Onuki Family Residence Main House

A brewer's house that arrived in Oarai by cart

Onuki Family Residence Main House is a wooden 2-storey merchant's house of 1912 standing in the Isohama district of Oarai Town, Ibaraki Prefecture, and it was placed on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2006.

The building is older than its address. It was put up in 1912 and moved to its present site in 1926, dismantled and re-erected rather than built afresh, which was ordinary practice for a substantial timber house in the Taishō period. The family that owned it ran a brewing business, and the house was the residential and business core of that concern.

The footprint is 12.7 m along the ridge by 11.9 m across, with a building area of 142 square meters. Those two figures are almost the same, and that is the first surprise. Merchant houses in Japan are usually deep and narrow, a shape driven by street frontage taxes and by the pressure of neighbours on both sides. Onuki Family Residence Main House is close to square. Whoever laid it out had land to spare and used it.

The roof is covered in the pantiles known as Sangawara-buki. Over the west end it is treated in the Irimoya-zukuri manner, with a gable riding above a hipped lower slope, which is the most formal roof shape available to a house of this class. Inside, the Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes that good timber was used throughout and the finish work is careful, though the interior is not accessible to visitors.

Why Onuki Family Residence Main House is on the register

Oarai has four buildings on the national register of tangible cultural properties, and Onuki Family Residence Main House is one of them. The town added it under the criterion for buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape, a broad test that suits structures whose value lies in how they sit in a place rather than in rarity alone. Registration as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property leaves the building in private hands and in use; the owner notifies the state before major alteration instead of applying for permission at every turn.

What the assessors singled out is the west and south elevations. On both, the eaves project a long way from the wall, carried on beams pushed out beyond the posts. Carpenters call the technique dashigeta. It buys shade and shelter along the two faces that take the weather and the approach, and it gives the house a heavy, settled outline that a flush eaves line would not.

The record makes a second point only obliquely. Onuki Family Residence Main House stands just west of the centre of Oarai, well back from the shore. Four buildings in the whole town hold this status, so a brewer's house of 1912 that is still in use and still in repair is one of the few points where the older settlement can be read from the street.

What to look for at Onuki Family Residence Main House

Approach from the west if you can. That is the face the house was arranged around, and everything about it is meant to be read from that side.

Look first at where the eaves stop. Stand close to the wall and look up: the roof edge is far out beyond your head, and the load is taken not by brackets but by the ends of horizontal beams that run out through the wall plane. The under-surface you are looking at is the exposed rafter work. In wet weather the strip of dry ground along the base of the wall shows exactly how far the overhang reaches.

Then take in the roof shape at the west end. The lower part slopes on all sides; above it a triangular gable rises and faces you. That combination is the Irimoya-zukuri form, and it was not a neutral choice. A plain hipped or gabled roof would have cost less and shed water just as well. The owner of Onuki Family Residence Main House wanted the more formal profile, and put it on the side the street sees.

Compare the proportions with any nearby townhouse. Most present a narrow face and run back deep into the plot. Here the two dimensions are within 1 metre of each other, so the building reads as a block rather than a slice. The upper storey carries that mass without looking top-heavy, largely because the deep eaves cut a horizontal shadow across the elevation and break its height in two.

The tiles repay a moment as well. Pantiles of this type interlock in an S profile, so a roof of them reads as a run of alternating light and shadow rather than the flat field a modern roof gives. Where the pitch changes at the hip, the courses have to be cut and closed, and the neatness of that junction is one measure of the roofer's work.

Visiting Onuki Family Residence Main House

Onuki Family Residence Main House is privately owned and is not open to the public. There is no admission charge, no opening time and no interior visit. Viewing is from the public road, and the west and south elevations that carry the building's interest are the ones that face outward. Do not enter the grounds.

Photography from the road is unrestricted. The house is lived in, so keep to the building itself and avoid pointing a camera into windows or over the boundary. The lanes here are narrow and residential; a car will want the space you are standing in sooner or later.

Access is straightforward, which is not true of most registered houses in the prefecture. Onuki Family Residence Main House lies roughly 400 metres west of Oarai Station on the Kashima Rinkai Railway Oarai-Kashima Line, about a 10 minute walk through the old part of town. Trains run from Mito, and the line also connects south towards Kashima. By car, the town is reached from the Kita-Kanto Expressway, and there is no dedicated parking at the house itself, so use one of the public car parks near the station and walk.

Morning light suits the west face poorly and evening light suits it well, which is worth knowing if you have come for the eaves. In winter the low sun rakes along the underside of the overhang and picks out the rafters; in high summer, with the sun overhead, the same detail flattens out. Onuki Family Residence Main House stands within a short walk of the older commercial lanes of Isohama, so the visit can be folded into a walk of the district rather than made as a trip in itself.