Hamada Norihiro Family Residence

A Landowner's Compound in Nahari

The Hamada Norihiro Family Residence (濱田典彌家住宅, Hamada Norihiro-ke Jūtaku) is a landowner's compound in Otsu, Nahari Town, Aki District, Kochi Prefecture, where a late Meiji storehouse and a main house, kitchen wing, rice deposit house and stone wall built around 1934 were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 8 November 2004.

The name is read Hamada Norihiro, following the furigana in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database. The character 彌 is the old form of 弥.

All five parts share the address 1028-1 Otsu, the same registration date and an unbroken run of registration numbers, 39-0177 to 39-0181. It is the Agency's note on the rice deposit house that calls this a landowner's residence. No public source we found describes Hamada Norihiro himself or the family's business.

How the Compound Fits Together

Read side by side, the five official descriptions sketch the layout of the Hamada Norihiro Family Residence. At the center is the main house, its ridge running east to west, with an entrance porch projecting from the north side.

The kamaya, the kitchen and bath wing, is attached to the main house's east face. North of it, and touching it, stands the rice deposit house, which links back to the northeast corner of the main house by a veranda corridor along its west side. A member of the household could move between all three without stepping out from under a roof.

The storehouse stands apart, to the southwest of the main house, while the stone wall turns the southeast corner of the lot. Living quarters sit in the middle, service and rice buildings run from the east round to the north, and the storehouse and wall hold the outer edges.

Two Building Phases

The oldest part of the Hamada Norihiro Family Residence is the storehouse, dated to the late Meiji period. The main house, kamaya and rice deposit house are dated to 1934, and the stone wall to about the same year. The picture is of an older storehouse kept in place while the household rebuilt its living quarters, service wings and boundary wall in a single campaign in the early Showa era.

Every roof is clad in Sangawara-buki pan tiles, and the main house, the rice deposit house and the storehouse each have Geya lean-to roofs or eaves added around the main roof. The storehouse walls carry Tosa-shikkui plaster and Mizukiri-gawara weather tiles, and the wall is built with stones from the beach, materials suited to the heavy rain and sea wind of eastern Kochi.

The main house and storehouse were registered as models of form, and the kamaya, rice deposit house and stone wall for their contribution to the historic landscape.

Other Hamada Properties in Nahari

According to Kochi Prefecture's list, Nahari has 37 registered buildings, many of them merchant houses and residences in the town. The Hamada Norihiro Family Residence accounts for five of them.

Visitors searching by family name should know that Nahari also has the Hamada Family Residence (Former Masudaya) at 1751 Otsu, registered in 2000, and a Hamada family shop and brick storehouse at 1564-3 Otsu, registered in 2003. These are separate properties with their own addresses, and no public source we found explains how, or whether, they relate to the Hamada Norihiro household.

Visiting

The Hamada Norihiro Family Residence has no public opening, and neither the buildings nor the grounds are open. The owner field in the national database is blank. Any visit is limited to what can be seen from outside, so please keep it brief and quiet out of respect for the people who live there.

The nearest station is Nahari, the terminus of the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line, a line of about 40 kilometers from Gomen in Nankoku. On the map the Hamada Norihiro Family Residence lies roughly 500 meters southeast of the station in a straight line. No visitor parking is advertised.

From 29 August to 31 December 2026 the railway is running fewer trains on the Gomen-Nahari Line because of a driver shortage, so check the timetable before you set out.