Nakayama Family Main Building

A House Built for a Teacher of Flowers

The Main House of the Nakayama Family Residence (中山家住宅主屋, Nakayama-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden house in Sanjocho, Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, completed in 1930 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties in 2007. The Agency for Cultural Affairs attributes the design to Takeda Goichi and records that he worked to the taste of a client who taught ikebana, the art of flower arrangement.

That last detail changes how the building reads. A flower master does not commission rooms in the abstract. Arrangements need a specific alcove, a particular quality of light, a viewing distance and a floor the arrangement can sit on. The house that resulted has a living room with a fireplace, Japanese rooms with formal alcove fittings, and a tea room, all under one roof of Spanish tiles.

The building covers about 139 square metres and has a basement. Its exterior walls are finished in cream mortar worked to a rough texture. Set on the southern foot of the Rokko mountains, it belongs to a stretch of hillside that was filling with the villas of Osaka merchants and professionals through the 1920s and 1930s.

Spanish tiles and a rendered wall on the outside, a tea room on the inside. In many houses of this period that combination announces itself as a compromise. The registration record judges this one differently, describing the Japanese and Western elements as fused without any break.

Takeda Goichi and the Tea Room He Never Stopped Thinking About

Takeda Goichi (1872 to 1938) is often called the father of architecture in the Kansai region. He graduated at the top of his class from the architecture department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1897, and the subject he chose for his graduation thesis was the tea room. He then studied in Europe from 1901, returning with a first-hand knowledge of Art Nouveau and the Vienna Secession that few architects in Japan then had. He taught at the Kyoto College of Arts and Crafts, ran the Nagoya Higher Technical School from 1918, and worked to establish the architecture department at Kyoto Imperial University, becoming a professor there when it opened in 1920. He is also credited with introducing the work of Frank Lloyd Wright to Japan.

Set that career beside the Nakayama house and the commission stops looking like a minor domestic job. A man who wrote his student thesis on the tea room, absorbed European design at first hand, and then taught for decades in Kyoto was unusually well equipped to put a tea room and a fireplace in one building without either looking like a guest.

Registration took effect on 15 May 2007, under registration number 28-0264 in the 54th round, on the criterion that the building serves as a model of design. The gate and wall of the same property were registered on the same day as a separate entry. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database leaves the public notice date blank for this entry, which is worth flagging for anyone citing the record precisely.

Ashiya, and What You Can Actually See

The house is closed. It is private property, not open to the public in any form, and Ashiya City withholds its street address from the published list of designated and registered cultural properties, recording the location simply as undisclosed. Visitors should not attempt to identify or approach it. The reason to know about this building is what it says about a place, not a doorway to stand in front of.

The place is worth understanding on its own terms. Ashiya sits between Kobe and Osaka on the narrow shelf of land between the Rokko range and the sea, and from the 1900s onwards the railway companies sold that shelf as a place to live well outside the industrial city. The culture that grew there, usually called Hanshinkan Modernism, produced schools, clubs, churches and a great many houses in which Western planning and Japanese rooms had to be reconciled by somebody.

One reconciliation from that period is open to the public and only a short distance away. The former Yamamura Residence in Yamatecho, now the Yodoko Guest House, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1924. It became an Important Cultural Property in 1974 and remains one of very few Wright buildings in Japan that anyone can walk through. Seeing it alongside the record of the Nakayama house gives a sense of the range of answers architects were giving to the same question on the same hillside within six years of each other.

Also in Sanjocho is the Ege-no-yama site, a Yayoi period hilltop settlement designated a National Historic Site in 2011. Ashiya City publishes walking maps of the town's modern architecture and a series of booklets on individual properties, which are the best starting point for planning a day here.

Ashiya has three stations on separate lines, spread from the shore to the hillside: Hanshin Ashiya in the south, JR Ashiya in the middle, and Hankyu Ashiyagawa highest up, which is the closest to the hillside neighbourhoods. JR Ashiya is roughly fifteen minutes from Osaka and under ten from Sannomiya.