Okamoto Family Residence

What Is the Okamoto Family Residence?

The Okamoto Family Residence (岡本家住宅, Okamoto-ke Jūtaku) is a merchant's town house in Yagicho 2-chome, Kashihara City, Nara Prefecture, built in 1906, and six of its buildings (the store and main house, the connecting corridor, the annex, the inner storehouse, the large annex and the storage shed) were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 29 November 2016. The plot opens east onto the Shimotsumichi, an ancient north-south road, and its buildings run back from the street toward the west.

Yagi grew up where the Shimotsumichi, later called the Nakakaidō, crossed the Yokoōji, an east-west route across the Nara Basin. Kashihara City notes that from the mid-Edo period the crossing was busy with travelers bound for the Ise Shrines, Yoshino and Mount Kōya, and Yagi prospered as a highway town. The Okamoto Family Residence stands on the west side of the Shimotsumichi, about 120 meters south of Fuda-no-tsuji, the old crossroads where the two roads meet.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the house as the home of a large Meiji-era merchant business and a record of how an upper-class merchant family lived. The public sources consulted for this page do not say what the Okamoto family traded in.

Six Registered Buildings

All six buildings of the Okamoto Family Residence were added to the national register together on 29 November 2016, in the 85th round of registrations, as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (buildings). They carry consecutive registration numbers from 29-0234 to 29-0239, and each was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency's database gives the following structures and sizes.

• Store and Main House: 2-storey timber building with a tiled roof, 279 square meters, including earthen walls on the north side of the courtyard, the south side of the passage and the northwest corner
• Connecting Corridor: single-storey timber building with a tiled roof, 37 square meters
• Annex: single-storey timber building with a tiled roof, 30 square meters
• Inner Storehouse: 2-storey Dozo-zukuri earthen-walled building with a tiled roof, 55 square meters
• Large Annex: 2-storey earthen-walled building with a tiled roof, 102 square meters, altered around 1936
• Storage Shed: single-storey timber building with a tiled roof, 14 square meters, including earthen walls to the east and west

All six are dated to 1906, and only the Large Annex has a recorded alteration, around 1936. Nara Prefecture's list of registered properties counts them as a single site, "Okamoto Family Residence Store and Main House and five others".

How the Plot Runs Back from the Street

Reading the six official descriptions together, the Okamoto Family Residence can be traced from the street at the east end to the back of the plot at the west.

The Store and Main House faces the Shimotsumichi. It follows the Omoteya-zukuri plan: a front block toward the street and a fully two-storey living block behind, linked by an entrance wing with a central corridor running through it. West of the living block lies a courtyard, closed on the north by an earthen wall that belongs to the main house registration and edged on the south by the Connecting Corridor.

At the end of that corridor, in the middle of the plot, stands the Annex, the innermost room of the family's living quarters. The Inner Storehouse adjoins it on the north, and a board-floored room at the back of the Annex serves as the storehouse's anteroom. From the shop at the front, the family could walk under one roof along the corridors and through the Annex to the storehouse door.

Further back, at the rear of the plot, the Large Annex faces east. It is an earthen-walled building whose upper floor holds a tatami room in its southern half, with storage in the rest, and the room has touches that suit a retirement residence. Along the southern boundary of the back half runs an earthen wall 56 meters long, with the Storage Shed set into its middle.

Shop and home, storage, retirement rooms and work space follow one another from the street inward. A merchant's house of the late Meiji period survives here as a whole, from its street front to its back wall.

Visiting and Getting There

The Okamoto Family Residence is a private home and is not open to the public. None of the six buildings can be entered, and visitors cannot go onto the property. No public openings by Kashihara City or the owners could be found.

What you can see is the street front of the Store and Main House on the Shimotsumichi, with latticed bays on the ground floor and white plastered walls above. The five buildings behind it stand inside the plot and are hard to see from the road. Please take photographs from the public street only, and keep clear of the doorway so as not to disturb passers-by or the neighbors.

The nearest station is Yamato-Yagi on the Kintetsu lines, about 600 meters or an 8-minute walk from the Okamoto Family Residence. Yagi-Nishiguchi Station on the Kintetsu Kashihara Line is about a 10-minute walk away. Head for the Fuda-no-tsuji crossroads, where the Shimotsumichi meets the Yokoōji, and walk south along the Shimotsumichi; the house front appears on your right.