Former Kihara Family Residence (Takaya Town, Kamo District,

Former Kihara Family Residence: A Merchant House Dated to 1665

A spatula signature scratched into one of the ridge-end tiles gives this house an unusually precise birthday: Kanbun 5, the year 1665. Few wooden buildings of its age in Japan can name their own construction year so plainly, and that single dated tile is part of why the residence carries the weight it does. It sits on a sloping corner in Shiraichi, a former market town in the hills of Takaya-chō, in what is now Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture.

The building is a machiya, a merchant townhouse rather than a farmhouse, and it was the working home of the Kihara family. The family traced its line to a warrior household, but by the Edo period its members had become prosperous townspeople. They brewed sake and ran salt fields down on the coast at Takehara, and the prefectural record adds money-changing to their trades. Salt produced on the Inland Sea coast was carried up through Shiraichi toward the mountainous interior, and the Kihara stood at a profitable point on that route.

What survives today is the main house, a single roofed structure measuring 12.6 meters across the front and 15.5 meters deep. It has a gabled roof entered from the long side, rises to a partial second story, and is covered in heavy formal roof tiles, with lighter pantiles over the side eaves and the rear. Around it once stood detached quarters and sake warehouses; a storehouse, a well, traces of the brewery, and part of the garden remain on the grounds.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the residence an Important Cultural Property on June 11, 1966. Two qualities lie behind that decision: its age, and the rarity of knowing exactly how old it is.

Wooden houses are notoriously hard to date. Most are placed within a span of decades on the basis of carpentry style. The Kihara house is different, because the inscribed ridge tile ties it to a specific year. The national database describes it as the oldest surviving folk dwelling in the Chūgoku region, and Higashihiroshima City ranks it among the one or two oldest townhouses in all of western Japan. Comparisons drawn by researchers of vernacular architecture place it just behind a small group of seventeenth-century townhouses in the Nara and Osaka areas.

Beyond the date, the plan preserves an early form that later townhouses moved away from. The interior keeps the layout that merchant houses used before the more standardized arrangements of the later Edo period took hold, which makes the building a reference point for how commercial homes were organized in the 1600s. For both reasons, it is treated as a primary document in the study of Japanese domestic architecture.

What to Look For Inside

Step through the large plank door, the ōdo, and the logic of the house reveals itself in the floor. A broad earthen-floored passage, the doma, runs the full depth of the building from front to back. This was the work space: a packed-earth corridor where deliveries moved, water was drawn, and cooking was done. Four stout pillars rise straight out of the doma to carry the roof directly above.

The rooms divide into three bands. Toward the street are the shop, the mise, and a wide boarded room. The formal parlor sits behind a lattice front. Living rooms and storage occupy the rear. One detail draws comment from almost everyone who studies the house: the formal reception room, the zashiki, is placed on the street side rather than tucked away at the back, where townhouses usually hid their best room. The same unusual choice appears in the former Ishii Residence in nearby Saijō, and it suggests the parlor doubled as the dignified face the merchant showed his customers.

Climb the ladder into the partial upper floor and the mood changes. This cramped space under the roof served as sleeping quarters for the household's live-in servants, lit by a single high window. The guide who shows visitors around tells a small story here about the Japanese phrase for pulling away a ladder, which means leaving someone stranded; a servant sent up to sleep could find himself doing exactly that.

Smaller objects reward a slow walk. Two stone water basins, each close to a meter across, sit near the entrance. The side gutters are cut from single slabs of granite. In one room, low stone figures of the Buddhas Amida and Shaka, roughly fifty centimeters tall, rest quietly against the wall.

Shiraichi and the Walk to the House

The residence cannot be separated from the town around it. Shiraichi grew up after Hakusan Castle was built here in the Warring States period, first as a castle town and then as a market and post town. From the early Edo period it held one of the region's great livestock markets; at its peak, several hundred horses and cattle changed hands during a single market period. Goods and travelers passed through on routes that reached Hiroshima, Kure, Takehara, Onomichi, and Miyoshi within a day. Old tiled townhouses from the Edo, Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa eras still line the streets, so the Kihara house stands among neighbors of its own kind rather than alone.

The house is about two kilometers northwest of Shiraichi Station on the JR Sanyō Main Line, roughly a thirty-minute walk or a five-minute taxi ride uphill. There is no parking at the house itself; drivers use the Shiraichi visitor parking lot about 200 meters to the south and walk the rest. A caretaker from the local history society is usually on hand to explain the building, which turns a quick look into a much fuller visit.