Yamanaka Family Residence (Nabari)

About the Yamanaka Family Residence in Nabari

The Yamanaka Family Residence (山中家住宅, Yamanaka-ke Jūtaku) is a late Edo-period merchant townhouse on the old Hase Kaido road in Honmachi, Nabari City, Mie Prefecture, and its four buildings, the main house, the annex, the north storehouse and the south storehouse, were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on September 10, 2019. They carry the consecutive registration numbers 24-269 to 24-272 and were all added on the same day.

The plot sits on a bend of the Hase Kaido, the pilgrim route that once linked Hasedera temple in Nara with the shrines of Ise. The main house faces the road to the east, and behind it the annex and two clay-walled storehouses stand around a central garden. A ridge-end tile (Onigawara) on the north wing is inscribed with the date Kaei 6, which corresponds to 1853, so the present main house was standing by the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest.

A brewery and an inn on the corner

Trade on this corner predates the Yamanaka family. According to a local newspaper report of March 2019, published when the registration was recommended, a sake brewery trading as 賀渡屋 worked the site in the mid-eighteenth century, and around the start of the nineteenth it was occupied by an inn called 角屋, a name that means "corner house". The Yamanaka family, who owned the Yamanaka Family Residence when it was registered, are said to have moved here from the former village of Kunitsu early in the Meiji era.

The name 角屋 also appears in the survey journals of the mapmaker Inō Tadataka. The lodging tables published by the Inopedia digital archive show that his sixth survey party spent the night of the 23rd day of the 12th month of Bunka 5 (February 7, 1809) in the town of Nabari, with the main group at the house of the elder Tsuji Kichijirō and an overflow group at the house of 角屋源三郎 (Genzaburō of the 角屋). The party had come over the hills from Hase village in Yamato and left the next morning for Ao. The journal alone cannot confirm that Genzaburō's 角屋 was the inn that stood on the Yamanaka site.

The main house is made up of two wings standing side by side. The 2019 report says the north wing served as the family's living quarters while the south wing took in paying guests, and that a drawing from the early Meiji era shows a third wing that once continued further south.

How the four buildings are laid out

Walking in from the road, the four buildings of the Yamanaka Family Residence are arranged like this:

• The main house fronts the road and faces east. Its north wing has a gabled roof (Kirizuma-zukuri) and its south wing a hip-and-gable roof (Irimoya-zukuri), and both have the low half-storey loft known as Tsushi-nikai.
• The north storehouse, used for household furnishings, stands west of the north wing and faces east.
• The annex, a guest pavilion from the early Meiji era, occupies the northwest corner of the plot and faces south.
• The south storehouse, a granary, stands in the southwest corner and faces north.

The annex and the north storehouse form one cluster in the northwest corner, and the south storehouse closes the garden from the opposite side. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the south storehouse as a backdrop to the garden view seen from the main house's reception rooms and from the annex.

In the national database of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the main house and both storehouses are registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and the annex for serving as a model of design. All four are Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Registered Tangible Cultural Property). The agency's note on the main house calls it a townhouse that conveys the streetscape of an Edo-period post town.

Most of the registered buildings in Nabari's old town are lined up along the Hase Kaido. The 2019 article noted that the 20 properties registered in the city before the Yamanaka Family Residence all stood on a stretch of the road about 2 kilometers long, and the Yamanaka corner in Honmachi lies roughly in the middle of it.

Visiting and getting there

The Yamanaka Family Residence is privately owned; Nabari City's list of cultural properties, current as of May 27, 2025, gives the owner as a private individual. In spring 2026, kyucho hotel Co., Ltd., set up jointly by Tsunagu, a local association that revives empty houses in the old town, and the Tokyo planning firm Landbrain, took over its management and opened it as kyucho hotel, a house rented to one party at a time.

As a result, only overnight guests can go inside. Check-in takes place at FLAT BASE, the association's base in nearby Motomachi, and guests are walked over from there. There is no parking at the house. Other visitors can see the facade of the main house from the Hase Kaido. The annex and the two storehouses stand at the back of the plot and are barely visible from the street.

The nearest station is Nabari on the Kintetsu Osaka Line. The walk to the Yamanaka Family Residence is about 1.1 kilometers and takes around 15 minutes. The old road is also a residential street, so please take photographs from the public road and keep clear of traffic and neighbors' doorways.