Nakamura Haruo's House, Main Building

A Merchant House on Muromachi Street

Nakamura Haruo Family Residence Main House (中村治男家住宅主屋, Shuoku) is a timber townhouse at 117 Kamiyanagihara-cho, Muromachi-dori north of Teranouchi, Kamigyo Ward, Kyoto, built in the late Meiji period and remodelled in 1933, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 31 July 2007.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record files this building under a category that surprises people: tertiary industry. Not housing, though it is a house. The classification points at what the building was for, and at the layout that follows from it.

Muromachi-dori north of Teranouchi runs through the part of Kamigyo shaped by cloth. Weavers, wholesalers, dyers, and the households that financed them filled these blocks, and their buildings were designed so that trade happened at the front and life happened behind. The Nakamura house is one of them, and the shape of its plan is the record of that arrangement.

The family's own trajectory is worth knowing, though it rests on local account rather than the national record. They traded under the house name written 中万 and originally ran a sake brewery at Shinmachi near Teranouchi. Later they moved into property dealing, and it is said that they bought this house, which had belonged to a Nishijin weaving business, and moved in. So the building carries two commercial lives: one it was built for, one it was bought into.

Omoya-zukuri: The Plan Explained

The house is built in omoya-zukuri, a form of Kyoto townhouse in which the street building and the living quarters are separate blocks divided by a courtyard, rather than one continuous depth of rooms. It is the arrangement used by substantial merchants. Business could be conducted in the front block without customers passing through the family's rooms, and the courtyard between them delivered daylight and air to both.

The front block, the omoya proper, faces west onto the street with a frontage of three and a half ken, about 6.4 metres. Behind a tsuboniwa courtyard stands the living block, presenting a face of six ken, roughly 10.9 metres. Two stories with a partly single-story section, tiled roof, 151 square metres of building area.

Three features on the street front tell you how the front block worked.

On the right of the ground floor is the odo, a large door. This was the working entrance, wide enough for goods and for people arriving on business. On the left is a degoshi, a lattice screen projecting from the wall plane. Latticework of this kind lets those inside watch the street while remaining unseen, and its projection makes a shallow shelf of space at the front of the room. Above, on the second floor, sits a mushiko-mado: a window whose vertical bars are thickly coated in plaster, so that a row of stubby white uprights stands against a plastered wall. The coating is fire protection, since a bare wooden lattice on an upper floor invites flame from a neighbouring roof.

Inside the living block, both floors carry an eight-mat formal room with a six-mat anteroom behind it. Placing the good rooms at the back is standard machiya logic: the street is noise and business, the rear is where the garden and the quiet are. Repeating the pair on both floors suggests a household that needed to receive guests properly on more than one level.

The 1933 remodelling is recorded without detail. Early Showa was a period when Kyoto merchant houses were commonly fitted with new kitchens, glazing, and wiring, so a visitor should expect the building to contain layers rather than a single moment.

The national record concludes that this is a fine example of the Kyoto townhouse. That is a modest phrase for a building whose value lies in being typical: not the exception, but the well-preserved instance of the rule.

Registered Because of the Street

Japan's two protection systems differ in strength and purpose. National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are designated, a selective category under permit control with substantial public support. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties belong to the 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 rather than seek permission. The system exists because buildings from the Meiji period onward were being demolished before anyone assessed them, and because Kyoto's townhouses in particular were vanishing at a rate no selective scheme could address.

Eligibility generally begins at fifty years of age plus one of three criteria. This house was registered under the first, contribution to the historic character of the landscape, together with the storehouse standing beside it, registered on the same day. That criterion is exactly right for a townhouse. What the register protects here is not a unique masterpiece but a street face: door, lattice, plastered window, tiled roof, in the correct proportions, on a street where such faces are steadily being replaced.

Seeing It, and Where to Go Instead

The house is closed. It remains in use as a private residence, and the Kyoto association of owners of registered cultural properties records it as not open to the public. There are no visiting days and no arrangements to request.

The street front, however, is the registered value, and it is fully visible from the public road at any hour without charge. Stand on the far side of Muromachi-dori and read the elevation from the bottom up: door, lattice, then the plastered window above. Beside it to the north stands the registered storehouse, turning the long eaves side of its gabled roof to the street rather than the gable end. Reach the area by city bus to the Horikawa Teranouchi stop, a few minutes' walk away, or on foot from Imadegawa Station on the Karasuma subway line, about fifteen minutes to the northwest. Photograph from the street only, and not into the property.

For an interior of the same type, one place answers precisely. Nishijin Kurashi no Bijutsukan Tondaya, a kimono wholesaler's house of 1885 registered in 1999, is also built in omoya-zukuri and is open to visitors with guided tours, kimono wearing, and tea. It has six courtyards, three storehouses, a tea room, and a detached room large enough for Noh. Booking is required and socks are needed for entry. Walking its courtyards is the nearest thing to walking through the Nakamura house.

Two more stops sit close by. The Chado Research Center at Urasenke, on Ogawa-dori north of Teranouchi, exhibits tea utensils and holds a full-size copy of the tea room Yuin, open 9:30 to 16:30 with last entry at 16:00, closed Mondays and between exhibitions. And the Teranouchi district itself holds a run of temples, among them Myokenji, Honpoji, and Hokyoji, so an hour on foot links the merchant street to the temple quarter it was named after.