Nakamura Family Residence Front Gate

Two Metres of Carpentry

Nakamura House Front Gate (中村家住宅表門, Omotemon) is a timber gate at 52 Yawata Yamashiba, Yawata City, Kyoto Prefecture, built in the early Showa period between 1926 and 1945, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 August 2012.

The opening is 2.1 metres wide. That is the whole building, and it is a nationally recognised cultural property.

Anyone who dismisses the gate as an afterthought is reading the property backwards. Three structures on this plot were registered together in 2012: the reception hall Daikado, the Upper Storehouse, and this gate. The first two are classified as buildings. The gate is filed under a different heading in the national record, "other structures," a category that also holds bridges, walls, chimneys, and water gates. The registration system treats it as a work of construction in its own right rather than as a fitting attached to something else.

The dating tells a small story. The villa and its storehouse went up around 1917 for Amano (尼野貴之), proprietor of the Bentenza, one of the five theatres along Dotonbori in Osaka. The gate is later, from the early Showa years, which was also roughly when the Nakamura family acquired the property. Whether the gate arrived with the new owners or in a final phase of the villa's completion is not recorded, so the sequence is a matter of inference rather than fact.

How the Gate Is Made

The type is an udegi-mon, a bracket gate: one bay wide with a single doorway, its roof carried on horizontal brackets projecting from the main posts rather than on a separate frame. It is the compact end of the gate repertoire, used at townhouses and modest villas where a full roofed gatehouse would be excessive.

The roof is gabled and laid in pantiles, and its surface has mukuri, a slight upward bow. Most Japanese roofs sag inward in a concave curve. Bowing the surface the other way is a sukiya gesture, borrowed from tea architecture, and it costs the carpenter extra work for an effect most passers-by register only as a feeling of lightness. Beneath the eaves, rafters run in a single tier at wide intervals, the arrangement called hitonoki mabaradaruki. Wide spacing shows the rafters as individual members instead of massing them into a texture.

Step inside and look up at the brackets. They are supported by hikaebashira, secondary posts, finished by naguri: worked over with an adze so the surface keeps a faceted, rippling texture rather than being planed smooth. Naguri is a deliberate roughness, prized in tea architecture, and putting it on the inner face of a gate means the finish was chosen for the household walking through rather than for the street.

The doors are a pair of boarded leaves. Above them sits an osa-ranma, a transom of closely spaced vertical slats named for the reed of a weaving loom. A transom on a gate this size is not required by anything. It admits light and air to the entry when the doors are shut, and it gives the upper part of the opening a rhythm.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record sums the gate up as small in scale yet carefully made. Concentrating this much detail into 2.1 metres is the point.

One siting decision is worth noticing on the spot. The gate stands toward the eastern end of the northern boundary and is set back from the road rather than flush with it. The recess makes a small forecourt, so a visitor stops and stands before entering instead of stepping straight from the street into the grounds.

Registered, Not Designated

The label matters. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated, a selective category governed by permit and backed by substantial public funding. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties belong to a lighter framework created by the 1996 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, effective 1 October that year, in which owners notify the authorities of changes rather than applying for permission. The system was built for the very large number of buildings from the Meiji period onward that were being lost before anyone evaluated them.

Eligibility generally starts at fifty years old, with one of three criteria to be met. All three Nakamura buildings, the gate included, qualified under the first: contribution to the historic character of the landscape. In the gate's case that landscape is the approach to Iwashimizu Hachimangu Shrine, where the street frontage of each property along the way adds up to the character of the shrine town.

Seeing It

The gate faces the road on the north side of the property, so it can be examined from public ground at any time, free of charge. The roof curve, the pantiles, the wide rafters, and the boarded leaves with their slatted transom are all legible from outside. The adze-finished inner posts are not, since they face into the grounds.

From Iwashimizu Hachimangu Station on the Keihan line it is about six minutes on foot toward the shrine. The wooden arched bridge on the left is Ankobashi; cross it and the property is on the right, the white storehouse gable visible above the wall. Photography from the street is unrestricted, though this is a residence, so please photograph the gate rather than through it.

The grounds are private. The reception hall now operates as a whole-house rental lodging, which means guests pass through this gate on arrival, and it is the one reliable way to see the inner face. Occasional daytime openings have been organised through the Yawata City Tourist Association, at modest cost and limited capacity; entry on those days has been by the side of the gate, along the stone-paved path to the entrance. These events are irregular, so check the association's announcements.

Ten minutes uphill, Iwashimizu Hachimangu Shrine has gates of a very different order, and ten of its main-precinct buildings were designated National Treasures in 2016. Looking at a National Treasure gate and then at this one, in either sequence, is the clearest short lesson available on what the two systems are each for.