Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House

A House Dated by Its Ridge Tablet

The Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House, in the Kawara district of Nishihara Village, Aso District, Kumamoto Prefecture, is a landowner's house built in 1873 and listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 7 June 1999.

In Japanese it is 矢野家住宅（本宅）主屋 (Yano-ke Jūtaku Hontaku Shuoku), the principal building of the head household's compound. With a building area of 333 square metres it is the largest of the eight Yano buildings on the register, which describes it as single-storey with a partial 2nd storey under a tiled roof. Board and bamboo fences are included in the listing.

The date comes from a ridge tablet kept in the room next to the zashiki, the formal reception room. It records construction in 1873. Part of the house was extended in 1889, the year the storehouse, miso storehouse and barn went up, so the Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House grew alongside the rest of the compound.

Samurai Manners in a Landowner's House

What the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out in the Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House is the way its entrance and reception rooms echo a samurai residence. The Yano traced their line to a warrior family and served as landowners in the Meiji era. In the rooms where guests were received, a rural household built to the conventions of the class it came from.

The listing criterion is that the building serves as a model of design. The Agency calls it a good example of a large early-Meiji house in this region. A house of this size, put up within a few years of the Meiji Restoration and dated by a written tablet, is not a common survival.

Read It with the Gates

The main house is best understood together with its approach. The front gate is a yakuimon with heavy main posts, and the Agency notes that its warrior-house styling matches the main house. From the gate a roofed bamboo fence runs toward the entrance, and the middle gate opens partway along it. Gate, fence and doorway were planned as one sequence.

A caution on construction. The structure field in the register gives the main house as stone, single storey with a partial 2nd storey. Published sources do not confirm that a house with a reception room and anteroom is really built of stone, and the same wording appears for the storehouse, miso storehouse and barn, where it conflicts with the Agency's own descriptions. This article reproduces the entry as it stands.

Visiting the Main House

The Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House is a private home and the interior is not open. The house does not face the road; it stands behind the front gate, and the ground inside the gate is private.

What can be seen with certainty from the public road is the front gate on the western road and the earthen walls on either side of it. Do not expect to make out the entrance or reception rooms from outside, and keep photography to exterior shots from the road.