Aoki Family Main Building

A 1930 Kyoto House That Opens With a Western Room

The Main House of the Aoki Family Residence (青木家住宅主屋, Aoki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber dwelling of 1930 standing on Tomikoji Street north of Sanjo in Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto, and it was entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties (Registered Tangible Cultural Property, 登録有形文化財) on 7 October 2014.

The plot runs long from east to west, in the manner of the merchant lots that shaped central Kyoto. What the owners did with that narrow strip in 1930 is the interesting part. Instead of placing shop space or a formal earthen entrance at the street end, they put a Western room there. Behind it, reached through the entrance hall, sits a separate wing of tatami rooms built in the sukiya manner, the lightweight, tea-house-derived style that Kyoto carpenters had refined for centuries.

So the house reads in two registers as you move through it. Stained glass and a fireplace at the front. Shoji, tokonoma and fine timberwork at the back. The Agency for Cultural Affairs sums the building up as one that carries both the housing ideas of the modern era and sukiya design at once, and the phrase is accurate: this is not a Japanese house with a foreign room bolted on, but a plan conceived around the meeting of the two.

The recorded building area is 86 square metres, with a tiled roof. Small, by the standards of grand villas. Dense, by the standards of what it manages to contain.

Why It Was Registered

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, sits alongside the older and stricter designation system. Registration applies mainly to buildings roughly fifty years old or more and works by encouraging owners to keep using them, with a lighter regulatory touch than the Important Cultural Property designation carries. Three criteria exist, and each registered building is listed under the one it satisfies.

The Aoki main house was registered under the first of them: that it serves as a model of design (造形の規範となっているもの). Of the three criteria this is the one that speaks most directly to architectural quality rather than to scale or to townscape value. It was assigned registration number 26-0459 in the 78th round of registrations.

The reasoning rests on how the two halves are handled. The Western room is described by the Agency as refined in its treatment, with stained glass and a fireplace, features that in 1930 signalled a household following the reformed-housing thinking then circulating in Japanese magazines and exhibitions, in which a dedicated reception room for guests replaced the older custom of receiving visitors in the family's own tatami rooms.

The tatami wing answers with craft of a different order. On the upper floor, the zashiki has a tsukeshoin (a built-in writing alcove projecting toward the garden, its low sill and paper screen a fixture of formal Japanese rooms) and above it, in the ranma transom, a set of chigaidana staggered shelves. Staggered shelves normally belong beside the tokonoma at floor level. Lifting them into the transom of the shoin is the kind of move a client and carpenter make when they are enjoying themselves, and it is singled out in the official description.

Seeing It, and What Lies Around It

This is a private home. The owner is listed simply as an individual in Kyoto City's register of national Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, and there is no published visiting programme, no opening hours and no admission fee. The interior, which is where the stained glass and the shoin shelving are, cannot be seen. Photography of the private grounds should not be attempted, and visitors should stay on the public street.

What you can do is walk the block. Tomikoji Street north of Sanjo is a quiet north-south lane in Fukunaga-cho, a few minutes on foot from Kyoto Shiyakusho-mae Station on the Tozai subway line and roughly ten minutes from Sanjo Station on the Keihan line. The same small neighbourhood holds the Hayami Family Residence, whose main house of 1913 and two storehouses joined the register in March 2015. Two registered households on one short street tell you something about how much of pre-war Kyoto survives behind unremarkable frontages.

For interiors of the period you have to go a few blocks west. Sanjo Street, running toward Karasuma, kept its Meiji and Taisho commercial architecture, and the Museum of Kyoto Annex, built in 1906 as the Kyoto branch of the Bank of Japan to designs by Tatsuno Kingo and Nagano Uheiji, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1969 and is open to the public. Standing inside that banking hall and then walking east to the Aoki house gives you both ends of Kyoto's modern building culture within about fifteen minutes of pavement.