Nishioka Family Residence

A Shop and a Home in Old Yasuda

The Nishioka Family Residence (西岡家住宅, Nishioka-ke Jūtaku) is a merchant family's town property in Yasuda, Yasuda Town, Aki District, Kochi Prefecture, built between about 1887 and the 1950s, whose 5 buildings and structures, including the Nishioka Kimono Store, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 October 2007. It stands close to the centre of Yasuda's old town.

In the Agency for Cultural Affairs record the five items carry two names. Four are listed as the Nishioka Family Residence: the main house, the annex, the storehouse, and the gate and wall. The fifth is the Nishioka Kimono Store (西岡呉服店店舗), the shop building. All five share one lot number, 1807, and one registration date, and their registration numbers run unbroken from 39-0216 to 39-0220, with the shop first. This site treats the street-front shop and the house behind it as one property.

The shared name suggests that the shop and the house belonged to the same Nishioka family, but no public source we could find explains how the two were connected or describes the history of the business. All five were registered under the same criterion: a contribution to the historic landscape of the country.

How the Property Is Laid Out

Read side by side, the official descriptions give a fairly clear plan of the Nishioka Family Residence. The property turns its face east, toward the road. The Nishioka Kimono Store occupies a corner plot and also faces east.

The main house stands back from the road behind a small front garden, again facing east. In front of it, a little recessed from the street line, is the gate, whose wing walls curve forward in arcs to meet the wall running along the street. The annex sits behind the main house at the western edge of the plot, and the storehouse stands north of the annex, its end wall touching the lane along the north side.

Shop and gate sit nearest the street, and the family rooms, guest rooms and storehouse follow as you move inward: business at the front, household life behind, as in many Japanese town houses.

Three Building Periods

The five parts of the Nishioka Family Residence were not built at once. The shop, the main house and the storehouse date to about 1887, in the Meiji era. The gate and wall belong to the early Showa era, and the annex was built in about 1953. A Meiji shop and home were given a new gateway in the early Showa years, and a guest annex followed after the war.

Across those decades some habits held steady. Every roof uses Sangawara-buki pantiles, and lime plaster covers the walls. The main house is finished in Tosa-shikkui, the local plaster, while the storehouse and annex show rows of Mizukiri-gawara, small drip tiles set into the wall to shed the heavy rain of this coast. The gate and wall, by contrast, are reinforced concrete, a sign of new materials reaching a small town in the early Showa years.

Visiting

The Nishioka Family Residence is privately owned, and we found no notice of public opening. The interiors cannot be visited and the grounds are closed. What you can see is the exterior from the road, so please look quietly and respect the privacy of the people who live here.

The nearest station is Yasuda on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway Gomen-Nahari Line. The Yasuda Townscape Exchange Center Nagomi, in the same old town, gives its walking time from the station as about 15 minutes, and the Nishioka Family Residence stands in the same historic streets. No visitor parking is advertised for the Nishioka Family Residence.

Kochi Prefecture's list of registered buildings shows several merchant houses and temple buildings in Yasuda besides this one, so a walk through the old streets is the natural way to see them from outside. Other properties called the Nishioka Family Residence exist in Makabe in Ibaraki Prefecture and in Shiota in Saga Prefecture; they are unrelated to this one.