Former Mori Residence (Imeitei) Main Building

A Merchant House Behind a Lattice Front

The Main Building of the Former Mori Family Residence (旧森家住宅（浜坂先人記念館以命亭）主屋, Kyū Mori-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Kyu Morike Jutaku) is a timber townhouse in Hamasaka, Shin-Onsen Town, Mikata District, Hyogo Prefecture, built in 1888 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2008.

It faces west, opening onto a small front garden that separates the entrance from the street. Two storeys, gable roof, pantiles. The ridge over the northern half sits one step lower than the southern ridge, a shift you notice from across the road before you notice anything else. Both floors of the facade are screened with wooden lattice, the arrangement that gives the frontages of Japanese merchant quarters their particular rhythm of light and shadow.

Inside, the plan follows the logic of a working shop. A tōri-doma, an earth-floored passage running the depth of the building, takes up the southern side; goods and people moved along it without disturbing the rooms. North of that passage sit nine tatami rooms in a three-by-three grid, wrapped on three sides by a veranda. The Agency for Cultural Affairs description singles out the refinement of the smaller details, and the phrase is earned: the joinery in the reception rooms is noticeably finer than the exterior lets on.

A wing was added in 1907. The recorded building area is 279 square metres.

The Mori Family and the Name Imeitei

The Mori traded in Hamasaka under the shop name Nanakamaya. They served as village headmen, ran one of the first pawnbroking businesses in the settlement, and later brewed sake. The house on Honmachi is what that combination of roles looked like in built form.

The name Imeitei belongs to a different building on the property. Mori Kōemon, the second head of the family, handed the estate to his eldest son and built himself a retirement house on the east side of the grounds. He called it Imeitei. Shin-Onsen Town traces the two characters to a line in the Book of Rites, usually rendered as the idea that a person of character dwells at ease and awaits what fate brings. Successive heads of the family are said to have interpreted the phrase through whatever discipline they had trained in, so the name carried a fresh reading in each generation.

When the town bought the estate and converted it into a museum, the name went with it. Conversion work ran from December 1991 to June 1992, and the Hamasaka Predecessors Memorial Hall opened on 12 July 1992. The complex covers about 1,466 square metres of land and holds the main house, two storehouses and a sake brewery.

What the Registration Recognises

Registration is not designation. Japan reserves designation as an Important Cultural Property for a small number of buildings held to be of the highest national value, with correspondingly tight controls. Registration, introduced in 1996, is a lighter framework covering structures roughly fifty years old or more that shape the historical character of a place, and it leaves owners far more room to keep using their buildings. That distinction matters here: the Mori house is registered precisely because it is still in daily service, as a museum rather than a preserved shell.

The main building entered the register on 8 July 2008, with public notice on 23 July, under register number 28-0368. Four other elements of the estate carry their own entries: the Inui storehouse, the north storehouse, the sake brewery and the stone retaining wall. Hyogo Prefecture had already included the buildings in the first round of its important structures for landscape formation in the 2005 fiscal year.

Read the registration alongside the street and the reasoning becomes obvious. Hamasaka kept its old lot divisions. Stone walls and older frontages still line the Ajiwara River a short walk behind the house, and the Mori residence anchors the block that holds the whole streetscape together.

Visiting the Memorial Hall

The house is open to the public as a town museum, and unlike many registered properties it takes walk-in visitors. Opening hours are 9:00 to 17:00, with last admission at 16:30. It closes on Thursdays, moving that closure to the following day when a public holiday falls on a Thursday, and shuts from 29 December to 3 January. Admission is 200 yen for adults and 100 yen for children; parties of ten or more pay 150 and 70 yen respectively, and an annual pass costs 500 yen for adults.

Allow around thirty minutes if you are only looking at the building, longer if the exhibitions hold you. The former sake brewery, a tall space open to the roof, now serves as Imeitei Hall and carries a rotating programme of exhibitions. Elsewhere the displays introduce figures from the area, among them the mountaineer Katō Buntarō and the poet Maeda Sumitaka. A stone bearing a verse by the haiku poet Mori Ran'o stands in the garden beside a plum tree, visible from the veranda.

JR Hamasaka Station on the Sanin Main Line is about ten minutes on foot, roughly half a kilometre. The Katō Buntarō Memorial Library sits nearby, and the Ajiwara path behind the property leads down to the river, which is the better way to leave once you have seen the house. Photography policy is set by the museum, so check at the reception desk before shooting inside.