Sarajokakumon Gate

A Stone Gate That Borrows the Shape of a Torii

Kojokaku Mon (更上閣門, the gate of Kōjōkaku), standing at the southeast corner of the Kōjōkaku grounds at 5-4 Motokachishichō in Hachinohe City, Aomori Prefecture, is a stone gate built around 1919 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2003.

Gates on Japanese estates are usually carpentry. This one is masonry: stone piers, stone lintel, a frontage of 2.7 metres, with low walls called sodebei extending left and right to tie the structure into the boundary. Set against the timber house behind it, the choice reads as deliberate rather than economical.

The detailing is where it becomes interesting. The capping member along the top, the kasagi, turns upward at each end in a slight curve. Anyone who has walked through a Shinto shrine approach will recognise the profile at once: it is the silhouette of a torii. The gate does not claim to be one. It simply lets the shape hang in the air above the entrance.

On either side, the service openings are handled in the manner of wakishōji, the flanking panels used in shrine architecture, and the small upper wall sections are built up to look like horizontal boarding. Stone has been asked to imitate carpentry, and it does so without much strain.

Registered on Different Grounds from the House

The gate and the main house were registered on the same day, 19 September 2003, with public notice on 17 October, in the thirty-eighth round. The gate carries register number 02-0024, the house 02-0023. What separates them is the criterion cited.

Japan's registration system, established in 1996 as a lighter alternative to designation, recognises buildings on one of three grounds. The main house was registered as a model of design. The gate was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. That is a judgement about the street, not about the object in isolation.

The reasoning holds up on site. Motokachishichō was a samurai quarter southwest of Hachinohe Castle, and by the time the Izumiyama family, kimono merchants turned soy sauce producers, mill operators and founders of the Izumiyama Bank, completed this gate around 1919, the neighbourhood was already several decades into its modern life. The gate is the one part of the property a passer-by cannot avoid. It fixes the scale of the frontage, marks where private ground begins, and gives the block a piece of stonework that has held its position for more than a century.

Registration also reflects the pairing. A large residence of this period was conceived with its approach, and evaluating the entrance separately from the house would miss how the two were meant to be read in sequence.

Standing at the Threshold

Approach on foot and stop before going through. The gate sits directly in front of, and slightly east of, the entrance wing of the main house, so the two line up. From outside, the stone frame crops the view of the timber porch beyond, with its two tiers of rafters and rainbow-curved beam. The framing is not accidental.

Look along the top edge for the upturned ends of the capping stone, then down to the side openings and their shrine-style treatment, then at the panelled effect worked into the small upper walls. Three separate borrowings from wooden architecture, all executed in stone, within a frontage of under three metres.

Immediately outside lies Kōjōkaku Nigiwai Hiroba, a public open space the city completed in February 2018 as part of a plan to revive the central district. Benches and lawn face the property, which means the gate can now be studied at leisure from across the way, an angle that did not exist a decade ago. In June and October the square hosts an evening food and music event with kitchen cars and local restaurants.

Passing through the gate costs nothing, and the grounds are open when no group has reserved the house: 9:00 to 21:00, closing at 17:00 on days without an evening booking, shut from 28 December to 4 January. Eleven parking spaces sit on the property. Photography from the street or the square is unrestricted.

The gate is at its most photographed in February, when audiences for Oniwa Enburi file through it after dark on their way to watch the rice-planting dance performed on the lawn by braziers. From Hon-Hachinohe Station on the JR Hachinohe Line, the walk takes about fifteen minutes.