Okada Family Detached House and Connecting Corridor

A Taishō Guest Room at the Back of the Plot

The Detached Wing and Connecting Passage of the Okada Family Residence (岡田家住宅離れ及び渡廊下, Okada-ke Jūtaku Hanare oyobi Watari-rōka) is a Taishō-period timber structure at 13 Kasasagi-chō in Nara City, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on 25 April 2014.

Naramachi plots run deep. The frontage a townhouse presents to the street is narrow, and the household spreads backwards instead: main house first, then a courtyard, then whatever the family built later as means allowed. The Okada wing occupies that rear ground, set toward the northern side behind the main house.

It is a single-storey building with a gabled kirizuma roof of sangawara pantiles, covering 33 square metres. Small, in other words, and deliberately so. A hanare of this kind was not extra living space in any general sense. It was a room for receiving guests, kept slightly apart from the daily traffic of the kitchen and the earth-floored passage.

Six Mats, a Board Floor, and a Round Window

The principal room is a six-mat zashiki. Along its north wall the builders set the formal fittings: an alcove, a shelf, and a storage recess. Nara City's description lists a toko, a shelf and a closet; the Agency for Cultural Affairs entry records the shelf as a chigaidana, the staggered form. To the east of the room a board-floored bay projects outward, breaking the rectangle of the plan and pushing the interior toward the garden.

The connecting passage runs from the southern end of the veranda on the room's west side back to the main house. Its northern side, the side facing the inner courtyard, is left open. Deep eaves carry over it, which is what makes that openness workable through a Nara summer of sun and a Nara rainy season of water.

The lavatory off the passage has a round window. It is a small thing and easy to pass over in a list of features, but a circular opening cut into a service room is a sukiya gesture, the tea-house sensibility applied where nobody strictly needed it. Nara City's assessment points to exactly this: refined joinery throughout, sukiya-influenced detailing, and a plan that shows how townhouse building in the modern period absorbed the vocabulary of the tea room.

The wing was built during the Taishō era, between 1912 and 1926, and was repaired in 2010. Its registration number is 29-0205, from the same 77th round of registrations that covered the main house and the storehouse, and it was registered under the criterion for structures contributing to the historic character of the national landscape.

Visiting the Site

The detached wing sits behind the main house and cannot be seen from the street. The Okada Family Residence is privately owned and lived in; there is no interior access, no opening hours, and no admission fee. Anyone travelling to Kasasagi-chō specifically to look at this building will be disappointed, and it is worth saying so plainly before the journey rather than after.

What the address gives you instead is the street elevation of the main house, on the lane along the eastern side of Gangoji, and the texture of the surrounding quarter. Allow about fifteen minutes on foot from Kintetsu Nara Station or twenty from JR Nara Station. Photography should be limited to what is visible from the public road; do not photograph into the property.

To see a Naramachi detached room and courtyard at first hand, walk to Naramachi Nigiwai-no-ie, a Taishō machiya operated by the city with free admission, open 9:00 to 17:00 and closed Mondays, the day after a public holiday, and over the New Year period. Naramachi Kōshi-no-ie, also free and on the same schedule, reconstructs the full sequence of a townhouse property including its rear wing and storehouse, which is close to the arrangement the Okada plot preserves.

Gangoji, a World Heritage component site, stands a short distance west and charges admission, with the main hall and treasure house open 9:00 to 17:00; the fee is reported as 400 yen for adults and should be checked against the temple's own site. On 23 and 24 August the temple holds its Jizō-e, when the lanes around Kasasagi-chō take on a different character after dusk.