Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall

Nineteen metres of brick along the west boundary

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall (旧堀田廣之家住宅煉瓦塀, Kyū Hotta Hiroyuki-ke Jūtaku Rengabei) is a brick boundary wall in Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, completed in January 1913 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. It runs 19 metres and stands 2.4 metres high along the western edge of the plot.

The official commentary is unusually direct about why it exists: to raise the fire resistance of the site. Tsushima was a dense timber town, houses shoulder to shoulder, and a fire next door was a fire in your own roof within minutes. Against a blaze coming from the west, the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall is a physical stop. This is not garden ornament. It is a piece of infrastructure with a job. The wall became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016.

The wall went up before the house did

The construction of the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall can be dated to the day, because the client kept a diary. According to material from the Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko published by the Tsushima City Library, the ground was consolidated in November 1912, concrete foundations were finished that December, and bricklaying began on 22 December. The wall was complete on 14 January 1913. Nineteen bricklayers came from Kuwana and laid nine thousand bricks.

The sequence is the interesting part. The frame of the main house was not raised until 12 April 1913, three months later. The fire wall was finished before the building it was meant to protect existed. Hotta Hiroyuki had spent the summer of 1912 travelling between Kuwana, Nagoya and Gifu to choose his contractors, and the Kuwana bricklayers presumably came out of that search. Whatever the reasoning, someone decided that the boundary mattered enough to build first, in the cold weeks either side of New Year.

Nineteen men, twenty-four days, nine thousand bricks. Those are the numbers, and they are the sort of numbers that almost never survive for a private house of this period.

English bond, buttresses, and a corbelled top

The bond is English bond, courses showing only the long faces of the bricks alternating with courses showing only the short ends. Japan adopted it widely for government buildings and factories in the Meiji era, and it is stronger than laying every course in Stretcher bond because the header courses tie the two leaves of the wall together. Stand close and you can read it straight off the face: a band of long rectangles, a band of near squares, repeating up to the top. Bonding is one thing masonry cannot hide.

Every two metres a pier projects from the inner face. These are buttresses. Brickwork takes vertical load happily and lateral load badly, and a free-standing wall 19 metres long and 2.4 metres high will not stay up without stiffening. Putting the piers on the garden side rather than the street side keeps the outer face flat and unbroken, which is a choice about how the wall meets the town.

At the head, courses of brick are corbelled outward in a stepped cornice. It throws rainwater clear of the wall face, and it draws one horizontal line of shadow across an otherwise uneventful 19 metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall as both raising the fire resistance of the site and showing a modern sensibility, and that pair of aims is legible in the fabric: brute fire protection at the bottom of the reasoning, and an interest in what was new at the top of it.

The compound has since come through the Tonankai earthquake of 1944, the Isewan typhoon of 1959 and the floods of 1961. Lateral shaking is exactly what unreinforced masonry dislikes, and it is hard not to credit those piers at two-metre centres with part of the survival.

Access and what you can see

The residence behind the wall is closed to the public. Tsushima City's cultural heritage archive records it as not open, with no entry to the grounds, no interior visiting and no advance-booking scheme.

The wall is a different case, because it faces outward. Of the five registered structures here, the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall is one of only three a visitor can genuinely examine, together with the gate and the boarded fence. The bond pattern, the width of the mortar joints, the number of corbelled courses at the head: all of it is at eye level and countable. The buttresses sit on the inner side and are hard to see from the road, though slight changes in the shadow across the face give away roughly where they are. Photography from the public road is unrestricted. People live here, so do not point a camera over the wall.

Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines is about one kilometre east, roughly fifteen minutes on foot along the approach to Tsushima Shrine. The compound fronts Negicho street on its north side, and the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Brick Wall turns the corner and runs back along the western boundary.

The Hotta Family Residence immediately to the west, an Important Cultural Property of the mid Edo period, is city-owned and opens on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00 (300 yen for adults, 100 yen for schoolchildren, checked August 2026). Looking at how an eighteenth-century Machiya handled fire, with thick plaster and detached storehouses, and then at what a client reached for in 1912, sets out about a century of change in a single street.