Umeda Family Residence (Nabari)

About the Umeda Family Residence (Nabari)

The Umeda Family Residence (梅田家住宅, Umeda-ke Jūtaku) is a merchant townhouse built in 1866 on the old Hase Kaidō road in Kamihatchō, Nabari City, Mie Prefecture, and its four buildings, the main house, front storehouse, middle storehouse and connecting corridor, became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on August 13, 2012. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates all four to the same year, Keiō 2, so the compound survives as a set laid out in the last years of the Edo period.

Other properties registered under the name Umeda Family Residence stand in Inuyama (Aichi) and Kakamigahara (Gifu). They belong to different families and have no connection with the Nabari house. This page covers the four buildings in Kamihatchō.

A House on the Hase Kaidō

The road in front of the Umeda Family Residence linked Ise with Yamato and Kyoto. Mie Prefecture explains that it ran from Rokken, now part of Matsusaka, over the Aoyama Pass to Nabari and on to Hase (Hatsuse) in Nara Prefecture, which gave the road its name. It was also known as the Aoyama-goe and the Sangū Omote Kaidō, and in the Edo period it carried a steady stream of pilgrims bound for the Ise shrines.

Townhouses from the Edo period through the Showa era still line this road through old Nabari, and many of them are now registered properties. Nabari City's list shows that the Umeda house was the first in Kamihatchō to be registered, in 2012, with two more houses in the same neighbourhood following in 2014.

The Four Buildings

Seen from the street and moving back into the plot, the four buildings of the Umeda Family Residence are arranged as follows. Floor areas and structures are those given by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

• The main house faces east onto the Hase Kaidō. It is a timber building with a low Tsushi-nikai upper floor and a footprint of 155 square meters, extended in 1919 to 1926 and renovated in 1960.
• The front storehouse adjoins the north side of the main house and shares its street frontage. It is a two-storey Dozo-zukuri building of 70 square meters, renovated around 1945.
• The connecting corridor runs back from the main house to the middle storehouse. It is a single-storey timber structure of 22 square meters with a lavatory on its south side.
• The middle storehouse stands at the southwest rear of the plot, facing the inner garden. It is a two-storey dozo-zukuri building of 24 square meters, renovated in 2006.

The main house and front storehouse form the public face on the road, while the corridor and middle storehouse frame the inner garden behind them. One pair shapes the streetscape and the other shapes the view from inside the house.

The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended the four buildings for registration on April 20, 2012, and they were entered in the register on August 13 the same year, as numbers 24-0123 to 24-0126. All four were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and the Agency's notes single out the main house and front storehouse standing side by side as the frontage of a large townhouse.

Visiting

The Umeda Family Residence is a private home, and Nabari City lists its owner as a private individual. It is not open to the public, and visitors cannot enter the buildings or the grounds. No regular or special openings were found at the time of writing.

What can be seen is the exterior of the main house and front storehouse from the Hase Kaidō. The corridor and middle storehouse lie deep inside the plot and are not visible from the road. Please take photographs only from the public street and keep clear of passing traffic and the residents' daily life.

The nearest station is Nabari on the Kintetsu Osaka Line. The Umeda Family Residence is about 1 kilometer away on foot, roughly a 15-minute walk: leave by the west side of the station, join the Hase Kaidō in the old town and follow it to Kamihatchō, where the main house and front storehouse stand together on the west side of the road.