Higashiyama Family Residence

The Higashiyama Family Residence

The Higashiyama Family Residence (東山家住宅, Higashiyama-ke Jūtaku) at Otsu 1281-2 in Nahari Town, Aki District, Kochi Prefecture, is a house compound built in about 1905; its main house, toilet and bath building, storehouse and stone wall were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on January 31, 2003 (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

The four carry consecutive registration numbers, 39-0067 to 39-0070, and the Agency dates every one of them to about 1905: the main house, its washroom annex, the storehouse and even the boundary wall belong to the same period.

They were registered on two different criteria. The main house, storehouse and stone wall were recognised for their contribution to the historic landscape; the toilet and bath building as something that would not be easy to reproduce. Because Japan registers buildings one at a time, a small annex holding a bath and a toilet, and a wall of which only 3.2 metres survive, each count as a property in their own right.

The Agency's database leaves the owner's name blank, and no public source we could find describes the Higashiyama family's trade or the history of the house.

A House in Old Nahari

Nahari lies on Tosa Bay in eastern Kochi, at the mouth of the Nahari River. The Agency for Cultural Affairs' Japan Heritage story for this Chūgei area, "From Forest Railway to Japan's Yuzu Road", tells how timber, above all Yanase cedar, was floated down to the river mouths and shipped on across Japan, and how merchants grown rich on lumber and coastal shipping filled the river-mouth towns with houses and sake breweries finished in Tosa plaster, with mizukiri-gawara tile ledges and stone walls known locally as ishiguro.

The Higashiyama Family Residence stands in the middle of town, a short way south of the national highway (Agency for Cultural Affairs). The Agency singles out its storehouse, which occupies the northwest corner of the lot and shows its Tosa-plastered walls and tile ledges to the street, as a centrepiece of the Nahari townscape.

Plastered walls crossed by small tiled ledges that shed the rain: the river-mouth townscape of the Japan Heritage story, shown to the street by a single corner storehouse.

How the Compound Is Laid Out

At the heart of the compound is the main house, which runs north to south and faces the street to the west. It has a hip-and-gable roof of pantiles and a low upper floor of the kind called tsushi-nikai, with a family room added to the east and a kitchen wing, the kamaya, to the south (Agency for Cultural Affairs).

North of the main house stands the storehouse: a 2-storey earthen storehouse with a single-storey one joined to its east side, filling the northwest corner of the lot. South of the main house is the small hipped-roof toilet and bath building, which holds a goemon-buro, an iron tub heated by a fire underneath. Along the east edge of the lot, a short stretch of the old boundary wall, built of beach cobbles set in mortar, survives as the stone wall.

• Higashiyama Family Residence Main House (registration no. 39-0067): the centre of the compound, facing the street
• Higashiyama Family Residence Toilet and Bath Building (39-0068): south of the main house, lined with decorative tiles
• Higashiyama Family Residence Storehouse (39-0069): north of the main house, on the northwest corner
• Higashiyama Family Residence Stone Wall (39-0070): what remains of the boundary wall on the east side

Put together from the Agency's descriptions, the layout runs like this: the front of the main house on the street side to the west, the storehouse on the northwest corner, the bath building behind the main house to the south, and the stone wall on the east boundary. From the street you mainly see the front of the main house and the walls of the storehouse; we could not confirm how much of the bath building or the stone wall is visible from outside.

Visiting

No official information was found on public access to the interior of the Higashiyama Family Residence. Please view it from the street and do not enter the property. There is no guidance on photography either, so be discreet: this may well be a lived-in home.

The local volunteer group Nahari-ura no Kai leads walks through the old town. Its model course listed by the Kochi Prefecture tourist guide association, a walk of about 120 minutes, takes in the Takezaki and Mori family residences among other sites but does not include the Higashiyama Family Residence. Bookings are needed by the day before (7 days ahead for groups of 10 or more), and the fee starts at 2,000 yen for a group of 10 or more (checked October 19, 2026).

By rail, take the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen-Nahari Line to its terminus, Nahari Station. The residence lies about 350 metres southeast of the station in a straight line, reached on foot through the streets of the town. No visitor parking was found.