Harada Family Main House

A House Built Around Silkworms

Harada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku (原田家住宅主屋, also written Haradake Jutaku Shuoku, "the main house of the Harada Family Residence") is a farmhouse of about 1909 at Minamikata 582, Ōaza Iriyamabe, Matsumoto City, Nagano Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 14 October 1999. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as a two-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a building area of 151 square metres.

Iriyamabe lies east of central Matsumoto, up the valley of the Susuki River. The Minamikata settlement occupies a steep slope on the river's left bank, and the Harada house sits on a terrace cut into that slope, facing east. Matsumoto City notes that the level ground was made by retaining walls of Yamabe stone, the local building stone quarried in this valley.

The form is a gabled block of two full storeys, roofed in sangawara pantiles, with a lower eave running around the main body. Walls are shinkabe: posts and horizontal tie-beams left exposed against white lime plaster, so the frame reads as a grid on the outside of the house. The upper floor is unusually tall for a farmhouse of this size, and that height is the whole point of the building.

The second storey was a silkworm room. Matsumoto City's account holds that it was originally one undivided space, without partitions. Raising silkworms at scale needs volume, steady warmth and moving air, and a farmhouse asked to do that work grows upward: taller upper walls, larger openings, a roof arranged to let air out. What appears at first as a generously proportioned house is a house shaped by an industrial process being carried out inside it.

Why This House Was Registered

Japan places historic buildings in tiers, and the label here is worth reading carefully. National Treasure and Important Cultural Property are designations, selective and legally demanding. Registered Tangible Cultural Property is a separate and lighter category, established in 1996, intended to catch a much wider body of buildings roughly fifty years old or more before they disappear. Owners notify the authorities of major changes rather than seeking approval for each repair. Harada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku is registered, not designated, under registration number 20-0023 from the twentieth round, with public notice issued on 28 October 1999.

The criterion applied is the second of the three available: that the building is a model of design (zōkei no kihan to natte iru mono). This is a slightly unexpected criterion for a rural house. It is usually reached for when a building represents its type with particular clarity, and that is the argument being made here. The Agency for Cultural Affairs record singles out the tall silkworm-room upper floor and the exposed posts and tie-beams of the plastered exterior as conveying the character of a farmhouse from the period when this district prospered on sericulture.

The reasoning gains force from what has happened around it. Matsumoto City states plainly that the Iriyamabe area was once full of houses of this kind, built for silk raising, and that almost none of them remain. Japan's raw silk industry carried the country's export economy through the Meiji and Taishō eras and collapsed under synthetic fibres and changing markets in the twentieth century. When an industry ends, its ordinary buildings go first, because nobody thinks to protect what is everywhere. The 1999 registration caught this one late.

The date of about 1909, Meiji 42, places construction near the peak of that trade rather than at its beginning. This was not an experiment. It was a mature building type, put up by people who knew exactly what a silk house needed to be.

Approaching with Care

Before anything else: this is somebody's home. Matsumoto City lists the owner as a private individual, there is no visitor provision of any kind, and the interior cannot be seen. Anyone who comes should stay on the public road, keep well back from the property line, and treat the house as a neighbour's house rather than as an attraction. Photography of the exterior from the road is reasonable; approaching the entrance, using a drone, or photographing into windows is not.

Given that, what is there to see from the road? The silhouette, mostly, and it repays a slow look. Compare the height of the ground floor with the height of the floor above it. In an ordinary farmhouse of this period the upper level would be a shallow loft. Here the two are close to equal, and the wall above the first-floor eave stands tall enough to read as a full room rather than an attic. That single proportion tells you what the building was for.

Then look at the grid. Vertical posts, horizontal tie-beams, white plaster panels between them. In much of Japan the equivalent farmhouse wall would be plastered over the frame entirely, hiding the timber. Leaving it visible was a regional preference in the Matsumoto basin, and Matsumoto City describes the resulting pattern as characteristic of local building.

The setting is half the experience. The slope, the stone retaining walls, the river below, the mountains closing the valley east toward Utsukushigahara. Iriyamabe reaches roughly eight and a half kilometres east of Matsumoto Station along the Susuki, and the road climbs steadily.

Further up the same valley at Iriyamabe 4526 stands Tokuun-ji, a Sōtō Zen temple founded in 1331 and rebuilt in 1854 after a fire. Its main hall, priest's quarters, gate and wall were registered as Tangible Cultural Properties in October 2014. Unlike the Harada house, Tokuun-ji receives visitors, and its wisteria draws crowds in late May. For anyone travelling out to Iriyamabe, the temple is the reasonable destination and the Harada house something noticed along the way.