Takagi Family Residence Main House

A 1913 townhouse facing Inuyama's Honmachi Street

The Takagi Family Residence Main House (髙木家住宅主屋, Takagi-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a merchant townhouse of 1913 that faces west onto Honmachi Street in Inuyama City, Aichi Prefecture, and it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on 23 July 2004. The building is a two-story timber structure with a Kirizuma-zukuri roof of Sangawara-buki tiles, covering 190 square meters.

Its frontage is six ken and its depth eight ken. The ken is a traditional Japanese module of roughly 1.8 meters, so the house measures about 11 meters across the street front and about 14.5 meters back into the block. The entrance side is Hirairi, meaning the door sits under the long slope of the roof rather than under the gable, and a half-ken canopy projects over the ground floor with a lattice screen set beneath it.

The upper story reads quite differently. Its posts are buried in plaster, and the only openings are small windows fitted with iron grilles. The purlins are carried forward past the line of the posts to deepen the eaves, a local carpentry method known as dashigeta-zukuri. The higher a visitor looks, the more closed the building becomes.

Inside, the plan follows the standard of an Machiya in a castle town. A Toriniwa, the earth-floored service passage, runs the full depth of the house along its southern edge, and a small enclosed courtyard sits behind a lower wing on the north side. Narrow at the street, long toward the rear: the lot shape of Inuyama's merchant quarter dictated everything.

The Takagi family brewed and sold sake here, trading under the shop name Watazen. According to Inuyama City's plan for maintaining the historic scenery of the town, a Munafuda ridge tablet dates the Takagi Family Residence Main House to 1913 and attributes it to Ichihashi Seijirō, a master carpenter descended from the carpenters who had served the Inuyama domain.

Why this house carries a national listing

The criterion applied to the Takagi Family Residence Main House was that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. The question was not how exceptional a single house might be on its own, but what it does for the street it stands on.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs files the house under a category it labels tertiary industry (産業3次) rather than under housing. The classification preserves something true about the place: this was a shop as much as a home, a building where sake was made and sold.

By Japanese standards 1913 is recent for a townhouse of this form, and the reason it looks older lies in what happened two decades earlier. The Nobi earthquake of 1891 brought down a great many buildings in the Inuyama castle town, though no major fire followed, so damaged houses were repaired or rebuilt to the same pattern and kept in use. Inuyama City's planning document records that two carpenter lineages, the Ichihashi and the Hirose, who had served as official carpenters for Inuyama Castle, are considered to have been closely involved in that rebuilding. Ichihashi Seijirō belonged to that line.

What to look at from the street

Start by looking up. The plastered wall of the second floor rises almost blank above the street, punctuated only by small iron-grilled windows. Fire protection shaped the design, and the design in turn gives the house its guarded face.

Then step under the canopy. The ground-floor lattice is made of slender vertical members set close together, so that people outside see very little and people inside see the street clearly. It is a one-way filter, and it is worth standing at for a moment.

Follow the eaves line as well. Because the purlins are cantilevered forward, the eaves of neighboring houses meet in a single continuous edge running along Honmachi Street. From the front of the Takagi Family Residence Main House that line can be traced north toward Inuyama Castle.

What cannot be seen matters too. The service passage and the courtyard lie inside. A Chashitsu tea house and a storehouse, both listed on the same day in 2004, stand in the rear garden behind the main house, and from the street only parts of their roofs appear above the walls.

Visiting the Takagi Family Residence Main House

The house is privately owned and lived in. There is no interior access, no opening hours and no admission fee. What visitors can see is the street elevation from Honmachi Street.

Photography of the exterior from the public road is not restricted. Since a family lives here, avoid pointing a lens through the lattice into the interior and do not step onto the property.

Meitetsu Inuyama Station is the arrival point. The walk north along Honmachi Street takes about 10 minutes. Rapid limited express and limited express trains reach Inuyama from Meitetsu Nagoya Station in about 25 minutes.

At number 72 on the same street, Inuyama City keeps the former Isobe Family Residence open to the public without charge. Walking through that interior first and then returning to the front of the Takagi Family Residence Main House makes the proportions legible: six ken of frontage, and a great deal of house behind it.