Arai Family Main House

Arai Family Residence Main House

A wooden two-storey house with a footprint of 152 square metres faces south on a low rise above the Suma shore, at the western edge of Kobe. It was completed in 1925, the fourteenth year of the Taishō era, when this length of coast had become one of the more sought-after places in the country to keep a second home. The courtier and poet Ariwara no Yukihira, sent into exile at Suma in the ninth century, is said to have watched the moon rise from a hill nearby. The place name Tsukimiyama, "moon-viewing mountain," carries that memory, and the literary fame of Suma drew aristocrats and industrialists to these slopes long before the Arai house was built on them.

The building is known in the national register as Araike Jūtaku Shuoku, the main house of the Arai residence. It is one of two parts of the same estate to be listed; the storehouse and barn that stand on the same plot were registered at the same time under a separate entry.

A late-Taishō house in a refined Japanese idiom

The roof is an irimoya, the hipped-and-gabled form that ranks among the more formal of Japanese roof types, laid with sangawara pantiles. The plan runs a corridor down the middle of the house, separating the south rooms, which take the light and the view of the water, from the service and private rooms to the north. This naka-rōka, or central corridor, was a planning idea then spreading through better Japanese houses, and it let the family keep the best aspect for the formal rooms.

The principal reception room carries the full grammar of formal interior design. There is a tokonoma, the recessed alcove where a hanging scroll or a seasonal flower is displayed; beside it, staggered chigaidana shelves; a tsukeshoin, a built-in writing bay set into the window wall; and ranma, the carved transom panels fitted above the sliding partitions to let air and light pass between rooms. None of this was unusual in a high-quality home of the period, but the care taken over the joinery and proportion is what the Agency for Cultural Affairs singled out.

The openings are wide. Large sliding screens let the southern rooms open almost fully toward the garden and the sea, a choice that made sense for a house built for a mild climate and a long view rather than for defence or farm labour.

One element stands apart from the rest. A small tower-like third storey rises above the main roof. The national register records that this level was a later addition, built after an earthquake. In this district that points to the rebuilding that followed the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of January 1995, which struck Kobe with great force; the upper room appears to date from the repair work of those years rather than from the original 1925 construction.

Why it is a Registered Cultural Property

The Arai main house holds the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property (tōroku yūkei bunkazai), a category created in 1996. It is worth keeping the two systems clear. Important Cultural Property and National Treasure are designations: the state selects a relatively small number of buildings and protects them with strong controls and substantial support. Registration is a lighter measure, introduced to catch the much larger body of modern buildings that were disappearing before anyone judged their worth. An owner who wishes to alter or demolish a registered building need only notify the authorities, and guidance follows rather than strict permission. The system was meant for exactly this kind of structure: a good early-twentieth-century house, not a temple hall or a castle keep, but valuable enough to record and pass on.

The Arai house was registered on 25 June 2002, in the thirty-third round of registrations, and gazetted the following month. The register lists it under the criterion that it serves as a model of design, the standard applied to buildings whose form and finish set a benchmark for their type. Its registration number is 28-0101, the prefectural code for Hyōgo followed by its local serial number.

What to look for

The house is best read from the street as a survivor of Suma's villa age. Most of the grand second homes that once lined these slopes are gone, lost to wartime air raids, to the 1995 earthquake, or to the slow turnover of land into flats and modern houses. The Arai residence keeps the south-facing aspect, the tiled irimoya roof and the broad timber frontage that the wealthy of the 1920s prized for the sea light. The mismatch between the original roofline and the later upper storey is itself part of the story, a visible record of the city's recovery.

The main house is a private home and is not open to visitors. There is no interior tour and no admission. The interest for a traveller lies in seeing the building in its setting and in understanding the district around it, which can be walked freely. From Tsukimiyama Station on the Sanyo Electric Railway the surrounding streets still hold the quiet, slightly old-fashioned character of a former resort suburb. A short walk leads to Suma Rikyū Park, laid out on the grounds of the former Mukogawa Imperial Villa of 1914 and now famous for its rose garden and its view over Osaka Bay. The white-sand beach at Suma and the hillside temple of Sumadera, both tied to the medieval Tale of the Heike, lie within easy reach.