Yamamoto Family Residence's Back Gate and Fence

The Back Entrance, and Why It Was Worth Registering

The Service Gate and Walls of the Yamamoto Residence (山本家住宅勝手門及び塀, Yamamoto-ke Jūtaku Kattemon oyobi Hei) stand on the west side of a private plot in Sanchōchō, Kamigyō Ward, Kyoto City, built around 1940 and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 15 May 2007. The walls run 28 metres, the longest of any registered element on the property, and the registration includes a lavatory built into the north end of the wall.

A kattemon is the gate a household uses for everything that is not a guest. Deliveries, staff, laundry, refuse, the daily traffic of a kitchen. In a Kyoto merchant's house the separation was not incidental. The residence behind these walls, known as Jinpūan (仁風庵), was built by the silk-cloth wholesaler Yamamoto Jinzaburō expressly to receive customers and business associates away from his shop on Muromachi Street. A property designed around hospitality needs somewhere for the unglamorous part of the operation to happen out of sight.

That is what the west side of the plot is. The four registered structures divide neatly along this line: the main house and the front gate group face the guest, the storehouse and this service gate group serve the household.

The Register, and a Discrepancy Worth Knowing About

This group holds the status of Registered Tangible Cultural Property under the criterion of contribution to the historic landscape of the nation. Registration is the lighter of Japan's two heritage frameworks for buildings, introduced in 1996: the owner notifies the authorities of alterations rather than seeking permission, which makes the system usable for houses people still live in. Designation as an Important Cultural Property, the older and stricter instrument, would almost never reach a service gate.

Three of the four structures here, this group among them, went in on landscape grounds. The main house alone was registered as a model of design.

One point needs flagging for anyone citing figures. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry gives the gate's opening as 1.5 metres in its structural summary, while the descriptive text on the same page calls the gate one bay wide. A bay in this context runs about 1.82 metres. The two statements do not agree, and the record offers no way to reconcile them. The 1.5-metre figure is the one entered in the structured field, so it is the safer number to quote, but the discrepancy is in the primary source itself rather than in any later retelling.

The registration number is 26-0241, from the fifty-fourth round of registrations.

Details on the West Lane

The gate sits at the middle of the west elevation. It is built as an udegi-mon, a form in which the roof is carried on brackets projecting from the two posts rather than on a full frame, and the doors are sliding lattice panels that pass each other. Compare it with the front gate, which is gabled with a pair of lattice doors sliding apart in opposite directions. The two gates use related materials to signal quite different degrees of formality.

Roofed walls extend from both ends of the gate. At the north end, the lavatory. Including a lavatory in the registered scope of a garden wall may look like bureaucratic thoroughness, and it is; it is also a record of how the household actually worked, with a facility placed for people coming and going on the service side rather than passing through the house.

The southern stretch

The wall running south is the more finished of the two. It turns the south-west corner of the plot and continues until it meets the front gate, which means the registered walls of the two gate groups together enclose the entire street-facing perimeter. Its foundation is cut stone. Above that come wooden base boards, a capping of battened tiles, and, in the upper zone, transom panels set into the wall.

Those transoms are the detail to look for. A blank wall of this length would read as defensive. Opening the top of it, even slightly, changes the relationship: light passes, air passes, and the wall stops being a barricade and becomes an edge. The Agency for Cultural Affairs summary characterises the result as composed and dignified. Walk the lane slowly and the judgment holds up.

Practical Notes

The Yamamoto Residence is closed. It is a private family home with no opening hours, no admission fee and no interior tour, and the service gate is not an entrance for visitors. A few times a year the family hosts a lecture or exhibition, announced individually and conducted in Japanese; Kyoto walking-tour organisers occasionally arrange access to the house and gardens.

The gate and walls themselves are visible from the public lane at any hour, at no cost. Standing here also gives the best available view of the registered earthen storehouse, whose plastered upper wall and tiled gable rise behind the wall line at the north-west corner of the plot. Photography from the lane is unrestricted; pointing a lens over the wall into a lived-in house is not acceptable.

Reaching the site takes about ten minutes on foot from Imadegawa Station on the Karasuma subway line, or five minutes from the Karasuma Ichijō bus stop. Coming out of Kyoto Imperial Palace Park by the Nakadachiuri Gate on its west side, walk west for roughly five minutes.

Anyone wanting to get inside a building of this period should continue about ten minutes south to the former main building of the Kyoto Prefectural Office at Shimodachiuri and Shinmachi. Completed in brick in 1904 and designated an Important Cultural Property in December 2004, it is the oldest government building in Japan still in official use with its original form intact, and admission to the state chamber, former governor's office and former assembly hall is free, Tuesday to Friday and on the first, third and fifth Saturdays, 10:00 to 17:00, outside public holidays and the new year period.