Nakakoji Family Residence Nagayamon

A gatehouse on the old Saigoku Kaido

The Nagayamon of the Nakakoji Residence (中小路家住宅長屋門, also written Nakakōji-ke Jūtaku Nagayamon) is a gatehouse in the Shimokawara area of Kaminoueno-cho, Muko City, Kyoto Prefecture, built in the early Meiji period and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 18 April 2008. It faces the former Saigoku Kaido highway on the east edge of the property, set slightly south of the main house.

The dimensions are small for a gate of this name. It runs 4.7 meters along the ridge and 2.2 meters in depth, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs lists its building area as 4.1 square meters. The southern portion carries the entrance, closed by heavy double plank doors with a kuguri-do set into them, a low wicket door used when the main leaves stay shut. The northern portion holds no passage at all. It is a two-mat room, about 3.3 square meters, with an out-jutting latticed window looking onto the road.

The word nagayamon means a gate built into a row of rooms. Warrior households used the form first, quartering retainers in the wings on either side of the opening; prosperous farming families later adopted it, filling the wings with storage or with a room like this one, where someone could sit and watch who came up the highway.

Roofing is sangawara-buki, the interlocking pantile developed in the late seventeenth century and standard across Kyoto's rural districts by the Meiji years. The north end finishes in an irimoya hip-and-gable, while the south end runs straight into the neighbouring kokugura, the two-storey grain storehouse. The two buildings share a wall.

Why it was registered

Japan's registration system, created in 1996, is lighter than the older designation categories of National Treasure and Important Cultural Property. Registered buildings remain in private hands and in ordinary use; owners are asked to notify the government before major alterations rather than seek permission for every repair. Registration number 26-0298 was granted to this gate in the fifty-ninth round of listings, with the public notification issued on 7 May 2008.

The criterion applied was the first of the three available: that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country. That wording matters here. Judged on its own, a 4.7-meter gate would be an unremarkable piece of carpentry. Judged as one element in a street elevation, it becomes part of something harder to replace.

Walk north along the old highway and the property presents a continuous face. First the grain storehouse, its walls plastered up to the eaves. Then this gate, its white lime plaster raised on a high skirt of vertical boarding. Then the kigoya woodshed and its attached fence, carrying the same boarded skirt and the same tiled cap northward to the boundary. Six buildings of the Nakakoji Residence are currently listed in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, and the roadside three read as a single wall broken by one opening.

A seventh building, the outer storehouse or sotogura, appears in the registration list compiled by the Kyoto prefectural association of registered-property owners. Muko City's cultural heritage pages state that it no longer stands.

The family behind the buildings is documented from 1680 onward in papers held on the property. The Nakakoji went by the shop name Kawachu, formed from the district name Kawaramachi and from Chubei, the name each head of the household took in turn. They farmed, and they served as village headmen. Muko City describes the family as sōnanushi, chief headmen of the area; the household's own account specifies service as shōya for the Shogoin Monzeki estate in the closing decades of the Edo period.

What to look at, and how to get there

Stand on the roadway and look at the window first. The degōshi, a lattice frame that projects out from the wall plane on small brackets, is what lifts this gate above utility. It gives the two-mat room light and a view of the highway while keeping the interior screened, and its shadow line breaks up what would otherwise be a flat white surface.

Then look at where the plaster stops. The koshi-ita, the boarded skirt running along the base of the wall, takes the splash and abrasion that plaster cannot survive at ground level beside a road. Its height is repeated on the woodshed and fence to the north, and the eye reads the repetition before it registers the reason.

The doors reward a second look. The kuguri-do is cut low enough that an adult stoops to pass through it, which was the point: a person can be admitted without swinging open the full width of the gate.

Behind the gate, the main house of 1848 now operates as a café, and this is the practical route to seeing the property. The owners' website gives opening hours of 10:00 to 17:00 and lists Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday as closing days along with days when events are held; the Kyoto association's entry names only Monday and Tuesday. The schedule shifts around concerts, exhibitions and classes held in the house, so a call to 075-921-2657 before travelling is the sensible step. The gate itself, being the street face of the property, can be seen from the public road at any hour.

Photography of the exterior from the road presents no difficulty. Inside the property and inside the house, ask first, since this is a family home as well as a café.

Access is straightforward. Nishi-Muko Station on the Hankyu Kyoto Line is about eight minutes on foot. Coming by JR, alight at Nagaokakyo Station, take a Hankyu bus to the Ichimonbashi stop and walk three minutes. The bus stop name refers to a bridge over the Obata River that once charged a single mon coin to cross, a reminder that this stretch of road carried traffic long before it carried cars.