Tani Yuzo Family Residence Main Building

A Shop Front on the Old Highway

The main building of the Tani Yūzō Family Residence (谷雄三家住宅主屋, Tani Yūzō-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a timber merchant house of 1874 in Sumiyoshi-minami, Tano Town, Aki District, Kōchi Prefecture, registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property on 1 December 2003.

It faces north onto what was, until the highway was rerouted, the main road running along the eastern coast of Kōchi. The ridge runs east to west, parallel with the street, so the long side of the house is what you see. Nothing about the building announces itself. It is exactly the sort of frontage that once repeated for hundreds of metres in a Tosa market town, and one reason it was registered is that so few of these frontages survive intact.

The plan is four and a half ken across the front by five ken deep, a ken being the traditional bay unit of roughly 1.8 metres. The roof is kirizuma, a simple gable, laid with sangawara pantiles. The registered building area is 80 square metres.

Inside, the western part of the front is doma, the beaten-earth floor that in a Japanese merchant house served as workspace, passage and unloading bay all at once. The eastern part is the mise, the shop room. Behind these, two six-mat tatami rooms sit side by side. It is a compact, entirely legible arrangement, and it tells you what the household did for a living without any explanatory panel.

The Details That Earned the Registration

Two features do most of the work.

The first is the tsushi nikai, a low half-storey under the roof, too shallow to stand up in comfortably and used for storage or for sleeping quarters. Its walls here are finished in Tosa shikkui, the local lime plaster. Tosa plaster is made with straw fermented into the lime rather than added as short fibre, and it sets hard enough to survive the driving rain and salt wind of the Pacific coast without the timber cladding that plaster usually needs elsewhere. On a clear day the half-storey reads as a bright white band above the darker ground floor.

The second is the degōshi, a projecting wooden lattice screen fitted across the front of the mise. A degōshi lets a shopkeeper see the street while the street sees only slats. Together with the geya, the lean-to eaves along the front, it produces the layered shopfront that distinguishes a commercial townhouse from a farmhouse of the same size.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the building under the criterion of contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and classified it under tertiary industry rather than housing, which is an unusually direct acknowledgement that this is a place of business first.

One small point on the record. The structural summary field describes the building as single-storey with a partial second floor, while the descriptive text calls it a tsushi nikai. These are not in conflict so much as differently worded: a half-storey attic is a partial upper floor, and the descriptive text is the more precise of the two.

Tano, and How to Walk It

Tano is the smallest municipality by area in Shikoku, about two kilometres east to west and four north to south, roughly 6.5 square kilometres in all. In the Edo period that small footprint held the commercial centre of eastern Tosa. Timber floated down from the Yanase forests, charcoal, salt and sake moved through the port, and a group of merchant houses known as the Tano Gonin-shū, the five houses of Tano, grew wealthy enough to lend silver to the domain and to receive in return the right to a surname, to wear swords and to be received individually in audience.

On 1 December 2003 the Agency registered a dozen properties in the town in a single batch, covering house after house along the old road. The Tani Yūzō main building was one of them. Others in the group include the Kumon, Sano, Hamakawa, Fukōe, Kawada, Sumida and Arisawa residences and the main hall and gate of Chōhōji.

Note the name carefully. Tano has two registered properties under the surname Tani, belonging to two different households: the Tani Yūzō residence described here, and the Tani Yutaka residence, whose detached wing and privy were registered on the same day. They are separate buildings at separate addresses.

All of these are private homes. The exteriors face public streets and can be looked at freely; none of them are open inside. The one building in Tano that you can pay to enter is Oka Goten, the mansion of the Oka family, the leading house of the Tano Gonin-shū, used by the lords of the Yamauchi clan as their lodging on the journey to and from Edo. It was designated a Kōchi Prefectural Tangible Cultural Property in April 1985.

Getting There

Tano Station on the Tosa Kuroshio Railway's Gomen-Nahari Line is the arrival point, about 76 minutes from Kōchi Station. The station shares a building with the Michi-no-Eki Tano Ekiya roadside stop, which sells local produce and prepared food and is the practical place to start. Bicycles can be hired in the town, and given that the whole place is two kilometres wide, walking works just as well. Oka Goten is about seven minutes on foot from the station.

Fukudenji, five minutes east of the station, holds the graves of the twenty-three men of Nonegayama, retainers who petitioned in 1864 for the release of the imprisoned loyalist Takechi Zuizan and were beheaded on the bank of the Nahari River for it. The temple, the memorial park at the execution ground and the surviving merchant houses together make Tano a town where the nineteenth century is unusually close to the surface.