Yabashi Family Residence Main House

A Townhouse Built for the Highway in 1833

The Yabashi Family Residence Main House (矢橋家住宅主屋, Yabashi-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a large merchant townhouse built in 1833 on the old Nakasendō highway in Akasaka, Ogaki City, Gifu Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 1997.

It stands on the south side of the road with its long side to the street, the arrangement Japanese builders call Hirairi. The structure is timber, 2 storeys under a tiled roof, and its footprint of 284 square metres makes it by far the largest of the 8 buildings on the estate. Everything else hangs off it: the Shoin reception wing adjoins it on the west, and the Middle Storehouse opens toward it from the rear.

Ogaki City singles out the roof. A single broad span of tiles is carried across an unusually deep building, and seen from the street it dominates the facade. That balance, a great sheet of roof above a low upper floor, is the first thing to register about the Yabashi Family Residence Main House.

A Textbook Late-Edo Townhouse

The building was registered as a model of its type. The Agency for Cultural Affairs points in particular to its Tsushi-nikai, a low upper storey, and says that together with its size this captures the character of large townhouses in provincial towns at the end of the Edo period.

In a tsushi-nikai house the upper eaves are kept low and the floor above is used for storage or servants' sleeping space rather than as full living rooms. Along the highways of Edo-period Japan, tall street-facing upper floors were generally avoided, so even a wealthy household with a wide frontage kept its roofline level with its neighbours. Here the family built big, but the street still saw a house of ordinary height.

The Main House went up 10 years before 1843, when records count 292 townhouses along Akasaka's main street. It is one of the buildings that actually made up that streetscape, and it still stands at the centre of the old post town at its original scale.

What to Look For

The interest is concentrated on the street front. The soffits of the upper eaves and the Udatsu, the short wing walls that project between neighbouring houses, are finished in black lime plaster, which gives the facade a crisp outline among the paler walls of the town. Both floors are fitted with senbon-gōshi, a lattice of very fine, closely set vertical slats. The Agency's own description makes a point of how refined this front is.

Start from the opposite side of the road, where the contrast between low upper floor and broad roof explains the tsushi-nikai type at a glance. Then move closer and look at how thin the slats are and how tightly they are spaced, and at the depth of shadow the black eaves throw across them.

The facade faces north and gets little direct sun at midday, when the lattice reads as a dark screen. In the low light of early morning or late afternoon each slat picks up its own edge of shadow, and the fineness of the work becomes obvious.

Visiting the Yabashi Family Residence Main House

The Yabashi Family Residence Main House is not open to the public, and the interior cannot be visited. It is, however, the easiest of the 8 buildings to see, since its whole facade faces the public road along the old Nakasendō.

Please photograph only from the road, and do not peer through the entrance or the lattice. The street carries local traffic, so choose where you stop with care. There is no admission charge or booking system, because there is no public access.