Takizawa Family Residence Nagayamon Gate

A Thatched Gate Closing the Western Boundary

Takizawa-ke Jūtaku Nagayamon (瀧澤家住宅長屋門, also written 滝澤家住宅長屋門), the gatehouse of the Takizawa family residence in the Isobe district of Chikuma City, Nagano Prefecture, is a late-Edo-period thatched nagayamon that was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on June 28, 2017.

The building runs the length of the compound's western edge and is the first thing anyone sees from the road. It is single story, built in dozō-zukuri with earthen walls, roofed in thatch, and covers 95 square meters. The passage through it opens slightly south of the midpoint. South of that opening lies a boarded floor three ken long; north of it, six ken of earth-floored storage.

A nagayamon is a gate with rooms in it. The form came out of the warrior class, where retainers' quarters flanked the entrance to a residence, and over the Edo period it spread to farming households wealthy and senior enough to be permitted one. The Takizawa were such a household: said to have been a warrior family who fought for the Takeda against the Murakami clan, they took up farming after the wars and served the village as kumigashira. A gate of this kind announced that history to anyone passing.

Two Roof Forms on One Building

The detail that makes this gate worth stopping for is at the two ends of the roof. The southern end is hipped, yosemune-zukuri, with slopes running down on three sides. The northern end is gabled, kirizuma-zukuri, cut off flat. One thatched roof, two different terminations, and the change is deliberate rather than the result of piecemeal rebuilding.

Read against the plan, the logic surfaces. The hipped end sits above the boarded southern section, the more formal half of the building, on the side of the gate a visitor approaches. The gabled end covers the storage, where the work of the farm happened. Roof form followed status of use, and a carpenter who understood the convention could say so without a word of explanation.

The gate opening itself carries careful work. Above the sanbari, the beam spanning the passage, the surface is plastered over in continuous mud rather than left as exposed timber and infill. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the treatment carefully made, a fairly unusual note in registration descriptions, which normally confine themselves to dimensions and materials. Plastering to that standard costs money and takes a skilled hand, and it puts the expenditure exactly where every visitor would pass beneath it.

The combination is itself uncommon: earthen dozō walls, which give fire resistance and a hard white surface, carrying a thatched roof, which is neither fireproof nor hard. Most owners who went to the trouble of mud walls also went to tile. Here the thatch was kept, and the registration file suggests why. The gate was admitted under the criterion of contribution to the historic character of the landscape, and the description observes that its thatched exterior, together with the main house behind, forms the historic character of the place. Continuity of appearance was worth more to this household than the extra safety of tile.

The house behind it was registered on the same day under a different criterion, as a model of form, on the strength of its interior structure. The storehouse to the north came in alongside the gate, on landscape grounds. Three buildings, one farmstead, two different arguments for keeping them.

At the Roadside

The Takizawa residence is a private home with the family still living in it. There is no admission and no interior access to the gate or to any other building on the property. Everything is seen from the public road along the western boundary, and visitors should not pass through the gateway or enter the grounds.

That restriction costs less here than it does with the other two buildings, because the gate is the one structure designed to be looked at from outside. Stand back far enough to take in the whole length and the asymmetry of the roof becomes legible: the soft three-sided slope at one end, the flat cut at the other, with the gate opening set a little off center between them. From directly in front, the composition compresses and the difference is easy to miss. A few steps north or south is all it takes.

Then look past it. The main house rises behind, higher and broader, its own thatch overlapping the gate's, and beyond that the metal roof of the storehouse. Thatched roofs of this scale were once ordinary through the villages of the Chikuma River valley. Maintaining one now means finding thatchers and finding reed, both of which have become expensive and scarce, so a compound with two of them standing is not a common sight in Nagano Prefecture or anywhere else.

Getting there: Togura Station on the Shinano Railway is a little over a kilometer away, fifteen to twenty minutes on foot, and the Sarashina Interchange on the Nagano Expressway is about fifteen minutes by car. No visitor parking exists at the site and the lane past the gate is narrow and residential, so drivers should park elsewhere in the district and walk. Photography from the road is fine; shooting through the gate passage into the yard is not.

Winter and early spring give the clearest views, with the surrounding trees bare. The Murakami clan fortification sites, a Nagano prefectural historic site, lie on the slopes of Isobe within walking distance, and Togura-Kamiyamada Onsen is a short way southwest for anyone wanting to end the afternoon in hot water.