Mashima Family Residence Garden Gate and Earthen Wall

A Thirteen-Metre Wall That Sorts One Garden from Another

The Majima Family Residence Garden Gate and Earthen Wall (間島家住宅庭門及び土塀, Majima-ke Jūtaku Niwamon oyobi Dobei) stands within a private estate in the Mure district of Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, dates from the early Shōwa period, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2006.

Thirteen metres is not much wall. It begins just west of the shikidai, the formal stepped entrance on the south face of the main house, runs south across the grounds, then turns west partway along and meets the north face of the long gatehouse. Packed earth, capped with a tiled roof of its own. Where it passes nearest the main house, a gap opens, and in that gap sits a gabled gate roofed in hongawara pan-and-cover tile, its opening measuring 1.4 metres.

The job of this assembly is division. North of it lies the maeniwa, the forecourt a guest crosses on the way to the formal entrance. South of it lies the okuniwa, the inner garden that the reception rooms look out onto. One is public, or as public as a private house gets. The other is not. The wall draws the line, and the gate is the only sanctioned way through.

Registration records classify the property under the somewhat dry heading of "other structures" rather than "buildings", which undersells it. A wall with a roof and a gate is architecture doing quiet work.

The Triangular Estate

The Majima grounds are unusual in plan. Water channels bound two sides, and the outer earthen wall, 120 metres of it, rises directly from the stone revetments above those channels, closing the site into a shape that locals have long called the sankaku yashiki, or triangular estate. Registration documentation for the outer wall records that nickname as established local usage.

Five elements of the estate went onto the register together on 2 March 2006, and the group makes more sense read as a set than one at a time. The main house is a shihōbuta-zukuri farmhouse, its hipped thatch core ringed on all four sides by tiled pent roofs, with a floor area of 174 square metres and a smoke vent raised toward the eastern end of the ridge. The gatehouse along the southern boundary runs 22.3 metres. A two-storey earth-walled storehouse of 55 square metres anchors the northern point of the triangle. The outer wall ties the perimeter together.

Within that group, the garden gate and inner wall are the only members whose registered date falls in the Shōwa era rather than the late Edo period. The main house and gatehouse are dated 1830 to 1867; the inner wall and its gate came later, added to grounds that were already old. What they represent, then, is not the original conception of the estate but a decision made generations afterwards about how its southern half should be organised.

Why It Was Registered, and What There Is to See

The registration criterion applied here is the one covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. That criterion suits a boundary wall better than almost anything else. Nobody registers a thirteen-metre inner wall for structural daring. It is registered because the estate reads as a coherent historic place only if every piece of its enclosure survives, and this piece defines the southern portion of the grounds.

The detail worth looking for is the roofing. The gate carries hongawara-buki, the formal pairing of broad concave pan tiles with narrow convex cover tiles, the same treatment used on temple gates and on the roofs of buildings meant to signal status. On a garden gate 1.4 metres across, it is a considerable expense for a very small object. The gabled form, plain and symmetrical, keeps the whole thing from looking ostentatious.

Read the tiled cap of the wall as it runs, too. Following it from the main house south and then west, you can trace the exact geometry of the division: a straight run, one break, and a junction with the gatehouse that stops the wall dead rather than letting it wander.

Visiting the Area

The Majima Family Residence is a private home. No public opening hours, admission arrangements or interior access are announced for it, and the garden gate and inner wall sit well inside the grounds, screened by the outer wall and the gatehouse. Visitors should not expect to see them, and should not enter the property or photograph over the walls. Registration as a Tangible Cultural Property carries no right of entry.

The Mure area rewards a visit regardless. Yakuriji, the eighty-fifth temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, sits on the slope above the town and is reached by a cable car that climbs through the trees. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, in the sculptor's former Mure workshop, admits visitors by advance reservation only. Mure and neighbouring Aji have quarried Aji granite for centuries, and stoneworking yards still line the roads. Shikoku Mura, the open-air museum of relocated historic buildings at the foot of Yashima, lies a short distance west and displays dozens of registered structures that can be entered freely.

Yakuri Station on the Kotoden Shido Line and Sanuki-Mure Station on the JR Kōtoku Line both serve the district. Both lines run from central Takamatsu.