Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall

A Meiji brick gate standing in the old town

The Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall (旧諸岡家住宅煉瓦門及び塀) is a brick gateway and boundary wall of the late Meiji period in Kamimachi, Ryugasaki City, Ibaraki Prefecture, entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 10 May 2018. It counts as 1 structure.

The gate opening measures 3.7 meters. A pair of main piers stands at the centre, flanked on either side by a slightly lower pair belonging to a side entrance. The central piers rise 3.8 meters, high enough that anyone standing in front of them has to tilt their head back. Walls 2.2 meters high run out from both sides, and their present combined length is 10 meters.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database dates the work to the late Meiji period, between 1898 and 1912. Ryugasaki City records attribute it to the businessman Morooka Ryosuke (諸岡良佐), who is said to have built it around 1910 together with the house it fronted.

The ground it occupies today, however, is not the ground it was built on. The Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall was taken apart and re-erected on its present site in Kamimachi in 2015.

Why the gate is on the register

The Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall carries registration number 08-0303. The criterion applied to it is the one covering work that sets a standard in design, rather than the criteria for landscape contribution or for construction that could no longer be reproduced. What the assessors singled out was the coherence of the composition.

Brick was one of the measures by which Meiji Japan took stock of its own modernisation. Construction in brick began with government offices, factories and railway stations, and only later reached private houses in provincial towns. Ryugasaki was a commercial centre for the southern part of Ibaraki, and the fact that a former town mayor's house here was fronted in brick shows how far that shift travelled into local society.

Japan's Registered Tangible Cultural Property system assumes that an owner keeps using a building and files notifications when it changes. This gate reached that system by an unusual route: it was dismantled, held in storage for nine years, and then rebuilt. What went onto the register in 2018 is the reassembled structure.

What to look at up close

The first thing that catches the eye on the Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall is a horizontal band that runs right around the upper part of each pier. Several courses of brick are set slightly proud of the face, throwing a single line of shadow. That is the whole of the ornament, and it is enough: a plain rectangular shaft reads differently once a horizontal division crosses it.

Each pier is finished at the top with a projection that recalls a capital, widening a little as it rises. It looks like the vocabulary of Western masonry translated into the material a local bricklayer actually had to hand.

The heights step down in three stages. The main piers reach 3.8 meters, the side piers are lower, and the walls on either flank stand 2.2 meters. Standing square in front of the opening and looking left and right, you can follow that descent.

Only 10 meters of wall survive. Ryugasaki City records that the original ran to more than 35 meters, so what stands here is a fragment of the frontage that once faced the street. Walking the ten meters with that figure in mind changes the scale of the thing.

The gate now sits on city-owned land beside Yasaka Shrine, next to Chuo Park, in a district where houses and shops still mix. Park trees show above the wall. Nothing stands behind the gate: the entrance and its wall are all that came through. That emptiness beyond the opening is part of what makes a relocated gate worth walking up to.

Morooka Ryosuke and the nine years in storage

The man who built the Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall belongs to any account of modern Ryugasaki. According to the city, Morooka Ryosuke served as the eleventh mayor of Ryugasaki town, headed Ryugasaki Bank, and was the sixth president of the Ryuzaki Railway Company, the predecessor of today's Kanto Railway Ryugasaki Line.

His house was built near Ryugasaki Station in 1910. A man who ran the railway put his residence within sight of his own terminus, and the brick gate with its long wall was the face it presented to the street.

In 2006 the Morooka family decided to demolish the house, and the gate and wall would have gone with it. Residents who did not want to lose them formed a committee for preserving the red brick and set about saving the structure. Contributions from committee members and donations from supporters were joined by a grant from the East Japan Railway Culture Foundation and by funding through Ryugasaki City's citizen collaboration programme. The bricks, held in storage in the meantime, were re-erected on the present site in 2015, nine years after the house came down.

The site chosen was not the station forecourt but a corner of the old town, where people still pass in front of the gate on their way through the neighbourhood.

Visiting and access

The Former Morooka Family Residence Brick Gate and Wall stands in the open on city-owned land beside a park, so it can be seen at any hour of any day. There is no admission charge and no ticket. Because no building stands behind the gate, there is no opening season or special viewing period to plan around.

Photography is not restricted. The banded piers and their capital-like tops read better from an oblique angle than head on, and early morning or late afternoon light brings out the depth of colour in the brick.

Coming by train, change at Ryugasakishi Station on the JR Joban Line onto the Kanto Railway Ryugasaki Line. The interchange keeps its older name of Sanuki Station on the Kanto Railway side. The line runs 4.5 kilometres to its terminus at Ryugasaki Station in about 7 minutes, and the gate is roughly 10 minutes on foot south of that terminus, beside Yasaka Shrine in Kamimachi.

No visitor parking is provided at the gate itself, so drivers need to use public facilities or paid parking nearby. Enquiries about the property go to the Culture and Lifelong Learning Division of the Ryugasaki City Board of Education, on 0297-64-1111.