Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House

A farmhouse turned to face its own gate

The Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House is a single-story timber farmhouse at Shimizu in Yoshise, Tsukuba City, Ibaraki Prefecture, built in the closing decades of the Edo period between 1830 and 1868, and it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 17 November 2015. It stands near the middle of a compound of about 1000 tsubo, roughly 3300 square meters, with its front turned east toward the gate on the lane.

It did not always face that way. A survey map of 1883, read alongside what the family remembered, puts the original entrance on the north side of the plot, opening south. Around 1886, when the Nagayamon went up on the street frontage, the house itself was jacked up and hauled west across the compound by the method carpenters call Hikiya, then set down with its front swung round to the east. The national database of the Agency for Cultural Affairs records the move under the year 1886.

The plan runs 7.5 Ken along the ridge by 5.5 ken across, and 1 ken is roughly 1.8 meters. Registered building area is 191 square meters. Nothing projects: the whole house sits under a single hipped roof in Yosemune-zukuri, the straight-block form rather than the L-shaped plan of the northern provinces.

The roof has changed twice. It began as Kayabuki thatch. Marks left in the roof frame, taken together with family memory, place a change to tile somewhere in the Taisho years between 1912 and 1926. The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 damaged the building, and in 2012 the tiles gave way to the sheet metal now overhead. The smoke vent that had ventilated the thatch came off at the same time.

Why the Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House was registered

The Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House carries registration number 08-0279 and joined the Registered Tangible Cultural Property list in the 82nd round, on the same day as the Nagayamon gate standing in front of it, number 08-0280. Tsukuba City counts the pair as a single entry of 2 buildings in its published list. The criterion applied was the first of the three available at registration: that a building contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs puts the case in one line. The house keeps the form of an upper-tier farmhouse of the early modern period as it was built on the rural edge of what is now Tsukuba. No single member or technique here is rare. What has survived is the combination, still legible in one structure: the earth-floored working end, the raised living rooms, and the formal step-entry reserved for guests.

The opinion submitted with the registration was written by Ando Kunihiro, professor emeritus of the University of Tsukuba. He dates the house to the first half of the 19th century by reading the frame rather than any document, citing the main post, the deep sashi-kamoi beams that divide the living hall from the tea room and the Zashiki, and the segai eaves treatment carried around three sides. The national database gives the wider bracket of 1830 to 1868, so the two readings overlap without agreeing exactly.

The Nemoto family are said to have settled at Yoshise by the early 18th century, on the evidence of memorial tablets kept in the house, and used the house name Jiemon. A formal reception building once stood beside the main house and has since been demolished. A barn remains at the northeast corner of the compound and a miso store behind the house.

What to look for at the Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House

Stand in front and read the facade from right to left. At the right end a door opens into the Doma, the earth-floored working space. In the middle there is a plain veranda. At the upper end, on the left, a Shikidai step forms the formal entrance. Three ways into one building, and the ranking between them was the point. Field hands and deliveries came through the doma, the household crossed the veranda, a guest of standing was received at the shikidai.

Look up at the eaves. They are built in the segai manner, in which the eave purlin rides on short beams pushed out beyond the wall so that the overhang reaches further than the wall plate alone would carry it. The treatment runs along the front and both sides, and a Geya lean-to skirts the building beneath it. On a farmhouse this kept rain off the walls and announced the household's rank in the same gesture.

The raised floor is divided four ways, the plan known as yomadori. Holding those divisions are the main post in the doma and the sashi-kamoi, beams set at door-head height that take structural load while doubling as the head rail for the sliding screens. The Zashiki at the front upper corner has an alcove and a closet built into it. That corner is where a visitor was seated.

Some of what stands here is younger than the frame. The bathroom at the rear was added by Kameichiro, head of the family two generations before the present one, and the corridor and privy are older additions than that. Until 1981 a stable projected from the back of the doma and a narrow veranda ran along its south side. The stable came down that year and the doma was rebuilt and enlarged into the shape it holds now.

The house was lived in until 1989. From 1995 it worked as a restaurant cooking vegetables grown nearby, which the registration opinion cites as an early case in the city of putting an old farmhouse back into use.

Visiting the Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House

The compound is open as Tsukuba Bunkago, a cluster of small businesses working out of the old farm buildings: a gallery in the gatehouse, a coffee roaster in the barn, a furniture shop, a pottery workshop, a coworking space. The grounds are free to walk through and the operator invites visitors to come and stroll. Access to the inside of the Former Nemoto Family Residence Main House depends on which tenant is using it and when, so ask rather than assume.

The site office answers the telephone on 029-857-3355 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. The whole site closes on Wednesdays and over the New Year period. Management is in the hands of Dengen Plan Co., Ltd. No admission is charged for the grounds, though the individual tenants keep their own hours and set their own prices.

No photography rule is published for the site. Visitors photograph the grounds and the exteriors freely, but for an interior it is worth a word with the business using the room before raising a camera.

By car, leave the Joban Expressway at Sakura-Tsuchiura Interchange and drive about 10 minutes. From Tsukuba Station on the Tsukuba Express, take the Kanto Railway bus bound for Tsuchiura Station, get off at Kise and walk about 8 minutes. From Tsuchiura Station on the JR Joban Line, take the Kanto Railway bus bound for Tsukuba Daigaku Chuo and use the same stop. A taxi from either station costs roughly 1500 to 2000 yen. One warning for navigation apps: the operator publishes its postal address as 1679-1 Kise, while the cultural property register gives 1680 Shimizu, Yoshise, a difference of one lot number.