Former Nueda Family Residence (Haruya Naramachi) Main

A Nara Townhouse That Stands Back Behind Its Own Gate

The Main House of the Former Fueda Family Residence (旧布江田家住宅（はる家ならまち）主屋, Kyū Fueda-ke Jūtaku Omoya, the building now operating as Haruya Naramachi) stands in Minamibukuro-chō in the southwestern part of Nara City's Naramachi district, was rebuilt in 1940, and was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 13 March 2025.

Walk the lanes south of Gangōji and the pattern repeats itself: house fronts pressed flat against the street, eaves almost touching, the whole block reading as one continuous wooden wall. Then the wall breaks. A tiled gate sits above a low stone plinth, a plastered fence runs off to either side, and behind the opening there is a gap of open ground before the house itself begins.

That gap is the reason this building was registered.

The Fueda family bought the plot in 1890. From the Taishō era until roughly the mid-1930s they were not living on it: the household ran a bathhouse business in Umeda, Osaka, and the Nara property sat neglected. Nara City's cultural properties division records that the family put the compound back in order after returning to Nara, and that the layout they settled on then is what survives today. A gohei inscription left inside the building dates the rebuilding of the main house to 1940. A further round of repair work was carried out in 2017.

Why the Register, and Why This House

Japan runs two parallel systems for architectural heritage, and the difference matters when you read the label on a building like this one. Designation (shitei) is the older and heavier instrument: National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties are selected for outstanding value, and almost nothing may be altered without permission from the national government. Registration (tōroku) was added to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1996 to catch a different problem, namely the steady loss of ordinary buildings from the Meiji period onward that were too numerous and too everyday to designate individually, yet too good to lose.

A registered building carries a duty to notify before major exterior alteration rather than a duty to seek permission. Owners keep far more freedom of use, and in exchange the state expects the building to stay in service. Roughly a third of Japan's registered buildings are in commercial use of some kind. The Fueda house is squarely in that category: it earns its keep as lodging, and the registration was made with that use already in place.

The criterion cited for all three Fueda buildings is the first of the three registration standards, contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The main house was not registered for a single dazzling feature. It was registered because the residential-style layout of gate, forecourt and set-back house is genuinely uncommon in Nara, where the standard townhouse puts its business frontage hard against the road; because the joinery and finishing are of a quality above the ordinary run of machiya; and because it works as one piece with the storehouse and the gate and fence, which were registered on the same day under the adjacent numbers 29-0365 and 29-0366.

One detail deserves attention from anyone interested in building archaeology. The 1940 campaign was extensive, but it was not total. The earthen-floored service wing at the south end kept the form of the earlier structure, so the building contains within itself evidence of the house that preceded it.

What to Look For

Start with the roof line from the forecourt. The main volume is a tsushi-nikai, a townhouse form in which the upper level is a low half-storey rather than a full second floor, roofed here with a gabled expanse of pantiles (sangawara). Building area is recorded as 174 square metres, which is large by Naramachi standards.

Then look up at the upper wall. It is finished in white plaster and pierced by a mushiko-mado, the thickly plastered lattice window that reads from the street as a row of fat white bars. Short wing walls (sodekabe) project at the ends of the plaster face. Both features are standard vocabulary in Kansai townhouse fronts, and both are executed here with unusual crispness.

Inside, the plan divides in two. The northern portion holds six rooms in two ranks of three, with the formal reception room in the northeast corner fitted with the full display alcove arrangement: tokonoma, staggered shelving, decorative shoji. The southern portion is the doma, the earth-floored working space, set under a lower roof section (ochimune) with a smoke vent above it. Cooking over an open kamado needed somewhere for the smoke to go, and the vent is the visible trace of that.

The one element that does not fit the traditional grammar sits at the southwest corner of the doma, where the 1940 work inserted a Western-style room. Households of a certain standing in the 1930s and 1940s often added exactly one such room, a place for chairs and a table and receiving outsiders, and left the rest of the house Japanese. It is a small architectural marker of its decade.

Two features survive that are usually the first casualties of modernisation. The tōri-niwa, the passage running straight from the entrance through to the small rear garden, is intact rather than boxed in. So is the kamado, the masonry cooking hearth, along with an old well.

Getting In: The Building Is a Guesthouse

The main house is privately owned, by Haruya Co., Ltd., and there is no public opening, no admission ticket and no guided tour. The way to see the interior is to book a night in it. The compound trades as Haruya Naramachi, and the registered main house contains guest rooms rather than being a separate exhibit.

Room types run from a single tatami room to a mixed dormitory sleeping fourteen. If the architecture is the point of your visit, note that one of the smallest rooms, Wakakusa, is a tatami room with a mushiko-mado in it, and several of the garden-side rooms retain the alcove, staggered shelving and veranda arrangement of a prewar Japanese house. One detached building on the site can be taken whole for up to six people.

Practical points that catch visitors out. Check-in is from 16:00 and check-out is 10:00, with no curfew once you have arrived, and luggage can be left before and after. Payment is taken in cash at check-in and credit cards are not accepted, which is worth planning around. No meals are served; there is a kitchen guests may cook in, and the operator recommends places to eat within a short walk. Children aged three and over are accepted. There is no car park on the site, though coin parking stands three or four minutes away on foot.

Because the building keeps its original construction, insulation and sound insulation are limited and voices carry between rooms. This is not a hotel wearing period costume.

The exterior is a different matter. The gate, the fence and the storehouse all face a public lane and can be seen and photographed from it at any hour, which is how most visitors to the site will experience the registered group. Photography inside the compound is a question for the staff and for the privacy of other guests, so ask at the desk rather than assume.

Getting there: about 15 minutes on foot from JR Nara Station, about 12 from Kintetsu Nara Station. By bus, take the inner-loop city route (route 1) from stand 5 at JR Nara Station's east exit or stand 9 at Kintetsu Nara Station, ride 3 or 7 minutes respectively to the Hakkenchō stop, then walk 5 minutes. Once you are in the lanes the address matters more than the name, since the operator runs several houses in Nara and Kyoto. Gangōji, whose main hall is a National Treasure and part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara World Heritage site, is a short walk north, and Jūrin'in, whose main hall is also a National Treasure, is closer still.