Horii Family Residence Wall

A Thirty-Metre Wall on the National Register

The Horii Family Residence Wall (堀井家住宅塀, Horii-ke Jūtaku Hei, also written Horii-ke Jutaku Hei) is a timber boundary wall roughly 30 metres long at Anashi in Sakurai City, Nara Prefecture, built around 1932 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 March 2004. It is a fence. It carries a registration number, 29-0088, exactly as the house behind it does.

The wall comes in two runs. The longer one leaves the gatehouse at the centre of the compound's east side and heads north, turning a right angle partway along, a bend Japanese carpenters call kanaori. The shorter run closes the gap between the detached guest room and the rice storehouse. Between them the two stretches complete the east and north edges of the property.

Its construction is worth stating plainly, because every element is visible from the road. The wall sits on a footing of dressed stone laid like a sill plate. Above that it is shinkabe, the method that leaves the timber posts exposed rather than burying them in the wall surface. The upper field between the posts is finished in white lime plaster. The lower band, the koshi, is clad in vertical boarding, which takes the splashing and the wear that a plastered surface at ankle height would not survive. A small tiled roof runs the whole length in sangawara pantile, the same tile used on every roof in the compound.

That is five materials in a structure a person can see over. Stone, timber, plaster, board, tile.

Registered for the Landscape, Not for the Architecture

Japan's registration system for buildings dates from a 1996 revision of the Cultural Properties Protection Act. It was created because the country's older designation system, the one that yields National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, is deliberately selective, and selectivity was leaving thousands of decent modern and near-modern buildings unprotected while development removed them. Registration applies a lighter regime: owners notify the state before making alterations, receive guidance and tax relief, and keep control of their property.

Three criteria govern what gets registered. The Horii wall was accepted under the third, which covers structures contributing to the historic landscape of the country. This matters for reading the property. The main house and the detached guest room were registered under the first criterion, the one about design quality. The gatehouse, the milling shed, the rice storehouse and this wall were all registered under the landscape criterion. Two-thirds of the compound is on the register for what it does to the view.

The wall also sits in a different category from its neighbours. Under the type classification used in the national database, the other five Horii structures are listed as buildings. The wall is listed as an other constructed work, the heading that catches bridges, chimneys, gates, retaining walls and everything else built but not inhabited.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs sums up its function in two moves: the wall regulates the eastern and northern faces of the estate, and it produces a continuous run of built landscape. The second half of that sentence is the interesting one. Six structures of two very different dates, three from the late Edo period and three from around 1932, could easily read as a collection of separate objects. The wall ties them into one silhouette.

Its own date is given as approximately 1932, which places it with the main house and gatehouse rather than with the Edo-period buildings. When the Horii family rebuilt the core of their compound in the early Shōwa years, the boundary was rebuilt with it, in materials and tile that match the new work while leaving the older structures untouched behind.

Reading It from the Lane

An unusual thing about this particular registered property: you can see nearly all of it. The house is private and closed, the guest room is closed, the storehouse is closed. The wall faces the public road along its full length, and looking at it from the lane is the intended and only way to experience the Horii compound.

Come at the east side first. The gatehouse of 1932 occupies roughly the centre of that frontage, its ridge running north to south, gabled at the south end and hipped-and-gabled at the north, with a room flanking each side of the gateway. Zelkova was used through the central bay, the eaves carry an exposed purlin, and a fine reed-slat transom sits above the doors. The Anashi stream runs past the front. From here the wall takes over, running north with its tiled coping stepping along at a constant height until the right-angle bend takes it out of your sightline.

Watch how the wall handles light. White plaster above, dark vertical boarding below, grey tile on top: the composition changes character completely between an overcast morning and low winter sun, when the boarding goes almost black and the plaster picks up warmth. The rooflines of the detached room and the long storehouse show above the coping.

The rice storehouse behind the western section deserves a look for scale alone. It runs 21 metres, five rooms deep inside, its pantile roof broken into three stepped gables with a hipped-and-gabled north end, and its outer walls repeat the wall's own logic of plaster above and vertical boarding at the base.

Practical notes, briefly. There is no admission and no opening time because there is nothing to admit anyone to. Photograph from the public road; the exterior is unrestricted, as any street view in Japan is. Do not enter the grounds or approach the gate for a closer look at the transom. People live here.

Reaching Anashi means JR Makimuku Station on the Manyō Mahoroba Line, then about twenty minutes east on foot, climbing gently. Most people who pass the Horii compound are walking the Yamanobe-no-michi, the old route along the base of the eastern hills between Sakurai and Tenri, and the detour costs very little. Above the settlement, a maple-lined approach leads to Anashi ni Imasu Hyōzu Jinja, listed in the tenth-century Engishiki, with Sumō Jinja just below it on ground held by tradition to be where the first wrestling match staged before an emperor took place. To the west lie the Makimuku archaeological site and the Hashihaka Kofun. The wall is thirty metres of plaster and board in a valley full of much older claims on attention, which is a fair reason to give it two minutes.