Jishuan Main House (former Hori Family Residence)

A House Registered for the Streetscape It Belongs To

Jishuan Shuoku (時習庵主屋, also written Jishū-an Shuoku), formerly the Hori Family Residence, is a Meiji-period wooden house in Daishoji Shinmeicho, Kaga City, Ishikawa Prefecture, added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 14 October 1999 under registration number 17-0037. It stands on land that was parcelled out to retainers of the Daishoji domain, and its ground area comes to 76 square metres.

Daishoji was the seat of a branch domain of the Kaga fief, governed by a cadet line of the Maeda family from 1639 until the abolition of the han system. Shinmeicho lies at its northern edge, where the flat town runs up against a wooded slope. Streets here were never widened. The house sits close to the road, presenting a gable end to passers-by, exactly as houses on this block have done for well over a century.

That relationship to the street is the reason the building carries the status it does. Registration was granted under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape, one of three grounds available under the system. The house was not singled out as a masterpiece. It was recognised as a component of something larger.

Registration Is Not Designation

Visitors who follow Japanese cultural properties will encounter two words that translate almost identically into English but mean quite different things in practice. A designated property (指定, shitei) receives strong statutory protection: alterations require permission, and the state shares the cost of repairs. A registered property (登録, toroku) sits under a lighter regime introduced in 1996, aimed at buildings roughly fifty years old or more that remain in everyday use.

Owners of registered buildings notify the authorities before major changes rather than seeking approval, and they retain considerable freedom over the interior. The bargain is deliberate. Japan has far more historic buildings than it can afford to freeze, and a house that cannot be adapted tends to be demolished. Jishuan is a working example of the compromise: a private residence that continues to function as one, while its exterior contributes to a townscape the register exists to keep intact.

Two buildings on this property were registered on the same day, the main house and a storehouse behind it. Kaga City lists them together as a single entry of two structures under the name Jishuan.

Two Wings, Two Dates

The plan is straightforward once you know what to look for. A two-storey entrance wing faces the road under a kirizuma gabled roof. Behind it, connected directly, sits a single-storey reception wing under an irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form that reads as more formal in Japanese building practice. The reception wing holds two zashiki, the tatami rooms reserved for guests and ceremony, together with a hiroen, a broad boarded veranda running along the outside of the tatami.

The two wings were not built at the same time. Agency for Cultural Affairs records place the house in the Meiji period, between 1868 and 1911, with the entrance wing rebuilt in 1941. So a visitor standing at the road looks first at Showa-period work, then at Meiji-period work behind it, joined without any visible seam.

What holds them together is the handling of timber. Both wings use unusually slender structural members, and both are finished in ki-urushi, raw unrefined lacquer applied directly to the wood. Raw lacquer is thin, close to transparent, and it darkens over decades into a deep amber that no stain reproduces. Applying it to an entire house was expensive in 1941 and is close to unthinkable now. The carpenter who rebuilt the front in wartime chose to match a standard set fifty years earlier rather than economise.

What Rewards a Slow Look

Start with the roofline from across the street. The gable end of the entrance wing is narrow and steep, and the lower, wider mass of the reception wing shows behind it. The two roofs read as one silhouette against the hill.

Then look at the timber if you can get close. Slender members produce a particular effect in Japanese domestic architecture: the framing recedes, walls and paper screens dominate, and rooms feel larger than their floor area suggests. The reception wing measures out at a size most visitors would guess to be smaller than it is.

The raw lacquer surface repays attention in low light. It has almost no gloss. What it does instead is deepen the grain, so that posts read as darker at the centre and lighter at the arris where hands have touched them.

Behind the house, the storehouse relocated from Jisshoin temple stands against the hillside. The two buildings were registered on the same day and are best understood as a pair, though they arrived here nearly two centuries apart.

Visiting, and the Walk Around It

The property is privately owned, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs database records no managing body. It has been listed in museum directories as the Daishoji Children's History Experience Centre, Jishuan, with an admission fee of 100 yen and a telephone number of 0761-73-0220, but opening arrangements for privately held registered properties change without notice. Anyone hoping to see the interior should contact Kaga City's Cultural Affairs Division on 0761-72-7988 in advance. The exterior can be seen from the public road at any time. Photography of the outside from the street is unrestricted; interior photography would depend on the owner's permission.

Reaching Shinmeicho is easy. Daishoji Station on the IR Ishikawa Railway is about a ten-minute walk away, one stop south of Kaga Onsen Station, and the Kaga loop bus stops at Yamanoshita Jiingun, the temple cluster, roughly 500 metres off. From Kaga Onsen Station the drive takes under fifteen minutes.

The surrounding block is the real reason to come on foot. Yamanoshita Jiingun, seven temples and one shrine deliberately grouped along the northern hills as a defensive line for the domain, begins a few minutes away. Zenshoji, with its 517 painted rakan figures completed in 1867, sits in the same neighbourhood, as does Kaga Shinmeigu, the shrine that gave Shinmeicho its name and whose worship hall carries a ridge tablet dated 1824. Jisshoin, the temple from which the Jishuan storehouse came, is about ten minutes' walk further along the same line of hills, though it has been closed to visitors since the Noto Peninsula earthquake of 1 January 2024 and remained so as of 2026.