Yamada Family Residence Main House

A townhouse on the corner where two highways meet

The Yamada Family Residence Main House (山田家住宅主屋) is a mid-Meiji Machiya townhouse at 776 Higashikoken in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 23 July 2004. It occupies the north-west corner of the T-junction where Honmachi-dōri meets Shinmachi-dōri, and faces south.

The building is two storeys of timber under tile, with a floor area of 120 square metres, a frontage of five ken and a depth of six. It is Hirairi, entered from the long side, under a Kirizuma-zukuri gable roof of Sangawara-buki pantiles, with a Geya lean-to running along the south, west and north faces. Inside, the southern two and a half ken of depth are earth-floored Doma; four rooms sit behind them in the grid arrangement Japanese carpenters call the character for "rice field", and the eastern half-ken serves as a passage. As a castle-town house, the skeleton is conventional.

The date is less settled. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns it to the middle of the Meiji era without a year. The Aichi prefectural heritage database goes further, recording a tradition that it was built after the Nōbi earthquake of 1891 as the home of a chest maker named Kajikawa Hikotarō. The prefecture presents this as something handed down rather than documented.

The Yamada family took the house over in 1955, lived in it, and ran a grocery from it. The building carries the name of the family who arrived in the Shōwa era, not of the one who built it.

The corner itself is the reason for registration

The grounds given for registration are that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. It became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 23 July 2004, under number 23-0147 from the forty-third round. The value recognised here lies less in the design of a single house than in where that house stands.

What makes the corner worth protecting is that the Edo-period street pattern survives at full scale. Honmachi-dōri carried the Nagoya highway and Shinmachi-dōri the Zenjino highway, and in the Inuyama castle town the north-south spine and the eastward route meet at this junction. According to the prefectural database, a late Edo castle map shows the plot roughly one ken west of this house as the kōsatsuba, the board where the shogunate and the domain posted their edicts. The present building was put up without disturbing that arrangement.

A notice board was the town's bulletin board, sited at a crossing because that is where people passed. The merchant house beside it was rebuilt after an earthquake and the plot lines were left alone. The result is that a Meiji building now fixes an Edo road pattern in place, and you can check it on foot.

Five other Inuyama properties were registered on the same day in 2004: three buildings of the Takagi family residence, three of the Umeda family residence, three of the Mitsui family residence, two of the Inoue family residence, and the Takino family storehouse. The Yamada Family Residence Main House belongs to that sweep, made when the aim was to keep a streetscape rather than isolated monuments.

Reading the front elevation

Nearly everything worth seeing is on the walls.

The upper storey uses dashigeta construction, the purlins pushed forward to carry a deeper eave, a form common on townhouses that face a street. The outer half-ken at each end of that upper front is finished in black plaster, with Nageshi tie-rails set above and below the lintel line and more black plaster carried up above them. Black rather than white Shikkui is what fixes the character of this facade.

The upper windows do not match. Two ken on the east side keep their projecting lattice; the one and a half ken to the west have lost their lattice, though the prefectural record notes it was once a flat grille. That is why the two halves of the same floor read differently.

Turn the corner to the gable wall and you find Shitami-itabari weatherboarding held by thin vertical battens and finished with persimmon tannin and ink. The blackened boards answer the black plaster on the front.

At the south-west corner of the ground floor there is a shop window. It is a later alteration, as are the fittings around it, and the prefectural description observes that a restoration would return a lattice-door frontage there. That the alteration was not stripped out before registration says something about the system: the Yamada Family Residence Main House entered the register as it stands, a Meiji frame with a century of trade laid over it.

Visiting the Yamada Family Residence Main House

This is a private building with no visitor programme. There is no way to see the interior, no opening hours and no admission fee, and the owner field in the Agency for Cultural Affairs record is blank.

The exterior is what you come for. Because the house holds a corner, two elevations are exposed to public streets, and there are positions from which the projecting upper front and the boarded gable wall can be taken in together. For a corner building the sightlines are unusually good.

Come from the west exit of Meitetsu Inuyama Station. The Inuyama tourism association gives about ten minutes on foot from that exit to the castle town; walking north along Honmachi-dōri brings you to the junction. The next plot north, at 779 Higashikoken, holds the storehouse for the Honmachi neighbourhood's festival float.

Photograph the outside from the street and leave it there. People live here. Shooting into windows or stepping onto the plot is not appropriate.