Former Kagino Family Residence Main Building

A Salaried Family's House on the Mikage Slope

The Former Kagino Family Residence Main Building (旧鍵野家住宅主屋, Kyū-Kagino-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a wooden house of 1924 at Mikage 2-chōme, Higashinada Ward, Kobe City, Hyōgo Prefecture, registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 25 February 2016. It stands on the sloping residential ground north of the old coastal town, a few minutes on foot from Mikage Station on the Hankyū Kobe Line, which sits in the same 2-chōme block.

Two storeys of timber frame with a partial basement, roofed in tile, covering about 100 square metres. The exterior reads as Western: horizontal weatherboard cladding, with part of the wall surface finished in doitsu-kabe or "German wall," a roughcast render thrown on to leave a coarse pebbled skin. Dormer windows break through the roof slope.

The basement is not an affectation. The ground here falls away toward the sea, and a house set into that fall gains a usable lower level on the downhill side at almost no extra cost. Walk the street and the slope is obvious in the retaining walls of every neighbouring plot.

Inside, the arrangement divides by floor rather than by wing. The ground floor holds Western rooms, a reception room and a study among them; the upper floor holds Japanese rooms in a row, floored in tatami. This vertical split is worth registering as a design decision. In grander Japanese houses of the same decade, a Western reception suite was usually a separate block attached to a Japanese main house. Here the two idioms are stacked, which is what you do when the site is narrow and the budget finite.

Why an Ordinary House Was Registered

The register number is 28-0642, and the listing criterion is the one covering buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. That criterion, rather than the one for exemplary design, is the key to what this house represents.

Kobe in the 1920s was a working trading port, and the port generated a professional class: shipping clerks, customs agents, trading-company staff, bank employees. These people did not commission villas from famous architects. They bought or built modest houses in the suburbs opening up along the new private railway lines, and they wanted those houses to look modern. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry places the building squarely in that context, as an example of how prewar middle-class housing in the port city was made.

The date is suggestive. The Hankyū Kobe Line opened in July 1920 with a station at Mikage, and this house went up four years later. Mikage filled with houses in exactly that window. Whole neighbourhoods of the Hanshinkan, the suburban belt between Osaka and Kobe, took their present shape in the decade after the railways arrived.

The house also survived what much of the neighbourhood did not. Higashinada Ward was among the areas hardest hit by the Great Hanshin earthquake of January 1995, and prewar timber housing suffered heavily. A registered building of 1924 still standing on this slope is, in part, a survivor.

It does not stand alone. Several other registered properties cluster within a few hundred metres, including the Mutō Family Residence at Mikage 2-323-4, listed in 2018, whose main house, storehouse, maids' quarters and gate were registered together. Read as a group, they sketch the range of housing that filled Mikage between the wars.

Seeing It, and the Limits on Doing So

This is a private house in private ownership. It is not a museum, there is no public opening, and nothing about the registration gives visitors any right of access. The only appropriate way to look at it is from the public road, briefly, without entering the grounds or approaching the door.

Please treat photography with the same restraint. Exterior shots from the street are ordinarily acceptable in Japan, but residents' privacy comes first: no photographs through windows, no lingering, no drones, no blocking the pavement. If anyone is at home and appears uncomfortable, the right response is to move on.

Within those limits there is still something to see. Look at how the dormers are placed relative to the windows below, and at the boundary where the weatherboarding gives way to the rendered panel. The two finishes have aged differently over a century, and the seam between them is one of the more telling things about how the house was built.

Anyone wanting to spend longer with the architecture of this district has better options nearby. The Mikage Kōkaidō of 1933, at Mikage Ishimachi about a kilometre to the south, is a registered property still working as a civic hall, and its basement restaurant has been trading since the building opened. Further west at Mikage Tsukamachi, the Kōnanzuke Museum occupies a former residence of 1930 that is likewise registered; opening days are worth checking in advance. Neither asks anyone to stand outside a stranger's home.