Former Morita Family Residence Front Gate

The Gate on the South Frontage

The Former Morita Family Residence Front Gate is a timber gate of the late Meiji era, built between 1898 and 1912 at Usaida in Noichicho, Konan City, Kochi Prefecture, and registered as a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 6 March 2024. It measures 2.4 metres across, carries a tiled roof, and has short flanking walls to north and south.

It stands towards the eastern end of the compound's south side, directly on the road. The form is a single bay Yakuimon: two main posts in front, two lighter struts behind, and the ridge set forward over the main posts. Japanese warrior households and temples used this type for their principal entrances. A pair of hinged leaves hangs in the opening.

This is the first thing anyone arriving at the site meets. Konan City owns it.

A Listing That Does Not Stop at the Gate

The registration criterion was contribution to the historic landscape of the country, the heading used for five of the six structures here. The national database gives two reasons together: the gate stands on the road, and it forms the historic scene of the locality along with the earthen wall running west from it.

The Former Morita Family Residence Front Gate was not assessed as an object in isolation. Gate and wall make a single continuous line, and that line is the face the village lane presents. Its register number is 39-0311.

Heavy Timber Under a Curved Roof

The first thing you notice is the size of the members. The register describes the principal timbers as thick and the work as robust, and the posts and beams are visibly generous for an opening only 2.4 metres wide. The rear struts are tied with a koshinuki, a horizontal tie passed through the posts low down, which braces the frame against the direction a gate is most likely to fall.

The roof is gabled and laid in Sangawara-buki pantiles, but it is not flat. It carries a slight mukuri, a convex upward swell across the roof plane, neither a straight line nor the concave sweep seen on temple roofs. On the Former Morita Family Residence Front Gate that curve is doing real work: it lightens a structure that would otherwise read as sheer mass.

The flanking walls to either side take the ends of the gate and run straight on into the earthen wall, so there is no visual break between gate and boundary.

Seeing the Front Gate

Of the six registered structures, the Former Morita Family Residence Front Gate is the easiest to see. It faces the road on the south side of the compound, and the whole gate, the curve of its roof and its junction with the flanking walls all read clearly from the public way. The gate itself cannot be passed; the grounds beyond are normally closed.

No restriction on photographing the exterior from the road has been posted, but entering the grounds, and photographing from within them, requires prior contact with the Cultural Promotion and Protection Section of the Konan City Board of Education, Lifelong Learning Division, telephone 0887-54-2296. The lanes here are narrow and serve houses and fields, so do not leave a car standing in the road.

Directions are on the Former Morita Family Residence page. Details confirmed on 13 September 2026.