Harayama Residence Friends' Room

The Building Where the Servants Lived

The Servants' Quarters of the Harayama Residence (原山家住宅仲間部屋, Harayama-ke Jūtaku Chūgen-beya), a two-storey timber building of the later Edo period in the Babachō quarter of Matsushiro, Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture, was entered on Japan's Register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 10 September 2010. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 69 square metres, and was repaired in 2001.

The building sits at the centre of the plot's eastern edge and faces the street. Its ridge runs north to south beneath a gabled roof of pantiles. A deep lean-to wraps from the south face around to the west, giving sheltered working space on the side away from the road.

The walls are built in the ōkabe manner, with the timber posts buried inside the plaster rather than left visible, and finished with the mid-coat render alone. No white top coat was applied, so the earth colour of the plaster shows on the surface. Set beside the lime-white gate to the north, the difference in texture is immediate.

Three windows open toward the street, each of a different kind: a flush lattice, a projecting lattice bay, and a low window with an elbow rail. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles these out as the features that give expression to a wall face that would otherwise be flat.

Who the Chūgen Were

The name carries the whole point of the building. Chūgen, usually written 中間 though the registered name uses 仲間, were servants hired into samurai households. They held no samurai status themselves and ranked below the ashigaru foot soldiers. Their work was the household's: chores, hauling, walking in attendance when the master went out, and watching the gate.

Visitors to Edo-period samurai districts tend to look at gates and reception rooms, which belonged to the master. The people who actually opened those gates lived somewhere else on the plot, and that somewhere is what survives here.

Matsushiro offers a useful comparison. Several residences in the town have a nagayamon, a gate carved out of a long service range, and the wings of those ranges served as lodging. The musha-mado lattice window in the gate of the Yamadera Jōzan residence is said to have let a chūgen watch callers approach. At the Harayama property the two functions are separated. The quarters stand as their own building, two storeys, facing the road, with the gate as a distinct structure to the north and a wall continuing beyond it. Read from south to north, the eastern edge of the plot is assembled from quarters, gate, wall.

The registration number is 20-0360, and the qualifying criterion was contribution to the historical character of the national landscape. Three elements of the property are registered and the main house is not. What the register covers, in effect, is what the street can see.

Reading the Three Windows

Compare them. The flush lattice sits level with the wall, screening the interior while allowing a view straight out. The projecting bay pushes forward, so its side lattices open oblique sightlines up and down the street. The elbow rail belongs to a low opening, meant for someone seated, forearms resting, looking out at length. Three postures, three fields of view. A household that expected someone to be watching the road had reason to arrange it in more than one way.

Note the second storey as well. The gate and the wall stop at heights that block a passer-by's line of sight. This building alone carries windows above that level.

The lean-to wrapping the south and west faces is largely invisible from the road. Presentation on the street side, utility behind it, the two resolved within a single small building.

One practical caution. The Harayama Residence is a private home, and the servants' quarters are not open. There are no visiting hours, no admission fee, and no interior access of any kind. Viewing means standing on the public road and looking. Photography from the roadway is fine; entering the grounds or pointing a lens through the window lattice is not. The 2001 repair is worth bearing in mind here, since it marks the building as one still in use rather than a preserved shell.

To get there, take Alpico Kōtsū bus route 30 from the Zenkōji exit of Nagano Station, about thirty minutes at roughly two departures an hour, and alight at Matsushiro-eki. Babachō is some 800 metres south, ten minutes on foot. If you want to see the inside of a Matsushiro samurai house, the former Yokota Residence, an Important Cultural Property, is open nearby, as are the Sanada villa and the relocated Shirai family gate. Visiting one of those first makes the Harayama frontage easier to read.