Sato Family Residence Main House

What Is the Sato Family Residence Main House?

The Sato Family Residence Main House (佐藤家住宅主屋, Satō-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a 2-storey wooden house built around 1899 in Nishidomari-cho, Nagasaki City, Nagasaki Prefecture, and was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on November 5, 1997. It has a tiled roof and a building area of 106 square meters.

Of the five registered buildings at the Sato Family Residence, the main house is the family's living quarters and by far the largest. It stands close to the shore on the western side of Nagasaki Bay, on the south side of an east-west street, with its front turned north toward the road. Stone Warehouse A adjoins it on the west, the Wooden Annex on the southwest, and the detached building lies behind it to the south.

A Tall Timber House

The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out the Sato Main House for its height. This is not a single-storey house with a loft squeezed under the roof but a full 2-storey building whose eaves and ridge sit high, so from the street it reads as tall for the width of its frontage.

The frame is traditional Japanese carpentry. In its note on the neighbouring detached building, the Agency contrasts that wing's slender timbers with the main house's thick posts and beams, which gives a good sense of the Sato Main House: a heavy, solidly framed town house under a tile roof.

The Brick Firewall on the East Side

The feature that sets the Sato Family Residence Main House apart is a brick firewall rising along its east end. That side runs right up against the neighbouring plot, and the builders raised a masonry wall on the boundary to shield the timber house from next door.

In towns of closely packed wooden houses, a fire next door was the danger that mattered most. Many Japanese houses answered it with thick clay walls or plastered side walls; the Sato house gave the job to brick. Timber houses that simply build brick into their structure like this are uncommon, and the wall shows one way Western building materials found their way into ordinary Nagasaki homes during the Meiji era.

To see it, stand on the east-west street north of the house and look at its east end. The seam where the timber wall meets the brick shows exactly how the two systems were joined.

Why the Sato Main House Was Registered

The Sato Family Residence Main House was listed as a registered tangible cultural property under the criterion of being difficult to reproduce. Its registration number, 42-0002, is the first of the five numbers issued to the Sato buildings on the same day.

The Agency describes it as an unusual mid-Meiji house that skilfully combines traditional timber construction with brickwork. The Agency gives its date as around 1899. For the Wooden Annex, which it places in the same period, it bases the estimate on the weathering of the firewall bricks and the timber, and the main house is dated alongside it.

Seeing the Sato Main House

The Sato Family Residence Main House is still a private home, and its interior is not open to the public (checked September 2026). Because it faces the street, the front can be seen from the road, but the grounds are closed. There is no official guidance on photography, so if you take pictures from outside, be considerate of the people who live there. Directions to the house are on the Sato Family Residence (Nagasaki) page.