Main House of New House

Arai Family Residence Main Building: A Refined Suburban Home from Taishō-Era Yodo

Tucked into a quiet residential corner of Yodo in southern Kyoto, the Arai Family Residence Main Building (Arai-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a graceful witness to a transformative moment in Japanese domestic architecture. Completed in 1926, the final year of the Taishō era, this two-story wooden house elegantly weds a Spanish-tiled Western wing with a sukiya-style Japanese parlor, embodying the cultured suburban living that flourished around Kyoto in the early twentieth century. Registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2014, it stands today as an unusually refined example of the "house with a Western room" — a distinctive housing type that captured the imagination of Japan's modernizing middle class.

Historical Background

To understand why such a remarkable home rose in this particular spot, one must look to the long history of Yodo itself. Where the Katsura, Uji, and Kizu rivers converge to form the great Yodo River, this area has been a strategic crossroads since antiquity. In the seventeenth century, Yodo Castle was built here on the orders of the Tokugawa shogunate, and a castle town developed alongside it. Yodo also served as a post station on the Kyō-kaidō highway linking Kyoto and Osaka, with travelers, freight, and river boats giving the town its lively character throughout the Edo period.

By the early twentieth century, Yodo had been transformed once again. The opening of the Keihan Main Line in 1910 and the establishment of Kyoto Racecourse in 1925 brought modern transportation and recreation to the area. It was in this atmosphere of measured modernization — neither fully urban nor truly rural — that the Arai family commissioned their new home in 1926. The house was further refined through renovations carried out between 1926 and 1945, leaving behind the harmonious composition that survives today.

Why It Was Designated a Cultural Property

The Arai Family Residence Main Building was added to Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on October 7, 2014. The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites it as a particularly fine example of the pre-war suburban house with an attached Western room — a building type that defined a generation of Japanese family life but is now rapidly disappearing.

What sets this house apart is not size or grandeur, but the unusual care given to every aspect of the design. The Western wing, capped with a gabled roof of Spanish-style tiles, displays restrained yet sophisticated geometric detailing in both its gable ornament and interior decoration. The Japanese rooms, by contrast, draw on the refined sukiya tradition of teahouse architecture, with their decorative alcoves and door frames finished in distinctive Negoro lacquer. The thoughtful contrast between these two halves — and the inventive details throughout — earned the house official recognition as a building well worth preserving for future generations.

Architectural Highlights

The house is a wooden two-story structure with a tiled roof and a building footprint of 187 square meters. The entrance faces west, with the Western room placed to its north and the traditional Japanese rooms to its south. A separate detached wing extends out to the southeast, creating a layered, asymmetrical composition.

Visitor Information

The Arai Family Residence Main Building is a private home, not a museum. As such, the interiors are not open to the public, and visitors are kindly asked to view the building only from the public road outside. Please refrain from entering the property, peering through windows, or photographing the residents. With that respect in mind, even a brief external glimpse — the Spanish-tiled gable rising above the garden, the contrasting tiled Japanese roof beside it — offers an evocative window into the domestic culture of pre-war Japan.

The closest station is Yodo Station on the Keihan Main Line, about a ten-minute walk away. The neighborhood is quiet and residential, so visitors are encouraged to walk softly and to combine their visit with the wider historical sights of the Yodo district.

What to See Nearby

The Yodo area rewards an unhurried half-day of exploration. Within a short walk you will find:

• Yodo Castle Ruins Park (Yodo-jō Ato Kōen) — surviving stone walls, a tenshu-dai foundation, and a moat from the seventeenth-century Tokugawa-era castle, now a leafy park where towering camphor and Himalayan cedar trees rise above the ruins.
• Yodo Shrine (Yodo-jinja / Yodo Hachiman-gū) — relocated to its present site in the Meiji period, with deep historical ties to the castle town.
• Inaba Shrine — dedicated to the Inaba clan, the daimyo lords of Yodo Domain in the late Edo period.
• Yodo Suiro (Yodo Waterway) — a tranquil canal lined with Kawazu cherry trees that bloom dramatically in February and March, well before the main cherry season.
• Tōjin Gangi Old Site — a stone marker commemorating the riverside landing once used by Korean Joseon envoys traveling between Edo and Kyoto.
• Kyoto Racecourse — one of Japan's most famous horse-racing venues, also visible from Yodo Station, hosting major races including the Kikuka Shō and the Tennō Shō (Spring).