Former Nishihiro Family Residence (Jirokichi) Brick Wall

The Brick Wall: Thirty-Four Metres of Oya Stone, Choshi Stone and English Bond

Walls do not often become cultural properties. The Nishihiro registration covers four buildings and one structure, and the structure is a garden wall: brick, running along the south side of the main house, listed in its own right by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

Read it from the ground up.

The base is Oya stone. Above that come three courses of Choshi stone. Above those, brick laid in English bond. At the top, the courses corbel outward, widening into something the agency's description likens to a small roof. Three changes of material between the soil and the sky.

Oya stone comes from Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture, roughly 150 kilometres inland. It is soft, easily worked, and turns up in foundations and storehouses across modern Japan. Choshi stone comes from underfoot. So the wall stacks, in order: stone hauled from elsewhere, stone from this coast, and then an industrial product made in a kiln. The history of what a builder in this port could get his hands on is legible vertically.

English Bond, and What Happens at the Top

Brick has grammar. English bond alternates a course laid entirely with the long faces showing against a course laid entirely with the short ends showing. The vertical joints never line up through the wall, which makes it strong, and it reads as orderly if slightly severe. Flemish bond, by contrast, alternates long and short within each single course, which looks livelier and binds less well.

Meiji-era Japan adopted English bond for government buildings and factories, and it became the default for the country's brick construction. Finding it here is no surprise. It is the standard answer.

The top of the wall is the interesting part. Corbelling, in the agency's phrase, widens the courses so the crown projects like a cap. This is not ornament. Rain running down a vertical brick face works into the mortar joints and destroys them over decades. A projecting crown throws the water clear of the wall below it. That the builder bothered with corbelled brickwork on a garden wall says something about how the Nishihiro family expected their property to be seen.

Two Things the Records Do Not Agree On

This wall comes with two open questions in the documentation, and they are worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over.

The date first. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns it to early Showa, 1926 to 1930. Choshi City takes a different line: the construction date is unknown, and oral account within the family suggests installation somewhere between the end of the Taisho era and the early Showa years. The national database takes precedence as the authoritative record, but no firm construction year has been established.

Then the length. The database's structural field gives the wall as brick and stone construction, 34 metres. The database's own descriptive text says the wall measures 34.5 metres along its bends. Half a metre apart, inside a single primary source. The Japanese term used, orimagari encho, means the total length measured along a wall that changes direction rather than the straight-line distance. The likeliest explanation is a rounded figure alongside a measured one, but that is inference.

Registration took effect on 27 March 2018, number 12-247, under the criterion of contribution to the historical landscape of the nation. The cannery on the same site shares that criterion. The main house and the two warehouses were registered instead as models of design quality. The distinction is real: this wall was valued less for what it is than for what Choshi would lose without it. It is classified as a structure other than a building, count of one.

What to Look For

You can see this one any day. It stands on the property boundary along the road, no ticket, no open day required. Of the five registered items at the Nishihiro compound, the wall is the easy one.

Get close to the base and compare the two stones. Oya stone is a pale greenish grey, flecked and slightly porous. The Choshi stone above it looks different in colour and grain. Working out where one ends and the other begins takes a few minutes and is more absorbing than it sounds.

Move up to the brickwork and follow the bond. One course shows long faces in a row, the next shows a row of square ends, and so on upward. Once your eye catches the alternation you cannot stop seeing it.

Then the crown. The corbelled projection casts a hard band of shadow across the face when the light comes in low, which on a west-facing stretch means late afternoon.

Remember that the wall has two sides. The face along the road was built to be seen by passers-by; the inner face looks onto the main house's south garden and was built to be seen from within. On an open day you can compare them. Access to the grounds runs the second and fourth Sunday of each month, 10:00 to 15:00, subject to cancellation. The Choshi City cultural properties office can confirm: 0479-21-6662.