered in pantiles, and a lower skirt roof called a geya runs round all four sides. A hipped roof projects from the north face.

The buildings that survive here were put up by Suzuki Ryūsuke and his son Sentarō, according to the group that now looks after the property. Sentarō sat in the House of Representatives, chaired the Aichi prefectural assembly, and served as headman of Saya village between the Meiji era and the early Shōwa years. The family were landlords for generations; Ryūsuke acquired extensive reclaimed paddy, and that land was given up in the postwar land reform.

The house did not stop changing in 1890. It was remodelled in the late Taishō period and extended and altered again in the early Shōwa years.

Why it was registered: a model of design

Japan's register of tangible cultural properties works through three criteria. The Suzuki Family Residence Main House qualifies under the first of them, "a model of design" (zōkei no kihan to natte iru mono). What was recognised was the quality of the building's making rather than its contribution to a historic landscape.

Three other structures on the same plot, a storehouse, a rice storehouse, and a gate with its outer wall, were registered on the same day under a different criterion, the one concerning contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Of the four, only the main house was chosen for the way it was designed.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs points to the interior. There is a principal room with formal alcove fittings, a large hall, a Buddhist altar room finished in the manner of a temple chapel, and a tea room in the sukiya manner. Four rooms, four different sets of conventions, under one roof. For a rural landlord's house this is unusually elaborate.

What to look at

Seen from outside, the building resolves into two horizontal bands: the wide hipped-and-gabled roof above, and the skirt roof that circles the walls below. Skirt roofs are common in the wet Nōbi plain, but carried around a frontage of 16 metres the eaves line stretches far enough to make the house read as long and low. The hipped roof pushing out on the north side breaks that line.

Inside, the Buddhist altar room is the room to stop in. The official description calls it temple-like in construction. The family's own account records long ties with the Ōtani branch of the Shin sect of Pure Land Buddhism, and the two facts sit together comfortably, though contemporary documentation linking them has not been traced here.

The tea room is sukiya work: slender posts, earthen walls, deliberately informal. It is the opposite in temperament to the formal principal room a few steps away, and the contrast is the point.

Visiting

The Suzuki Family Residence Main House is private property and is not open on a regular basis. There are no set opening hours and no admission fee, and visitors should not enter or peer into the grounds uninvited. Access is possible only on the occasional open days arranged by the unincorporated association that manages the house, and at the concerts and lectures it hosts. Dates are announced on the association's own website.

Photography rules are set event by event by the organisers, so it is worth asking in advance.

The nearest station is Saya on the Meitetsu Bisai Line, about a fifteen-minute walk away. Many services run through from Meitetsu Nagoya via the Tsushima Line, putting Saya about thirty minutes from the city centre without a change. There is no parking on site, and the surrounding lanes are narrow, so drivers should use a coin park nearby rather than stopping on the street.