Matsuura Family Residence Nagayamon Gate

A Village Headman's Gate in Hayashida

The Matsuura Family Residence Nagayamon (松浦家住宅長屋門, Matsuura-ke Jūtaku Nagayamon) is an early Meiji period gatehouse in Hayashida-chō, Sakaide City, Kagawa Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 March 2004. A nagayamon is a gate built into a long single-storey range, so that the entrance passage and the rooms flanking it form one continuous building.

The Matsuura family served as shōya, the headman responsible for tax collection, dispute settlement and official correspondence in a village under the Takamatsu domain. In the Edo order, a headman occupied an awkward rung: a commoner by law, an administrator in practice. Certain architectural privileges came with the post, and the gatehouse was the most visible of them. Building one announced the household's standing to everyone who walked past.

This example dates to the early Meiji years, after the domain system had already been dismantled. The family put up a gate in a form whose original legal meaning had just evaporated. Read that way, the building is less a relic of feudal rank than a statement made at the moment rank stopped being enforceable.

Construction and the Reason for Registration

The registered figures give a single-storey timber structure with a tiled roof and a footprint of 73 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the frame as nine and a half ken along the front by two ken deep, which works out to roughly 17 metres by 3.6 metres. The roof is irimoya, hipped above and gabled at the ends, laid in hongawara tiling, the heavier system that alternates broad flat pantiles with semi-cylindrical cover tiles. It stands on a stone plinth, and the gate opening is set slightly right of centre on the front elevation.

Two details of the finish are worth singling out. The walls are rendered in white plaster, but along the front only, the lower section is treated as namako-kabe: square tiles fixed flat to the wall with the joints raised in thick white plaster ridges, producing a diagonal grid. The name comes from the resemblance of those ridges to a sea cucumber. The technique was developed to protect wall bases from rain and salt-laden wind, and it is common along the Seto Inland Sea coast where this building stands.

The second is the eaves. Rather than leaving the underside of the eaves open to show the rafters, the plasterer has carried the render out and modelled the eaves edge into a wave profile. It is a small piece of showmanship, done by hand, and it is the kind of local craft decision that a photograph flattens and a visit does not.

Registration was made under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. That criterion is the broadest of the three used in the registration system, and it fits a structure valued for the face it presents to its surroundings rather than for structural rarity.

Visiting, and What You Can Actually See

This is private property. The Matsuura Family Residence Nagayamon is owned by a private individual, no regular opening hours are published, and there is no ticket office, car park or visitor facility. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record notes that the gate has been relocated within the grounds on a changed orientation and is used as a gallery and for similar purposes, but the town publishes no schedule, so anyone hoping to go inside should treat access as something to arrange in advance rather than assume.

That relocation is itself part of the building's history. A gate that no longer faces the direction it was built to face, and no longer guards anything, has been kept because someone found it a new job. Registration in 2004 recognised a structure already in its second life.

Do not enter the grounds, photograph through gaps in walls, or approach the house. Hayashida-chō is a working residential and agricultural district on the coastal plain west of central Sakaide, and the people living there are not part of an exhibit.

If you have come to Sakaide for its architecture, several properties nearby do welcome visitors. The Kamada Kyōsaikai Local Museum on Honmachi, itself a Registered Tangible Cultural Property that began life as a library in 1925, is the obvious starting point, and the Tan'ō-sō villa and the former Kamada Shōyu main store stand in the same district. Shiromineji, a temple on Mount Shiromine with a group of Important Cultural Property halls, sits in the hills above the city. Any of these will give you an interior to walk through, which the Matsuura gate will not.