Gotokuan Main House

What Is the Gotokuan Main House?

The Gotokuan Main House (五徳庵主屋, Gotoku-an Shuoku) is a single-story wooden house built in 1900 in Daishoji Nishikicho, Kaga City, Ishikawa Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on February 9, 2005. It is the principal dwelling of Gotokuan and was registered on the same day as the compound's gate, warehouse and annex.

The house stands north of the gate and warehouse and faces south. With a building area of 99 square meters it is the largest of the four. The roof is basically a Kirizuma-zukuri gable covered in Sangawara-buki tiles.

Guests on the East, Daily Life on the West

The plan of the Gotokuan Main House splits cleanly in two. On the east side are the entrance and a three-mat toritsugi, a small anteroom where callers were received and announced, with two eight-mat reception rooms running north to south. Entrance, anteroom, reception room: it is a familiar sequence in samurai houses, where receiving a visitor correctly was a matter of form.

The west side holds the kitchen and wash areas and two living rooms, where the family's everyday life went on out of the guests' way.

A tatami mat is roughly 1.8 by 0.9 meters, so each reception room is about the size of a generous modern living room. Giving two of them to guests in a house of this size says a good deal about priorities.

A Samurai Plan After the Samurai

By 1900 the domains had been gone for almost thirty years, abolished in 1871. The Daishoji Domain no longer existed, and the middle-ranking samurai who once lived in this district had become ordinary citizens.

Even so, the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Gotokuan Main House as a Meiji-period house in the lineage of the middle-ranking samurai residence, and Kaga City calls Gotokuan a modern home that keeps traces of a samurai house. It is not an Edo survivor. It is a new house built to the old pattern, and that is what makes it worth a look.

Why the Gotokuan Main House Was Registered

The Gotokuan Main House was registered, as number 17-0124, under the criterion for buildings that serve as models of design. The Agency regards it as a valuable surviving Meiji house that carries on the form of the middle-ranking samurai residence, with its entrance, anteroom and reception rooms in a single line.

Seeing the Gotokuan Main House

We could find no official information on interior viewing of the Gotokuan Main House. It sits in the middle of the plot, behind the street-front gate and warehouse, so visitors see it from outside the gate without entering the grounds.

Because its south-facing front lies beyond the gate, the view from the road is framed by the gate itself. Please photograph only from the public road. Directions to the compound are on the Gotokuan page.