Yano Family Residence

A Landowner's Compound in Kawara

The Yano Family Residence is a rural family compound in the Kawara district of Nishihara Village, Aso District, Kumamoto Prefecture, built between 1870 and 1929, and its eight buildings were each listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 7 June 1999.

In Japanese the name is 矢野家住宅, Yano-ke Jūtaku. Seven of the listed buildings belong to the Hontaku (本宅), the head household, and one to the Shintaku (新宅), a branch household that split off at the end of the Meiji era and built next door, on the plot immediately to the east.

Nishihara lies at the western foot of the outer caldera rim of Mount Aso, about 20 kilometres east of the Kumamoto prefectural office. Kawara is farmland on the western side of the village.

According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the Yano were descended from a samurai line and served as local landowners through the Meiji era. That background is the Agency's explanation for the warrior-house details on the gates and in the main house. The Shintaku main house was built by Yano Kazuma (矢野数馬), who served as head of Kawara village.

Gates First, Storehouses Later

The Yano Family Residence was not built in one campaign. The earliest dates in the national register belong to the three gates, front, middle and rear, all of 1870. The Hontaku main house followed in 1873, a date fixed by a ridge tablet preserved in the room next to the formal reception room.

In 1889 three working buildings went up, the storehouse, the miso storehouse and the barn, and part of the main house was extended in the same year. Entrance and dwelling came first; 16 years later came the buildings that stored rice, miso and tools. The dates read like a ledger of a household finding its feet as landowners.

The Shintaku main house dates from 1929, more than half a century after its neighbour. Side by side, the two plots let you compare a samurai-flavoured house of the early Meiji era with an early Showa house built around a formal room with an alcove and a writing desk.

How the Compound Is Laid Out

The Agency's descriptions, read together, give the plan of the Hontaku. The front of the plot faces a road on the west. Along that road, reading north to south, stand the barn and the miso storehouse. South of the miso storehouse, pulled back slightly from the road, is the front gate, which leads to the entrance of the main house.

The main house stands east of the miso storehouse. A roofed bamboo fence links it to the front gate, and the middle gate opens partway along that fence, giving onto the fields south of the plot. The storehouse stands south of the main house on the edge of the property. On the north side, set back from another road, is the rear gate.

The Shintaku plot adjoins on the east. The Agency singles out the road front of the Hontaku: the miso storehouse and the barn are faced with weatherboarding that runs level with the board fences on either side, so the whole frontage reads as one composition from the street. That western road is the place to stand.

Visiting

The Yano Family Residence is a private home and is not open to the public. A check of the village's and the Agency's published material found no open days or visitor arrangements (as of September 2026). The interiors cannot be entered, and the ground inside the gates is private property.

What a visitor can do is look from the public road. The barn, the miso storehouse and the front gate of the Hontaku face the western road, and the rear gate faces the northern one. The storehouse, the middle gate and the main house lie deeper inside the property, and the Shintaku main house stands within its own plot next door.

No photography rules have been published. Keep to exterior shots from the road, and do not point a camera at the house interiors or at residents. Questions about cultural properties in the village go to the Nishihara village office (096-279-3111, weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.).

Getting There

There is no railway in Nishihara, so a car is the practical way to reach the Yano Family Residence. It lies about 4 kilometres southeast of Aso Kumamoto Airport in a straight line. No visitor parking is advertised, and the lanes around the compound are everyday roads for local residents, so avoid leaving a car at the roadside for long.

The Eight Registered Buildings

The eight buildings of the Yano Family Residence carry consecutive registration numbers, 43-0018 through 43-0025.

• Hontaku main house: 1873, partly extended in 1889; building area 333 square metres
• Hontaku front gate: 1870; a yakuimon gate with a frontage of 2.7 metres
• Hontaku middle gate: 1870; yakuimon, frontage 1.8 metres
• Hontaku rear gate: 1870; yakuimon, frontage 2.1 metres
• Hontaku storehouse: 1889; building area 171 square metres
• Hontaku miso storehouse: 1889; building area 22 square metres
• Hontaku barn: 1889; building area 58 square metres
• Shintaku main house: 1929; building area 241 square metres

The registration criteria differ. The two main houses and the front gate were listed as models of design; the storehouse as a building that would be hard to reproduce; the miso storehouse, barn, middle gate and rear gate as contributions to the historic landscape.

One discrepancy should be noted. The structure field in the Agency's register gives the two main houses, the storehouse, the miso storehouse and the barn all as stone buildings of one storey with a partial second. The same database's descriptions, however, call the storehouse an earthen-walled kura and the barn a building with exposed timber framing. This site reproduces the structure field as entered and does not take a position on the actual construction.

Names and Readings

The name is read Yano-ke jūtaku; Hontaku is read hontaku and Shintaku shintaku. The national register lists each building separately, joining household and building names, as in 矢野家住宅（本宅）主屋, Yano Family Residence (Hontaku) Main House. Hontaku means the head family's house; Shintaku, literally the new house, is the branch family's. A building also called Yano Family Residence Main House stands in Kochi Prefecture, but it belongs to a different family.