Former Fujimura Family Residence (Tamura Family Residence) Main House

A Tamura Family House of 1937

The Former Fujimura Family Residence (Tamura Family Residence) Main House is a two-storey wooden house built in 1937 on the old Hokkoku Kaidō highway in Nonoichi City, Ishikawa Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2021.

The Tamura family built it after taking over the old Fujimura home, the house that had hosted Emperor Meiji on a rest stop. Rather than clear the site, they kept the early Meiji annex and set their new house deeper in the lot. The tiled building covers 247 square metres, and in the same year the family added the Rear Gate and Board Fence along the northern street, apparently finishing that side of the property as part of one campaign.

Of the eight registered structures at the Former Fujimura Family Residence, this is the largest, and it holds the first registration number, 17-292. Yet from the highway you barely know it is there: it sits back behind the gate and the earthen wall.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the house as a modern Japanese-style residence (kindai wafū jūtaku) built from carefully chosen timber, with close attention to details such as the carved ranma transoms. The term covers houses built with traditional carpentry but planned around the way families lived after the Meiji era.

The floor plan shows what that means. A central corridor (a naka-rōka) runs in from the entrance, with three formal zashiki rooms in a row on its south side and the family's private rooms to the north. Separating guest rooms from living rooms with a hallway was an idea that spread through Japanese houses in the Taishō and early Shōwa years, and here it is applied to a substantial post-town house.

The formal criterion is contribution to the historic landscape. The Main House is hard to see from the road, but it completes a plot that also holds a Meiji annex, a late Edo storehouse and the gates and walls.

What to Look For

The exterior is all about stacked roofs. Part of the upper floor pushes forward, and a second irimoya (hip-and-gable) end is layered on top of it; a separate irimoya porch then marks the entrance. Nonoichi City calls the result a multi-layered irimoya roof and an imposing front.

Upstairs are five rooms, one of them a tea room. Add the three zashiki downstairs and you have a house that gave a great deal of its space to receiving guests, which is also why so much care went into the transoms and other visible details.

Look, too, at where the house sits. The early Meiji annex survives just to its southwest. By keeping the older reception rooms rather than demolishing them, the Tamura family left two generations of domestic architecture side by side on the same plot of the Former Fujimura Family Residence.

Visiting the Main House

The Main House is a private family home. You cannot enter, and the interiors, including the central corridor, the upstairs tea room and the transoms, are not shown to the public.

Because it stands deep in the lot behind the Front Gate and Earthen Wall, the building cannot be seen in full from the street. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database has a photograph of the facade if you want a clear look. On site, please keep to the road outside the gate. Directions and general viewing conditions are on the Former Fujimura Family Residence page.