Former Yamamoto Residence (Memorial Hall) Gatehouse

Nineteen Square Metres at the Gate

The Gatehouse of the Former Yamamoto Residence (旧山本家住宅（山本清記念財団会館）門衛所, Kyū Yamamoto-ke Jūtaku Mon'eisho, also written Kyu Yamamotoke Jutaku Moneisho) stands in Yuzen-cho, Nishinomiya City, Hyogo Prefecture, was built around 1937 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2007.

It is the smallest registered element on the estate and the first one anybody sees. The building runs north to south along the street, 3.9 metres by 4.0 metres, with a gabled pantile roof and a recorded floor area of nineteen square metres. The outer walls are finished in scratched mortar render, a texture achieved by combing the surface once the coat has begun to set, with the lower band faced in teppeiseki, the platy grey andesite quarried in the Suwa area of Nagano and used throughout interwar Kansai for exactly this kind of grounding detail.

The north end is where the design gets interesting. A thin horizontal slab of concrete projects outward, and set back slightly beneath it stands a wall of the same grey stone, fitted with a door. That is the side gate, and the arrangement is a small essay in the modern idiom: a flat cantilevered plane, a stone plinth, a shadow gap between them. It sits directly beside a tiled roof and timber framing without either looking out of place.

A gatehouse implies a gatekeeper. This one was built for a household that expected somebody to be stationed there.

A Villa on the Shukugawa Slopes

The estate belongs to the phenomenon Japanese architectural writing calls Hanshinkan Modernism. Between the world wars, the hillsides between Osaka and Kobe filled with businessmen, artists and academics who commuted into the cities by private railway and built themselves houses that mixed Japanese and Western planning with unusual confidence. The suburb along the Shukugawa river became one of its centres.

The client was Kondō Juichirō (1880-1958), a mining proprietor from Tottori Prefecture. The architect was Okada Takao (1898-1993), a technician in the residential design department of Osaka Mitsukoshi, a pupil of Takeda Goichi and a serious scholar of tea architecture. The Yamamoto Kiyoshi Memorial Foundation records the completion year as 1938 and the builder as Kasatani Kōmuten of Ashiya; the national register lists the buildings under 1937 and gives the gatehouse as around 1937, so the two accounts sit a year apart.

The grounds run to 1,266 square metres, about four hundred tsubo. Behind the gate stand the main house of 331 square metres, timber with two storeys and a partly single-storey wing under a hipped pantile roof, a storehouse, and a tea room set in a Japanese garden. The house also had an internal telephone system, uncommon in a private residence at the time and a fair indication of how the place was meant to run.

Yamamoto Kiyoshi, born in 1920 in what is now Awaji City, became the fifth owner in 1966. He had built a drinks and food business after the war and kept the house essentially as he found it. On his death in December 1994 his will transferred the property toward the creation of a foundation, which was established in 1997. The Great Hanshin earthquake of January 1995 damaged parts of the estate but left the structural frame intact, and that survival is one reason the buildings are still here.

Why the Gatehouse Was Registered Separately

Japan's registration system, created in 1996, differs from designation as an Important Cultural Property in both scope and severity. Designation covers a narrow band of buildings of the highest national value under strict controls; registration is a broader, lighter instrument for structures around fifty years old or more that give a place its historical character, and it treats a compound as a set of individually listed parts rather than a single object.

That is why five separate entries exist here: the main house, the front gate and wall, this gatehouse, the storehouse and the tea room. All were registered on 5 December 2007, with public notice on 19 December. The gatehouse carries register number 28-0296.

Listing the gatehouse in its own right is a judgement about the street rather than about the building's size. The registration criterion applied is the one covering contribution to the historical landscape, and the gatehouse is the part of the estate that does that work, since it is what a passerby actually sees. Hyogo Prefecture selected the residence for its hundred modern houses list in 2010, and Nishinomiya City designated it an urban landscape formation building in 2011.

Booking a Visit

The estate is open to the public by reservation, made at least a day in advance through the foundation. Opening hours are 10:30 to 15:30, with last admission at 15:00. Admission is 300 yen for adults and 150 yen for elementary and junior high school students. The property closes on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays, along with the Obon and New Year periods. Enquiries go to 0798-73-6677 during opening hours on days the house is open.

One small thing to prepare for: the foundation has suspended its loan of indoor slippers, so bring your own socks. Visitors walk through the interior, and the reception room holds the collection Yamamoto and his late wife Tomie assembled, weighted toward tea utensils but taking in lacquerware and paintings as well. Ask about photography when you book, since permissions vary by room and by occasion.

Three stations serve the site. Kurakuenguchi on the Hankyu Koyo line is seven minutes on foot to the southeast, Shukugawa on the Hankyu Kobe line is twelve minutes to the northeast, and JR Sakura Shukugawa is ten minutes to the north. Parking is available. Walk the last stretch rather than taking a taxi to the door, because the point of the gatehouse is the moment you come upon it from the pavement.