Nakakoji Family Residence Annex and Inner Gate

Two structures, one listing

The Annex and Inner Gate of the Nakakoji Residence (中小路家住宅離れ及び内門, also written Nakakōji-ke Jūtaku Hanare oyobi Uchimon) stand in the Shimokawara area of Kaminoueno-cho, Muko City, Kyoto Prefecture, date to the early Meiji period, and were entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 18 April 2008. They occupy the southeast corner of the property, behind the highway frontage and to one side of the 1848 main house.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs counts them as a single unit. The annex is a one-storey timber building of about 20 square meters, its ridge running east to west, roofed in kirizuma gable form with sangawara pantiles and fitted with a hisashi, a projecting eave, along its north face. Its walls are lime plaster over a high skirt of vertical boarding. The rooms inside are living rooms, and they have stayed living rooms.

Between the annex and the main house runs the second structure, which the family calls the uchimon or inner gate. It measures 6.0 meters along its length and only 1.4 meters in depth, with a recorded area of 9.0 square meters, and it continues directly from the annex eave rather than standing free.

That last detail explains why one registration covers both. Detach the gate from the annex and neither reads correctly.

An open side and a closed side

The inner gate has two faces, and they are not alike. Its west side is left open, giving onto the courtyard and the approach to the main house. Its east side, the side turned toward the old Saigoku Kaido, is finished in solid plaster, pierced only where a kuguri-mon, a small doorway, is set into the wall.

The arrangement produces a covered passage that is also a screen. Anyone crossing from the main house to the annex walks under a roof, shielded from the road by plaster on one flank and open to the garden on the other.

Registration under number 26-0296 was granted in the fifty-ninth round of listings, with public notification on 7 May 2008, and the criterion applied was the first of the three the system offers: a building that contributes to the historic landscape of the country. The registration scheme itself dates from 1996 and was designed for exactly this kind of property, one still lived in, still altered as families alter houses, and worth keeping without the permit regime that governs Important Cultural Properties.

The gate marks a second threshold on a property that already has one. The nagayamon on the street line admits visitors from the highway into the grounds. The inner gate then separates the household's formal front from its private southeast corner. Estates of this rank in the Kyoto countryside were organised in layers, and the layers survive here in built form.

The household, the site, and visiting

Documents kept on the property run back to 1680, and the Nakakoji have been on this ground for something close to four centuries. Their shop name was Kawachu, drawn from Kawaramachi, the local name for this stretch of roadside, and from Chubei, the name taken in turn by each head of the house. Muko City records the family as chief village headmen. The family's own account adds that in the late Edo period they served as shoya, village officials, for an estate belonging to the Shogoin Monzeki temple.

A land document of the Meiji period lists a main house, two storehouses, a shed and an outbuilding, which correspond to the main house, the inner and outer storehouses, the annex and the shed. Muko City notes that the outer storehouse is the one item on that list no longer standing. A kasō-zu, a house-plan drawing made in April 1925 for divination purposes, matches the present layout closely, which places the annex and inner gate in their current form by that year at the latest.

Six buildings of the residence are currently listed in the national database. Visitors reach them through the café that now occupies the main house, open 10:00 to 17:00. Closing days are given as Monday through Wednesday plus event days on the owners' own site, and as Monday and Tuesday in the Kyoto owners' association listing, so the safe approach is a call to 075-921-2657 in advance. Concerts, exhibitions and classes are held in the house through the year and they displace the café schedule.

The annex and inner gate sit inside the grounds and cannot be seen from the public road, unlike the gate and grain storehouse on the street line. Seeing them means entering. Photography inside the property is best cleared with the owners first, since the house remains a family home.

Nishi-Muko Station on the Hankyu Kyoto Line is about eight minutes on foot. From JR Nagaokakyo Station, a Hankyu bus reaches the Ichimonbashi stop, three minutes away. The Muko district repays a longer walk: the old highway runs north past other listed houses, and the site of the Nagaoka Palace, capital of Japan for a decade in the 780s, lies within the same city.