Former Nara Family Residence New Residence

The wing that was cut loose from the main house

For decades this building was not a separate structure at all. The shin-jūkyo, or "new residence," of the former Nara estate was built in 1895 (Meiji 28) as an extension joined to the eastern side of the main house. When that main house, an Important Cultural Property, underwent restoration in 1966 (Shōwa 41), the new residence was severed from it, and the two-story portion at its east end was taken down. What remains stands on its own, west of the main house on an east–west axis, facing north.

It is a wooden two-story building of about 152 square meters, its hipped roof clad in copper sheet. A porch projects from the north face to form the entrance. The layout speaks of comfort rather than storage: a twelve-mat reception room and an eight-mat room on the ground floor, an eight-mat reception room and a four-mat tea room above.

A late-Meiji upgrade in living

By the 1890s the Nara family had lived in the mid-eighteenth-century main house for well over a century. The new residence reads as an addition made for a changing standard of daily life. A corridor extends toward the main house, with a toilet attached, and the exterior is finished in vertical board siding. The kitchen block is a later enlargement, a reminder that the building kept adapting after it was first raised.

When the estate's seven annexes were entered on the national register of tangible cultural properties in 2006, they were valued as a group for their contribution to the historic landscape. The new residence carries a particular weight within that group, because its history is bound to the main house itself. Its separation in the 1966 restoration is a documented episode in how the whole complex was conserved, and the building preserves that episode in its very independence.

What to look for on a visit

The estate is open as an annex of the Akita Prefectural Museum, and admission is free. Stand where the new residence faces the main house and the old connection becomes easy to picture: the two once shared a wall on this side. Inside the plan, the tea room upstairs is worth seeking out, a four-mat space that signals leisure and hospitality rather than farm work. The vertical board siding and the projecting north entrance give the exterior its character. Because museum staff interpret the grounds, a visit here can be read against the main house next door, showing how one household's buildings grew and changed over time.