Machiya

What a machiya is

A machiya is the townhouse of the merchant quarters, a building that serves as both shop and dwelling. The characteristic plot is narrow where it meets the street and runs deep behind, so that houses stand shoulder to shoulder along the frontage.

The descriptions in the National Cultural Properties Database return to the same features. The Okamura Residence in Mie Prefecture is described as a machiya facing the old Hase highway, entered from the eaves side, timber-framed with a low upper storey, thirteen metres by thirteen, gabled and pantiled, with a tiled canopy across the front and a small monitor roof on the ridge.

That low upper storey is a floor without standing height, used for storage or sleeping, and it is a common mark of the pre-modern townhouse. The Nakamura Sotetsu Residence in Kyoto is described as a machiya with high walls to the south and west and a through-passage of beaten earth, the element that gives the plan its spine.

Building in this form continued into the modern period. The Masujin sake shop in Niigata Prefecture, built in 1934, is described as a two-storey shopfront, gabled, pantiled and entered from the eaves side, with a frontage of about ten metres, a twelve-mat room and an earthen passage behind the shop, and three rooms upstairs. Its full-height upper storey is what distinguishes it from earlier examples.

Visiting a townhouse quarter

Where machiya survive in numbers, the quarter is often selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings. That protection covers the district, while individual buildings may separately be a Registered Tangible Cultural Property or an Important Cultural Property. Signs on a single street can refer to either system, and they mean different things.

The narrow frontage is commonly explained by taxes once levied on street width. Land division worked differently from city to city, so for any particular building the official description or the municipal survey is the source worth checking.

Most of these houses are still lived in. Museums and private homes stand on the same street, sometimes side by side, and following the posted notices on entry and photography is both courteous and reliable.