Kanehara Family Residence Gate

The Oldest Building on the Property Is the Gate

The Gate of the Kanehara Family Residence (金原家住宅門, Kanehara-ke Jūtaku Mon) is a wooden gate at Dodanbara in Shimominaga, Saijō-chō, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture, built in the late Meiji era, extended during the Taishō era, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 August 2012.

Of the three registered structures on this property, the gate is the earliest. The register dates the main house and the detached room to the Taishō era alone; the gate is recorded as late Meiji, roughly 1898 to 1912, with a Taishō-period enlargement and a relocation in 1997. The family therefore had a gate of this quality standing before the house it now fronts was built.

It faces the entrance of the main house from the north. The structure runs 6.3 metres along the ridge and 2.4 metres in depth, under a kirizuma gabled roof of sangawara pantiles.

How the Gate Is Put Together

The elevation divides into three bays. The centre bay forms the opening proper, three metres wide, hung with plank doors. The two flanking bays are filled with horizontal boarding, and a kuguri-do is cut into the west side.

That small door deserves a moment. A kuguri-do is a wicket, low enough that anyone using it must stoop, set into or beside the main leaves so the household can come and go without swinging three metres of timber. Japanese gates almost always have one. The main doors were for occasions, for palanquins and carts and formal callers; the wicket was for everybody else, every day.

Both end walls are finished in earthen plaster rather than boarding, which gives the gate a heavier, more closed appearance from the side than from the front. The official description settles on the phrase jūkō na kamae, a substantial or weighty stance, and applies it to the gate as a formal entrance.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs classifies this structure differently from its two neighbours. The main house and the detached room are recorded under the second category heading as buildings, kenchikubutsu. The gate is recorded as sonota kōsakubutsu, other constructed works. The distinction is administrative rather than a judgement of merit, and it reflects the fact that a gate encloses no interior space. It does mean that anyone searching the national database by category will find the three parts of this single property in two different places.

What a Gate Was For, and What Moving One Involves

In a Japanese house the gate did the work that a facade does elsewhere. Domestic architecture here turns inward, screened by walls and planting, so the street sees very little of the building. What it sees is the gate. Width of opening, roof form, quality of timber and the presence or absence of flanking rooms all communicated standing, and in the Edo period sumptuary regulation made the message literal: certain gate types were reserved to certain ranks. Those rules lapsed with the Meiji Restoration, but the habit of reading a household from its gate outlasted them by generations. A rural family building in the 1900s would have understood a 6.3-metre gate with a three-metre opening as a considerable statement.

The 1997 relocation raises a question worth asking of any moved building: how much of what stands is original? Japanese timber construction answers this better than most. A frame assembled from jointed members without nails can be numbered, taken down and reassembled, a practice with centuries of precedent behind it. Roof tiles are lifted and relaid, earthen walls are usually rebuilt because they cannot travel, and decayed members are replaced. The structural timbers, which carry the carpentry that gives a building its character, generally survive the journey.

Registration in 2012, fifteen years after the move, indicates that the Agency's assessors examined the relocated buildings and judged them to retain the qualities the criterion asks for. Registration under the criterion for a work that serves as a model of design was granted to all three structures together, the gate holding number 34-0132.

As with the rest of the property, there is no public access. No opening hours, admission fee or visiting arrangement has been announced, and the national database lists no owner name and no management body. The registered address is 286-5 Dodanbara, Shimominaga, Saijō-chō, about four kilometres south of JR Saijō Station on the Sanyō Line, in a part of Higashihiroshima City where a car is the practical means of getting about. Visitors already in the district often stop at the Minaga Reservoir embankment, a waterworks site of the same general period that is open during daytime hours and free to enter.