Chikada Family Residence Main House

The House a Lumber Dealer Built for Himself

The Chikada Family Residence Main House (近田家住宅主屋, Chikada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also read Chikada-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is a two-storey wooden townhouse in Kasasagi-cho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, completed in 1933 and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 25 April 2014.

It stands on the narrow street running down the eastern edge of Gangoji, the temple whose long-vanished precinct gave the Naramachi quarter its street pattern. The front faces east, so morning sun strikes the facade square on and the lattice throws hard shadows across the boards. Building area is 87 square metres, a figure that sounds cramped until you stand at the door and register how these lots actually work: tight at the street, running back a long way behind.

The client was a timber wholesaler, and the building did double duty as his home and his office. On the ground floor three rooms sit in a line back from the street. The first is the misenoma, the front room where a Nara merchant laid out goods and received customers. Down the south side runs the doma, an earth-floored working passage that goes from the entrance clean through to the rear of the plot. The doma's roof is dropped below the main ridge in the arrangement Japanese carpenters call ochimune, and a low lean-to, the geya, runs across the front at the level of the first floor ceiling.

Registered Rather Than Designated

Japan protects its buildings through two parallel systems, and the difference matters for what you can expect to see here. Designation (shitei) produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, with strict controls on any alteration and, usually, public money behind the repairs. Registration (toroku), added to the law in 1996, is deliberately lighter. Owners keep considerable freedom over their property and in return agree to notify the authorities before making substantial changes. The register exists for buildings exactly like this one: working structures of the last century or so, still in daily use, that would otherwise disappear without ever being written down.

The Chikada main house was registered under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, as entry 29-0207 in the seventy-seventh round of registrations. Nara City's cultural properties division describes it as a sound example of an early Showa machiya in Naramachi and draws attention to the group of townhouses along the eastern side of Gangoji, put up between the Meiji era and the early Showa years, which together hold a consistent line and scale along the street. The Chikada house is one link in that chain, and its value is bound up with the neighbours it keeps.

Its 1933 date places it at the late edge of what most visitors picture when they think of Naramachi, and that is part of the point. By the 1930s the machiya had quietly absorbed sheet glass, electric light and a different notion of how rooms ought to be laid out. This house records that shift without throwing away the older plan it inherited.

Reading the Front from the Street

Start with the windows. They carry glass shoji, sliding screens glazed rather than papered, set behind bo-goshi, a screen of plain vertical bars with no ornament. Glass across a machiya frontage was a marker of the 1920s and 1930s, and here it appears alongside the woodwork of a much older tradition without any sense of collision.

The upper storey repays a second look. In earlier Nara townhouses the second floor was a low half-level used for storage, lit through narrow slotted openings. Here the rooms above are proper rooms, and the elevation has been worked out so that light reaches them.

Then follow the ridge line from north to south. Where it steps down, the doma begins.

The interior stays closed, but knowing what lies behind the front changes how the front reads. Upstairs the plan is chu-roka, a central corridor with rooms opening off both sides, an arrangement that entered Japanese domestic building from Meiji-era schools and offices and reached ordinary townhouses only in the twentieth century. The ten-mat zashiki on that floor is finished with meiboku, specially selected timbers chosen for the figure and colour of their grain, used around the tokonoma alcove and in the ceiling boards. A wholesaler picking material for his own best room could reach stock that never went near an ordinary customer, and Nara City reads that room as the owner's trade made visible in his own house.

One practical point before you go. The house is privately owned and someone lives in it. There is no interior access, no open day, no admission desk. What is available to a visitor is the walk along the street and the view of the outside, which is precisely what the registration was designed to protect. Photographing the facade from the public road is fine; stepping onto the property is not, and it is worth keeping your voice down in a lane this narrow.

Getting there is easy. Gangoji sits about fifteen minutes on foot from Kintetsu Nara Station or twenty from JR Nara Station, and the Chikada house is on the street along the temple's eastern boundary; Nara Kotsu buses stop at Fukuchiin-cho, five minutes away. Pair the visit with Gangoji itself, where the Gokurakubo Main Hall and the Zenshitsu are both National Treasures and the precinct forms one component of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara World Heritage property. On the evenings of 23 and 24 August the temple holds Jizo-e Manto Kuyo, a lantern offering that fills these streets with people at the close of summer.