Ogawa Family Residence (Nabari)

The Ogawa Family Residence in Nabari

The Ogawa Family Residence (小川家住宅, Ogawa-ke Jūtaku) is a late Edo-period merchant house on the old Hase Kaido road in Sakakimachi, Nabari City, Mie Prefecture, whose main house, east storehouse and west storehouse were each registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property (structure) on October 27, 2017 (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Several registered houses elsewhere in Japan share the name, so this page calls it the Ogawa Family Residence (Nabari).

According to the Mie Prefectural Board of Education, the Ogawa family came from Koka, settled in Sakakimachi in 1616 and brewed soy sauce here until 1948. The Hase Kaido linked Hasedera Temple in Yamato with the Ise Grand Shrine (Nabari City), and the main house faces east onto it.

After brewing ended the main house was altered to serve as the office of an ironworks, and when registration was recommended in 2017 the owners were living in it (Iga Town Joho YOU, a local newspaper). No source describes the Ogawa Family Residence as open to the public.

How the Site Is Laid Out

The Ogawa Family Residence runs back from the street, with the main house at the front. This is a Machiya, a town house built as shop and dwelling in one, with a frontage of seven and a half bays (Agency for Cultural Affairs; Mie Prefecture).

An earthen-floored passage leads from the entrance through the house to two storehouses. The east storehouse stands behind the main house in the middle of the north side of the plot and faces south; the west storehouse lies to its southwest and faces east (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Both are two-storey earthen-walled storehouses with a dado of namako walling, flat tiles set on the wall with raised plaster joints, and beyond them lies the site of the former brewing yard (Mie Prefecture).

The main house and the west storehouse date from the late Edo period (the Agency gives 1830–1868) and the east storehouse from the mid-Meiji era (1883–1897). A Meiji storehouse was thus added beside an Edo one. Each building has its own page with the structural detail.

Why the Buildings Were Registered

All three buildings of the Ogawa Family Residence were registered as contributing to the historic landscape of the country (Agency for Cultural Affairs). Mie Prefecture describes them as a group that still shows how the house looked when the soy sauce trade prospered.

The main house of the Ogawa Family Residence faces east onto the Hase Kaido, with a projecting lattice bay at the south end of the front and barred windows in the low upper storey (Agency for Cultural Affairs). This front is what the road sees.

Visiting and Access

The Ogawa Family Residence is a private home, and no official information on interior visits was found. Visitors see the front of the main house from the Hase Kaido. The two storehouses stand behind it and do not face the street.

Nothing is published about photography either. Because people live here, stay on the public road and keep to exterior views.

The nearest station is Nabari on the Kintetsu Osaka Line. The Ogawa Family Residence lies about 650 metres west of it in a straight line, a figure calculated from Geospatial Information Authority coordinates. No information on visitor parking was found.