Main House of the Araki Family Residence (Former Hayashi Family Residence)

A Registered Dwelling at the Northern Rim of Kyoto

The Main House of the Araki Family Residence (荒木家住宅（旧林家住宅）主屋, also written Araki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, and formerly the Hayashi Family Residence) is a single-storey timber house in Shichiku Seinan-chō, Kita Ward, Kyoto, built in 1807 during the Bunka era and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties in 2007.

The plot lies north of Imamiya-dōri, the east-west street that skirts the upper edge of the Daitoku-ji temple precinct. Walk that way and the density of central Kyoto thins out. Shop fronts give way to garden walls, and the lots grow wider. Shichiku belonged to the farmland belt that fed the capital, and the Araki house carries the marks of that in-between condition: it is neither a compact merchant townhouse of the Nakagyō grid nor a full country farmstead, but something built by people who lived at the seam.

One detail announces the difference immediately. The house does not press against the street. A front garden sits between the road and the building line, and the dwelling faces south across it. In the machiya districts closer to the city centre, land value forced houses right up to the property edge and pushed the greenery into a courtyard hidden at the back. Here there was room to spare, and the garden was placed where visitors would see it first.

The building measures roughly five and a half ken across the front and six and a half ken deep, a ken being the traditional bay unit of about 1.8 metres. In metric terms the frontage runs to about ten metres. The registered building area is 143 square metres.

Why the House Was Registered

Japan's registration system for cultural properties, introduced in 1996, works differently from the older designation system that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties. Designation selects a small number of outstanding works and protects them through permit requirements and substantial state funding. Registration casts a much wider net over buildings at risk of quiet disappearance, and asks the owner only to notify the authorities before major alterations. The trade-off is deliberate: lighter protection, far broader coverage, and buildings that stay in ordinary use.

The Araki main house was registered under the first of the three statutory criteria, the clause covering structures that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. That criterion suits this house well. Its value is not that any single element is unique in Japanese architecture. Its value is that the whole assembly still reads as a coherent piece of the old Shichiku streetscape, in a district where most neighbouring plots have been rebuilt.

Registration number 26-0254 was issued in the 55th round of registrations. The formal registration date is 31 July 2007, and the notice appeared in the official gazette on 13 August of the same year. The storehouse behind the main house was registered on the same day as number 26-0255, so the two buildings entered the register as a pair.

The name itself records a change of hands. The property is listed as the Araki Family Residence with the former Hayashi Family Residence in parentheses, a convention the Agency for Cultural Affairs uses when a building is known in scholarship or local memory under an earlier household name.

What to Look For From the Street

The roof does most of the talking. It is a kirizuma-zukuri gable, laid with sangawara pantiles, the S-curved clay tiles that became standard for ordinary houses in the eighteenth century after their invention made tiled roofing affordable outside temple and castle construction. Above the earth-floored section of the interior, a smaller secondary roof rises clear of the main slope. This is a koshi-yane, a roof monitor.

A koshi-yane is functional rather than decorative. Below it, inside, lies the doma, the packed-earth working floor where the cooking hearth stood. Smoke needed somewhere to go, and daylight needed a way in. The raised monitor gave both, venting the hearth and dropping light into a space that would otherwise have been dim all day. When you see one on a Kyoto house, you are looking at evidence of an open fire that once burned below it.

A tiled pent roof, or hisashi, runs along the front, sheltering the entrance and the wall beneath.

The plan divides in two along its length. The eastern strip is the tōri-niwa, an unfloored passage that runs from the front entrance straight through to the rear of the house. The western portion holds the raised, floored living rooms. Facing the front garden is an eight-mat zashiki, the formal reception room, positioned so that a seated guest looks out at the planting.

That arrangement repays a moment's thought. In a tightly packed machiya, the formal room usually sits at the back, looking onto the tsubo-niwa courtyard, because the street side is given over to the shop. Here the reception room takes the prime southern frontage. The household was not selling anything to passers-by.

Visiting, and What Is Not Possible

The Araki Family Residence is a private home. It is not open to the public, there are no visiting hours, and no admission is charged because no admission is offered. The interior described above is documented in the Agency for Cultural Affairs record rather than accessible to visitors. Anyone hoping to see the eight-mat zashiki or the doma in person will be disappointed.

What remains possible is a look at the exterior from the public road. The front elevation, the gable, the koshi-yane and the front garden are all visible from Shichiku Seinan-chō's street. Photography from the roadway is not restricted, though pointing a lens into a family's windows is another matter, and the neighbourhood is residential and quiet.

Getting there is straightforward. Kitaōji Station on the Karasuma subway line is the nearest rail access, and the walk north from there takes roughly twenty to twenty-five minutes. City buses running along Kitaōji-dōri and Ōmiya-dōri shorten it considerably. Daitoku-ji, with its sub-temples and their gardens, is a short walk south of the house, and Imamiya Shrine sits just beyond the temple's northern boundary, which makes the Araki residence an easy addition to a morning already spent in this part of Kita Ward.