Morimura Family Residence (Shingacho, Kashihara City, Nara

The Oldest Yamato-mune Roof, Raised Around 1732

From the road, the first thing that registers is the roofline. Both gable walls of the main house rise straight up to meet the ridge, plastered solid, so the long thatched roof sits between two tall white end-walls. This is the yamato-mune, a high-gabled farmhouse form particular to the Nara Basin, and the Morimura house carries what specialists regard as its oldest surviving example.

The Morimura Family Residence stands in Shinga-cho, Kashihara, in the southern part of the Nara Basin. Its principal buildings went up around the seventeenth year of the Kyoho era, about 1732, during the middle Edo period. The compound was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1989, and the designation covers the whole ensemble: the main house (omoya), the inner storehouse (uchigura), a detached parlour (bekkazashiki), the front gate (omotemon), and the residential grounds themselves.

It is one of the largest farmhouses in the Nara Basin. A moat once ringed the grounds, a defensive trace left from an earlier age, and the garden has been listed separately as a Place of Scenic Beauty by Nara Prefecture. The scale is not accidental: the Morimura were not ordinary farmers.

A Headman's Compound, and Why It Was Designated

The Morimura were an old family with roots reaching back to medieval times. Through the Edo period they served as o-shoya, the senior village headman overseeing the Shinga group of villages in Tochi district, a post of real local authority covering more than a dozen settlements. The residence is thought to stand on the site of a fortified manor of the Tochi-Shinga clan, so the moat and the commanding gate are remnants of a household that ranked well above its neighbours.

The main house shows this in its plan. Measuring roughly twenty-four metres along the front, it divides into an eastern half given over to the earthen-floored work space (doma) and cooking area (kamaya), and a western half of living rooms laid out three by three, a formal nine-room arrangement. The detached parlour attached at the upper end was finished with a raised alcove, staggered shelves, and a study bay, using high-grade timber throughout. The front gate is a nagaya-mon, a long gatehouse with rooms built into its flanks, sized to announce the family's standing.

What earned the designation was the combination: well-preserved, little-altered buildings of unusual quality, set within grounds that still read as a single composition. The committee singled out the main house as the earliest stage of the yamato-mune form, a point that gives the house value in the architectural history of the region, not just as a fine old home. Large dwellings reaching back to the mid-Edo period are rare, and this one survives close to its original state.

What to Notice from Outside

Visitors should know one thing first: the Morimura Family Residence is a private home and is not open for interior viewing. The reward here is in the silhouette and the setting, read from the public road. The tall white gable ends and the broad sweep of roof are best seen with some distance, where the yamato-mune profile comes through clearly against the sky.

The front gate, set back from the road, frames the approach to the main house behind it. Trace the line where the moat once ran and the logic of the compound becomes legible: a working farmyard at the rear, formal rooms and parlour toward the front, storehouses for grain and goods ranged around the edge. The family's archive, the Morimura documents, runs to more than two thousand six hundred items, the largest such collection in Kashihara, a measure of how much administrative life passed through this gate.

Around the Residence

The house lies about a thirteen-minute walk from the north exit of Yamato-Yagi Station, the main rail hub of Kashihara. The city rewards a longer stay. A short distance away is Imai-cho, a remarkably intact merchant district of the Edo period whose streets hold several other designated houses, including the Imanishi, Toyoda, and former Kometani residences, all open in varying degrees to visitors.

Kashihara Jingu, the large Meiji-era shrine at the foot of Mount Unebi, sits to the southwest, and the grassy expanse of the Fujiwara Palace site, capital of Japan in the early eighth century, lies to the east. Together they make Kashihara a place where a moated farmhouse, a planned merchant town, and an ancient imperial capital can be seen in a single day.