Niwa Family Residence Main Building

A Townhouse on the Corner at Unuma-juku

The Niwa Family Residence Main House (丹羽家住宅主屋, Niwa-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber townhouse of 1930 standing on a corner plot on the north side of the old Nakasendō highway at Unuma-juku in Kakamigahara City, Gifu Prefecture, and it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2006. Unuma was the fifty-second of the sixty-nine post stations on the Nakasendō, counting east from Nihonbashi in Edo.

The registration criterion applied here says something important about the building. It was not registered as a model of design or as a technical rarity, but under the heading covering works that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. In other words, the value of this house lies substantially in where it stands and what it does for the street.

The Plan of a Merchant House

The roof is gabled, and the entrance faces the long eaves side rather than the gable end, the arrangement Japanese carpenters call hirairi. The frame measures eight ken along the street and four ken in depth, roughly 14.5 by 7.3 metres, with lean-to roofs added front and back.

On the ground floor the eastern portion is an earth-floored doma, the working space where a merchant household received goods, cooked and moved between the street and the yard without taking off its footwear. A mizuya, the water and scullery area, projects from the rear. West of the doma the living quarters follow the regular four-room plan, four rooms of roughly eight tatami arranged in a grid, with the lean-to on that side serving as a veranda.

None of this was old-fashioned by accident. The house dates from 1930, more than sixty years after the Nakasendō had ceased to matter as a route of state, yet its builders held to the plan and the proportions that the street had always had. That continuity is the point. Walk the surviving stretch of Unuma-juku and the eye reads a coherent line of frontages rather than a museum piece surrounded by later work.

Local accounts say the Niwa family kept an inn here under the name Ōsakaya during the Edo period. That tradition is not recorded in the national database, and it refers to the household rather than to the present structure, which is a Shōwa-period replacement on the same ground.

Seeing It, and Seeing the Street

This is a private house. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record gives no owner, which for a registered property of this kind normally indicates private ownership, and the interior is not open to visitors. What you can do, and what the registration invites you to do, is look at it from the road and understand it as one frontage among several.

Kakamigahara City has spent two decades restoring this stretch: waterways reopened, façades of designated buildings conserved, the waki-honjin rebuilt. The place to start is the Nakasendō Unuma-juku Machiya Museum, roughly the midpoint of the old street, in a house given to the city by the Mutō family in 2006 and opened to the public in May 2008. Admission is free, hours are 9:00 to 17:00, and it closes on Mondays, on the day after a public holiday, and from 28 December to 4 January. Staff there manage the whole preserved area and can point you to individual buildings.

From Unumajuku Station on the Meitetsu Kakamigahara Line the walk takes about fifteen minutes; from Shin-Unuma Station on the same line, or from Unuma Station on the JR Takayama Line, allow about twenty. There is a small car park for the preserved district with room for around fifteen vehicles.

Photograph the exterior from the public road by all means. Do not enter the site, and keep in mind that people live here.