Katayama Family Residence Lower Privy

A Four-Cubicle Privy on Stone Footings

The Katayama Family Residence Lower Privy (片山家住宅下の便所, Katayama-ke Jūtaku Shita no Benjo) is an outdoor privy built in the early Taisho era, shortly after 1912, in Nitta Tameikecho, Ota City, Gunma Prefecture, and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2004.

It stands east of the main house on the homestead of the Katayamas, the old headman family of Tameike village, and faces west. Covering just 4.4 square metres, it is a narrow building divided into four tiny cubicles in a row, the middle two of which served as toilets for solid waste.

Privies are easy to overlook, but the Agency for Cultural Affairs counts the Katayama Family Residence Lower Privy as one of the elements that make up the homestead of a prosperous farming family. Tiled like the main house and properly framed on stone footings, it shows how far a well-off rural household went in equipping its home.

Why It Was Registered

The privy received registration number 10-0116 in the 40th round of national registrations, dated 2004/2/17, for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

One of the things that sets the Katayama Family Residence apart is that its small service buildings, the privy and the well house, are registered alongside the main house and storehouses. The value lies in having the everyday infrastructure of the homestead survive as a set.

What to Look For

A narrow building, four small rooms

The Lower Privy is 2 ken long and only half a ken deep, with its ridge running north to south. It is a single-storey building under a kirizuma-zukuri gable roof of sangawara-buki pan tiles, entered on the long side (hirairi). Inside, four cubicles, each about the size of half a tatami mat, line up north to south, and the central two are toilets for solid waste. The Agency does not say what the two end cubicles were for; urinals are a likely possibility.

Yabuzuka stone and exposed framing

According to the Agency, the building rests on footings of Yabuzuka stone, a building stone named after the Yabuzuka district of Ota, with a timber sill laid on top and posts rising from it in shinkabe style, the frame left visible in the walls. The same stone appears in the base and well lining of the well house on the property.

Two descriptions of the structure

The structure field of the national database records the privy as a single-storey dozo-zukuri building, the plastered earthen-wall construction used for storehouses, while the Agency's descriptive note calls it a wooden single-storey building in shinkabe style. The two are quite different ways of building. Our basic information follows the structure field as recorded, but we have not been able to confirm which better describes the building.

Why "lower"?

The sources do not explain the word shita, lower, in the name. The privy stands east of the main house, on what the Agency identifies as the shimote, the working side of the home. Separately, where a homestead had an upper and a lower privy, the upper was usually for guests and the lower for the family or household staff. Either the position or that distinction in use may lie behind the name of the Katayama Family Residence Lower Privy.

Visiting

The privy is part of a private home and is not open; as of October 2026 we found no announcement of open days. It stands inside the homestead east of the main house, and we have not confirmed whether it can be seen from outside the property. Please stay off the grounds and respect the residents' privacy.

Photographs in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database show the exterior.