Irie Family Residence Main House

A 1926 townhouse on Makabe's old jinya street

Irie Family Residence Main House is a wooden 2-storey townhouse of 1926 standing on the west side of Gojinyamae-dori in the Makabe district of Sakuragawa City, Ibaraki Prefecture, and it was placed on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2002.

Gojinyamae-dori takes its name from the Jinya, the administrative post that the Kasama domain kept at the centre of Makabe after the castle here fell out of use. The street has carried the town's main commerce ever since. Walk it today and the buildings come at you out of order: a plastered storefront from the closing years of the shogunate, then a gate, then a low tiled roof, then the tall boarded flank of Irie Family Residence Main House.

The plan measures 6 Ken along the ridge and 3 ken across, giving a building area of 60 square meters. The roof is hipped, in the Yosemune-zukuri manner, and covered with the pantiles known as Sangawara-buki. What sets the building apart from most of its neighbours is the direction of approach. Makabe's shops usually open along their long side. This one is Tsumairi, entered from the short end, so the facade the street sees is narrow and tall rather than wide and low.

Outside, the walls are clad in horizontal boarding of the Shitami-itabari type, held down by slender vertical battens notched like a bamboo whisk. Carpenters call this sasarako. A single-bay gate stands on the south side of the house. Across the front, a Geya canopy runs at first-floor height, and its rafters carry a faint upward swell rather than a straight line.

Why Irie Family Residence Main House is on the register

Japan's register of tangible cultural properties, created in 1996, works differently from the older system of designation. Buildings enter it under broad criteria and their owners keep using them, with a duty to notify the state before major alteration rather than to seek permission for every repair. Irie Family Residence Main House was registered under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. Sakuragawa City had begun using the Registered Tangible Cultural Property system in earnest a few years earlier, and within a short span more than a hundred buildings in Makabe went onto the register.

The reason this particular house earned its place is written into its eaves line. Makabe burned in 1837. Before the fire the town was roofed largely in thatch and board; afterwards the merchants put up plastered shopfronts and storehouses under tile, and the oldest buildings standing today date from the years just after. When the railway reached Makabe in the Taishō era, two-storey frontages with projecting eaves beams spread through the town, and Irie Family Residence Main House belongs squarely to that wave. Its second-floor eaves were taken up high, and the registration record credits that height with giving variation to the historic streetscape. Standing at the kerb, you can watch the roofline of the street step up and then drop again.

The wider district followed the buildings onto the protection lists. In 2010 the area around this street was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, covering roughly 17.6 hectares. The following year the Tōhoku earthquake struck, and Makabe took the heaviest damage of any preservation district in the country, with more than nine out of ten traditional buildings affected. Repair work has run for years since. Several of the frontages you now see standing straight were leaning badly in 2011.

What to look for at Irie Family Residence Main House

Start across the street, far enough back to take in the whole elevation at once.

The first thing to test is the curve of the lower canopy. Sight along the eaves edge of the Geya from one end. Instead of running dead straight it rises very slightly in the middle, a convexity carpenters call mukuri. It sheds rain a little faster and it keeps the shadow line from looking heavy. On a bright afternoon the shadow the canopy throws onto the boards below bows in the same way.

Then look at the boarding itself. The horizontal planks lap one over the next, and the vertical battens pinning them are cut with a stepped profile so that each notch beds against a plank edge. Rain runs off the battens rather than sitting in the joint. The timber has silvered where the weather reaches it and stayed darker under the canopy, so the wall reads as two different colours split along the line of the eaves.

Above that, count the storeys against the neighbours. The ground floor of Irie Family Residence Main House is conventional enough; it is the upper floor that has been given real ceiling height, which is why the ridge sits high. Machiya of the preceding generation often had no more than a low storage loft under the roof, lit by a slot window. Here the second floor is a proper room.

The small gate to the south is easy to miss. It spans a single bay, with a ridge of its own, and it marks the point where the commercial frontage gives way to the private part of the plot. Gates are one of the recurring features of Makabe: the town was a merchant settlement, yet gateways of the kind usually associated with samurai residences stand along its streets in some number.

Visiting Irie Family Residence Main House

Irie Family Residence Main House is a private property and is not open to the public. There are no opening hours and no admission fee, because there is nothing to admit visitors to. The building is seen entirely from the public street, which is where its interest lies in any case, and the whole of the registered elevation is visible from the pavement opposite. Please do not enter the gate or the plot.

Photography from the street is not restricted. Ordinary courtesy applies: the upper windows belong to somebody's rooms, so frame the building rather than its occupants, and keep out of the roadway, which carries local traffic and is narrower than it looks.

Getting there takes some planning, because Makabe has no railway station today. From Iwase Station on the JR Mito Line, a taxi takes about 20 minutes. Coming from the Tsukuba direction, a Tsukuba city bus runs to Tsukubasanguchi in roughly 50 minutes, where you change to a Sakuragawa city bus bound for the Iwase government office for about another 20 minutes. By car, the drive from the Sakuragawa-Chikusei interchange is about 20 minutes, and from Tsuchiura-kita interchange by Route 125 and Prefectural Route 41 about 50 minutes. The municipal car park at Makabe Takajōmachi, at 279-1 Makabe, holds 65 cars and puts you a few minutes' walk from the house.

Late winter is the busiest season on this street. From early February to 3 March each year the town's residents set out hina dolls in their front rooms and shopfronts, and the lanes fill with visitors on foot; parts of the centre are closed to cars on the peak weekends. Irie Family Residence Main House is worth seeing at that time for the crowd's sake or avoiding at that time for the quiet, depending on what you want. In midwinter, with the leaves off, the eaves geometry reads more clearly than in summer.