Sarajokakushuya

A Banker's House Wearing a Temple's Carpentry

Kojokaku Shuoku (更上閣主屋, the main house of Kōjōkaku), at 5-4 Motokachishichō in Hachinohe City, Aomori Prefecture, is a timber residence built in 1897 and enlarged in 1919 that was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2003.

The address matters here. Motokachishichō was a samurai quarter laid out southwest of Hachinohe Castle, home to the kachi, the domain's foot retainers. By the late nineteenth century the swords were gone and the money had moved. The Izumiyama family, who traded in kimono fabric, brewed and sold soy sauce, ran a textile mill and founded the Izumiyama Bank, put up their house on ground that a generation earlier would have been closed to merchants entirely.

What they built is not a merchant's townhouse. The entrance wing carries rafters in two tiers at intermediate spacing (futanoki han-shigedaruki), frog-leg struts called kaerumata set above the beams, and a head-tie beam cut into the swelling curve of a kōryō, or rainbow beam. Those are the moves of a shrine or temple carpenter, transplanted onto a private front door.

Twenty-two years later the family added a reception wing behind it, finished in 1919. The two blocks meet at an angle rather than in a straight line, an arrangement Japanese carpenters call gankō, after the staggered formation of geese in flight. The addition stands noticeably taller than the older wing, and its second storey carries a band of windows running through the narrow wall panel above the interior partitions. That detail is the modern one: daylight brought deep into rooms that older houses of this kind kept dim.

The whole is single-storey with a two-storey section, roofed in sheet iron, with a footprint of 373 square metres.

What Registration Means, and Why This House Earned It

Japan sorts its built heritage into two systems that English translation tends to blur. Designation (shitei) is the stricter one, producing National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Registration (tōroku), introduced in 1996, is lighter: it covers buildings roughly fifty years old or more, applies looser controls on alteration, and exists precisely so that owners can keep using their buildings instead of freezing them. Kojokaku belongs to the second system. It is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, not a designated one, and the distinction is worth keeping straight.

The main house was registered on 19 September 2003, with the official notice published on 17 October of the same year, in the thirty-eighth round of registrations. Its register number is 02-0023. The criterion cited was that the building is a model of design, one of three grounds the system allows.

The case rests on the hybrid. Late Meiji produced plenty of large provincial houses, and plenty of them are handsome. Fewer of them import shrine and temple detailing so thoroughly into a domestic entrance, and fewer still pair that with an extension whose window band answers a distinctly twentieth-century interest in daylight. Read the two wings together and you get a compressed account of what happened to Japanese domestic architecture between 1897 and 1919, held in one building on one plot.

Ownership has since passed to the City of Hachinohe, which is why the house is open at all.

Going In: Rooms, Garden, and the February Dance

The house works as a public hall now. Five rooms are rented out: a great room of thirty-five tatami mats, a meeting room of eighteen, and three eight-mat rooms. Rates run from roughly 340 yen for a small room in a morning slot to 5,250 yen for the great room across a full day, and heating costs 250 yen per stove per four hours.

Visitors who simply want to look are welcome when nothing is booked, at no charge. Opening hours are 9:00 to 21:00, though the building shuts at 17:00 on days with no evening reservation, so an afternoon arrival is the safer bet. The site closes from 28 December to 4 January. There is parking for eleven cars, and reception handles enquiries on weekdays between 9:00 and 17:00.

Walk the garden before going inside. Among the older plantings is a pine trained low and horizontal, known as the reclining dragon pine, reckoned to be more than a century old. Yew, plane, maple, cedar and zelkova fill out the canopy; azalea and enkianthus hold the lower layer. The planting is contemporary with the house, which is unusual enough on its own.

The building's best-known moment comes in February. Hachinohe Enburi, a rice-planting dance performed to summon a good harvest and listed as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property, takes over the city each year around 17 to 20 February. Kojokaku hosts Oniwa Enburi, garden enburi: dancers in tall lacquered eboshi headdresses perform on the lawn after dark under braziers while the audience watches from the tatami rooms with sweet amazake and Hachinohe's senbei-jiru hotpot. Tickets are required and sell out; check with the venue well ahead.

Other months bring their own programmes, among them a doll display around the March Hinamatsuri, warrior dolls in early May, and a chrysanthemum show in autumn.

Getting there is easy. From Hon-Hachinohe Station on the JR Hachinohe Line the walk takes about fifteen minutes. Photography of the exterior and garden is generally unrestricted; ask at reception before shooting interiors, since private bookings may be under way.