Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing

Formal rooms behind the shop

The Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing (旧平井家住宅座敷棟) in Shinmachi, Sakura City, Chiba Prefecture, is a single-storey block of formal rooms added behind the shop and main house of the Former Hirai Family Residence in 1931, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on August 1, 2016 (number 12-0189).

The Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing runs west from the back of the street-front shop. It is a single-storey timber building with its tiled ridge running east to west, hipped at the west end and joined at the east end to the rear of the main house. The building area is 59 m². Where the main house packed shop and daily life together, this wing held the rooms for receiving guests and for family rites.

A study based on the city's detailed survey of 1996 records that work began in 1931, the year a mother-in-law in the family died, and finished around 1932. It was built while the family's sake shop was restoring the Hirai to the front rank of Shinmachi merchants.

Altar room, back room and veranda

The Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing lines up an 8-mat altar room (butsuma) and a 10-mat back room (oku no ma) from east to west, with a storage room alongside. A veranda (Engawa) wraps the south and west sides, so the back room looks out over the south-facing garden. The family altar, which had stood in the main house's sitting room, was moved here when the wing was built.

At the west end is a guest lavatory with marble on the floor and the lower walls, a sign of how much care a merchant family of the early Showa era put into the rooms visitors would see.

The joinery is fine throughout. Where the plaster of the Tokonoma alcove meets the posts, the carpenters cut a small groove (chiri-jakuri) so the wall finish locks neatly into the timber, and the sliding paper screens facing the garden are finished with chamfered edges.

A dated merchant's parlor

The Agency for Cultural Affairs values the Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing for its firm construction date and for how well it conveys a merchant family's way of life. Town houses in the old castle town were often enlarged by adding formal rooms behind the shop, and a wing with a known date helps trace that process.

Researchers note that the interior of the house survives much as it was when the parlor wing was added, so the value here lies as much in the rooms as in the outward form.

Visiting

The Former Hirai Family Residence Parlor Wing sits behind the shop and is barely visible from Shinmachi-dōri. Even from the side road to the south it is hard to see much of it.

The interior is normally closed and is opened only on occasion, during events such as the autumn festival. That is the only time to see the altar room, the back room and the marble-lined lavatory. The history of the whole property and directions are on the Former Hirai Family Residence page.