Hirota Family Residence

About the Hirota Family Residence

The Hirota Family Residence (廣田家住宅, Hirota-ke Jūtaku) is a late Edo to Meiji-period homestead in Kamisakabe 2-chome, Amagasaki City, Hyogo Prefecture, where six structures led by a thatched main house of 1908 were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2021.

The homestead lies in the north-east of Amagasaki, in the Sonoda district, on land that once belonged to Kamisakabe village. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Hirota as an old family who served for generations as village headmen, shōya, and the registered buildings keep the complete layout of a well-to-do farming household of that rank.

Four buildings are registered: the main house, the north annex, the storehouse and the nagayamon gatehouse. Two further items are walls: the south wall, and a garden gate with its fence. Houses now press in on every side, yet the set is intact: the big hipped-and-gabled roof of the main house, a gatehouse and brick wall on the street, a fence and gate dividing the garden, and a storehouse and annex tucked along the back of the plot.

Dates of the Buildings

The Agency's database dates the six structures as follows.

• Storehouse: 1848 (Kōka 5)
• Main house: built 1908 (Meiji 41), altered 1976 (Shōwa 51)
• North annex, nagayamon gate, south wall, and garden gate and fence: late Meiji (1898 to 1912)

The storehouse is the oldest building on the site, and the Agency notes that it goes back to the closing years of the shogunate. The main house followed some sixty years later, in 1908. The annex, gate and walls all belong to the late Meiji years, which suggests the front of the property and its garden were put in order around the time the house was built. No published record says, though, that they went up together.

How the Homestead Is Laid Out

According to Amagasaki City, the plot is a rectangle bounded by a water channel on the north and west and by roads on the south and east. The Agency's notes on each building fill in the rest.

The street front: gatehouse and south wall

The south side of the plot faces an east-west road, and this is where the gatehouse and the south wall stand. The wall meets the gatehouse at its east end and turns slightly north at its west end. Black plaster on the gatehouse and grey render on the outer face of the wall make the street front read as one piece.

The centre: main house and garden

The main house sits toward the north of the plot, on its east side, facing south. A formal shikidai entrance is set in the middle of the south front. From its west post, the garden gate and fence run out in an L to enclose the garden in front of the inner reception rooms; the city describes this fence as running south-west from the house and dividing the garden into north and south.

The back: north annex and storehouse

North of the main house is the single-storey north annex, with the storehouse standing against its west side. The two line the northern edge of the plot, and the Agency values the annex as part of that northern edge together with the storehouse.

What Was Registered

The six items of the Hirota Family Residence were registered on 24 June 2021 as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (structures), with consecutive registration numbers 28-0759 to 28-0764. All six were listed for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

• Main house (28-0759): single-storey timber, kayabuki thatch (temporarily sheathed in copper), building area 240 square metres
• North annex (28-0760): single-storey timber, tiled, building area 15 square metres
• Storehouse (28-0761): two-storey dozo-zukuri earthen storehouse, tiled, building area 23 square metres
• Nagayamon gate (28-0762): single-storey timber, tiled, building area 30 square metres
• South wall (28-0763): brick, tiled, 20 metres long
• Garden gate and fence (28-0764): timber gate with a tiled roof and an opening of 1.2 metres; timber fence with a tiled coping, 16 metres in all

The south wall and the garden gate and fence are classed not as buildings but as "other structures". None of the six was registered for its size alone; each counts as part of the view of the whole homestead.

Visiting and Getting There

The Hirota Family Residence is a private home, and Amagasaki City states plainly that it is not open to the public. You cannot enter the grounds or any of the buildings. The gatehouse and south wall stand on the road along the south side of the plot, but we have not checked on site how much of them can be seen from the street. If you walk past, please keep to the road and respect the residents' privacy. Photographs of every building are published in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.

For questions about registered cultural properties in the city, the contact is the cultural properties section of the Amagasaki City Museum of History (phone 06-6489-9801).

The nearest station is Tsukaguchi on the JR Fukuchiyama Line (JR Takarazuka Line); the homestead lies about 300 metres south-east of it in a straight line. Tsukaguchi Station on the Hankyu Kobe Line is about 1.2 kilometres to the west-north-west. Both distances are map estimates; no official directions are published.

About the Name

The name is read Hirota-ke Jūtaku, and the district, 上坂部, is read Kamisakabe. Amagasaki City points out that the 廣 in 廣田 is the older form of the character, written with the 广 radical over 黄, and the family name is not written with the modern 広. In the Agency database each item carries the residence name followed by its own: main house (omoya), north annex (kitahanare), storehouse (dozō), nagayamon gate (nagayamon), south wall (minamibei), and garden gate and fence (niwamon oyobi hei).