Main Building of the Lee and Yamashita Family Residence

A Small House on a Steep Slope

The Main House of the Ri and Yamashita Family Residence (李及び山下家住宅主屋, Ri oyobi Yamashita-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden house in Suwayamacho, Chuo Ward, Kobe, built around 1933 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties in 2006. It faces south on a hillside below Suwayama Park, and the approach road reaches the site at its southeastern corner.

The measurements recorded by the Agency for Cultural Affairs are precise and unglamorous: about 12 metres along the ridge, about 8 metres across, a building area of roughly 85 square metres. That is small. The Asaki house over in Kitano, registered on the same national list, covers about 126 square metres. The interest here lies in what the plan does with so little space.

An entrance hall and a staircase sit at the centre of the building, with rooms opening off either side. This is Western domestic planning of the period rather than Japanese: a hall that distributes movement, instead of the chain of tatami rooms and sliding screens that organises a traditional house. Around 1933, a Kobe family building on the hillside could choose either, and this one chose the hall.

The roof is hipped and laid with tiles. The exterior walls are mortar rendered, not the horizontal weatherboarding used on the older houses over in Kitano. Round windows and vertically sliding sash windows are set into that render, both of them imported details that had become ordinary in Kobe by the early Showa years without ever becoming Japanese.

Registered for What It Adds to the Hillside

Registration took effect on 29 November 2006, with public notice on 19 December of the same year. The house carries registration number 28-0250 and belongs to the 53rd round of registrations. The criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape of the country.

That wording deserves a moment. Japan protects historic buildings at two very different intensities. Designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure is selective, restrictive and heavily funded. Registration, introduced in 1996, is deliberately looser: the owner notifies the authorities before major alteration and receives advice, and the system exists to catch the enormous stock of modern buildings that were vanishing faster than anyone could assess them individually.

Under that system, three grounds are available. Two of them reward a building on its own merits. The third, the one used here, asks a different question: does this building make the place around it what it is? The Ri and Yamashita house was listed on those terms. No architect is recorded for it. No client's brief survives. What it has is a position on a slope, a silhouette against the trees, and enough intact 1930s detail to hold the character of the lane it belongs to.

It is a useful reminder that not every listed building in Japan is a masterpiece, and that the register was never meant to contain only masterpieces.

Looking at It From the Lane

Suwayama is one of the steepest inhabited slopes in central Kobe. Lanes double back on themselves, several of them turn into flights of steps, and the ground drops away far enough that the roofs below sit at eye level. A house built here in 1933 had to be planned around the gradient before anything else, which is why the entrance hall and stair occupy the centre of the plan and the living rooms take the sunny south face.

The round window is the detail most people notice. It is a small thing, and in a mortar wall it reads as a deliberate flourish rather than a structural necessity. Sash windows sit alongside it. Neither would appear on a Japanese house of the same date built anywhere other than a port city.

Above the house, Suwayama Park climbs towards Kinseidai, a terrace said to take its name from a transit of Venus observed here by a French expedition in 1874, and then to Venus Bridge, a figure-of-eight spiral ramp about 90 metres long. The view from the top takes in the harbour. Walking down from the park towards the city gives the best sense of the terrain the house was built into.

The property is privately owned and there is no public access, inside or on the grounds. It is recorded in the national database as belonging to a company. Anyone coming to look should stay on the public road, keep noise down in what is an ordinary residential neighbourhood, and photograph the exterior from the street only. Do not photograph through windows and do not enter the site.

Getting there from Sannomiya: city bus route 7 to the Suwayama Kōen Shita stop, then a walk uphill of roughly twenty minutes. From Kenchōmae station on the Seishin-Yamate subway line the walk is closer to thirty minutes, all of it climbing. Wear shoes you can climb in.