Yano Family Residence Main House

About the Yano Family Residence Main House

The Yano Family Residence Main House (箟家住宅主屋, Yano-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is a 2-storey wooden dwelling built in 1838 in Gogazuka 3-chome, Itami City, Hyogo Prefecture, and was entered on the register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 6, 2024. It stands a little north of the center of the estate and faces south. With a building area of 262 square meters, it is both the oldest and the largest of the ten structures registered together at the Yano Family Residence.

The upper storey is a tsushi-nikai, a low-ceilinged half floor tucked under the roof and used mainly for storage. The roof itself is a hip-and-gable irimoya form covered in pantiles, and a lean-to geya roof runs around all four sides of the core. Seen from a distance, the house therefore reads as two bands of tile, one above the other.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records three later campaigns of work: additions in 1845 and 1923, and a renovation in 1986. The Yano Main House was extended seven years after it went up, again 85 years later, and repaired once more after another six decades. It is a building that kept changing with the household.

Why It Was Registered

The Yano Family Residence Main House was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape of the nation. The Agency's summary singles out its scale, describing it as a large main house that carries the history of the settlement.

The numbers make the point. At 262 square meters, roughly 79 tsubo, the house is more than two and a half times the size of the next-largest building on the estate, the barn, which covers 99 square meters. Storehouses and sheds line the edges of the plot, but only the main house has real bulk, and that difference shows at once where the center of the household lay.

The layers of alteration add a second kind of value. The 1845 addition came in the late Edo period. The 1923 work followed five years after the clothing storehouse was built on the north side in 1918, when three neighboring outbuildings were also altered. Taken together, the dates suggest that the whole estate was overhauled in the middle of the Taisho era.

What to Look For

The shikidai entrance

On the south front of the Yano Main House is a shikidai, a raised, board-floored entry step where guests of standing were received. Its presence tells you that the family kept a formal entrance separate from the everyday way in through the earthen-floored work area. Visitors of rank and the household did not come through the same door.

Plaster walls and mushiko windows

The exterior walls are finished in white shikkui lime plaster, and the half-storey above is pierced by mushiko-mado, small openings screened with thick plastered bars set close together. They let light and air into the loft while keeping the openings small enough to resist fire. The row of dark slits against the white wall is the most memorable feature of the elevation.

Earthen floor to the east, four rooms to the west

Inside, the Yano Family Residence Main House divides cleanly in two. The eastern half is a doma, an earthen-floored hall for cooking and work. The western half holds four raised rooms arranged in a neat grid, the plan Japanese architectural historians call seikei yomadori. The southwest room, closest to the shikidai, has a tokonoma alcove and was presumably where guests were entertained. Rooms grew more formal toward the west, and knowing that gradient helps you read the building even when only the roof is visible.

Visiting

The Yano Family Residence Main House is still a family home, and its interior is closed to the public. The shikidai, the earthen hall and the reception rooms cannot be visited (checked September 26, 2026).

Viewing from outside is limited too. The house stands in the middle of the plot, screened on the south by the gatehouse and the southwest wall and on the north by the row of storehouses, so there is no point on the public road with a clear view of its walls or entrance. Expect to see the upper part of the irimoya roof rising above the gate and walls.

No sign prohibits photography, but please do not point a camera into the private grounds.