Sato Family Main House

Built in 1937 as a Restaurant

Sato Family Main House (佐藤家住宅主屋, Satō-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey wooden building in the Jūichiya-machi district of Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, constructed in 1937 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 9 June 2004. It has a tile roof and a footprint of 107 square metres.

The building's history contains a turn rarely found among Kanazawa's modern structures. It did not begin as a house. It was built as a ryōtei, a high-end restaurant serving formal multi-course meals in private tatami rooms, and that origin is why the Agency for Cultural Affairs files it under tertiary industry rather than housing.

Jūichiya-machi lies south of central Kanazawa, on rising ground beyond the Sai River. It is a standalone district name without numbered subdivisions, bounded by the Wakakusa, Hōjima, Teramachi and Heiwa neighbourhoods. The name is said to come from 1622, when farmers from Izumino built field huts here and cleared land; eleven households settled, and jūichi means eleven. The settlement existed through the Edo period as Jūichiya village in Ishikawa County, and became part of Kanazawa in 1925.

This was never a licensed pleasure quarter like the teahouse districts across the city. It was a residential slope running toward the Teramachi temple plateau. A two-storey restaurant went up here in 1937, shortly before wartime constraints closed in on Japanese cities.

Moved Rather Than Demolished

After the Second World War the building was relocated by hikiya and converted into a private house. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the conversion to around 1952.

Hikiya is the technique of lifting a building and moving it bodily to a new position without taking it apart. It works because a Japanese timber frame behaves as a single connected structure. Compared with dismantling and rebuilding, it spares the members from damage and preserves everything that depends on accumulated dimensions: how the sliding doors sit in their grooves, how high the ceilings run, how the rooms relate to one another.

In postwar Kanazawa the restaurant trade in this form had become hard to sustain. Rather than demolishing a building that had lost its purpose, someone chose to move it and live in it. That decision is the reason a 1937 interior survives into the present century. Roughly fifty years after the conversion, the building entered the national register.

It qualified under the criterion of excellence as a model of design, one of three available. The alternative that assesses a building's contribution to the historic landscape was not the one applied. The distinction is telling: the assessment rested on the building itself, not on its relationship to a street. Its function had changed and even its location had changed, and the quality of what had been built for a restaurant was still intact.

The registration number is 17-0107, from the forty-second round, announced on 24 June 2004. Shibue Family Main Building in Higashiyama entered the register on the same date, pairing a Taisho townhouse with a prewar Shōwa restaurant. Registration imposes lighter obligations than designation as an Important Cultural Property: owners file notification when altering more than a quarter of the exterior, rather than seeking permission, which is what makes the system practical for houses people occupy.

Swans in the Transoms, a Veranda Around the Upper Floor

The interior holds what matters most here. Both the ground floor and the upper floor have a shoin alcove group complete with toko and tana: the recessed display alcove, the staggered shelves beside it, and the built-in writing bay with its low window. This is the standard vocabulary of a formal Japanese reception room, and the building has two complete sets, one above the other. A private house needs one. A restaurant receiving separate parties on each floor needs two, and the plan preserved that logic through the conversion.

The ranma transoms carry carvings of swans. Ranma are the open panels set between the lintel and the ceiling, pierced so that air and light pass between rooms while the carving establishes the room's formality. Pine, bamboo, clouds and waves are the usual subjects. Swans are unusual, and the choice reads as an attempt to give a restaurant's rooms a distinct decorative signature.

From outside, the proportions register first. The building is tall for its footprint, with generous floor-to-ceiling heights throughout. Rooms intended for guests on an upper storey suffer if the ceiling is brought down, and the section responds to that. A veranda runs around the outside of the second floor with a small eave projecting above it.

A veranda wrapping the upper floor implies that people were meant to sit and look out from it. Given the elevated ground south of the Sai River, the outlook would have been worth the expense. When the Agency's description calls this a fine example of modern Japanese-style architecture, this assembly of decisions is what it means.

Access needs stating plainly. Sato Family Main House is privately owned and closed to the public. The grounds cannot be entered, and the swan transoms and shoin alcoves cannot be seen. Viewing is limited to the exterior from the public road. The nearest bus stop is Jūichiya on the Hokutetsu network; Nomachi Station on the Hokuriku Railroad Ishikawa Line lies just under two kilometres away, and the drive from Kanazawa Station takes about fifteen minutes. This is a residential street, so discretion applies to photography and to lingering.