Uchiyama-ke Kashiya

A Rental House on a Naramachi Back Lane

Uchiyama-ke Kashiya (内山家貸家, also written Uchiyamake Kashiya; the Uchiyama Family Rental House) is a single-storey wooden house in Kidera-cho, Nara City, Nara Prefecture, built in the early Showa period and entered on the national Register of Tangible Cultural Properties (Structures) on 3 April 2020.

It faces west onto a narrow lane that runs north to south through the southeastern edge of the district Nara people call Naramachi. The plan turns a right angle. An east-west wing holds the living rooms: an eight-mat zashiki with a tokonoma alcove, a six-mat room beside it, and a veranda opening onto the garden. A section projecting to the south contains the doma, the earth-floored work space.

Nara City's cultural properties division records that the house was put up as rental accommodation around the time of the Showa Depression, which began in 1930. Before the Second World War its tenants included officers of the Nara regiment, one of them a lieutenant. It went on being let for decades afterwards.

Sixty-nine square metres of floor area. A tile roof with sheet metal over part of it. Those are the bare figures in the national register, and on their own they explain nothing about why an ordinary rented house came to be protected by law.

Why a House Built to Be Let Became a Registered Property

Japan runs two parallel systems for architectural heritage. Designation, the older one, produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties and carries heavy obligations. Registration, introduced in 1996, is lighter in duty and much wider in reach, and it was created for buildings like this one: recent, unremarkable in purpose, and vulnerable to quiet demolition. Uchiyama-ke Kashiya was registered under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country. Its register number is 29-0279, entered in the ninety-fifth round of registrations.

The case for it turns on the fact that it was never a family seat. Naramachi is full of machiya, the deep narrow townhouses of merchants, and the defining feature of a machiya is the tori-doma, a strip of packed earth running the whole depth of the lot from street to rear. This house has no tori-doma at all. In its place is a genkan-no-ma, a formal entrance room, which is the arrangement of a dwelling rather than a shop.

Look at what the landlord paid for. The zashiki has a proper tokonoma. The veranda is closed by shoji glazed with glass instead of paper, so daylight reaches the rooms even when the screens are shut. Neither feature is lavish. Both cost more than the minimum, and someone building for tenants in 1930 chose to spend the difference.

Pre-war rental housing survives poorly in Japan. Nobody inherited it with sentiment attached, and the economics of small urban plots have consumed most of what remained. That scarcity, combined with the condition of the fabric, is what the registration rests on.

Reading the Building from the Lane

Start with the wall. The construction is mabashira, which leaves the timber posts exposed against the plaster rather than burying them, so the frame is legible from outside. The plaster is nezumi-shikkui, lime tinted a soft mouse grey that shifts noticeably between overcast and direct sun.

Below it, at about knee height, the base course is finished in jinzo-seki arai-dashi. Crushed stone is set in mortar, then the surface is washed while the mix is still green so the aggregate stands proud. The technique was fashionable through the 1920s and 1930s, cheap enough to be practical for a rental and smart enough to signal that the property was a cut above.

Because the plan bends, the house shows two faces rather than one flat elevation. Walk a few paces along the lane and the relationship between the living wing and the projecting doma opens up.

Nara City repaired the building in 2017. Its cultural properties division reports that it has since been used as a rental event space called Kiya (木屋). That is the only route to the interior, and it depends entirely on the operator. The property belongs to a limited company, Uchikame, and there is no scheduled public opening; anyone hoping to see inside should confirm current arrangements well ahead rather than arriving on spec.

From the lane, photographing the exterior is unproblematic, with the usual courtesies. This is a lived-in residential street, not a museum precinct. Keep your voice down and do not shoot into windows.

Reaching it is simple enough. Buses from Kintetsu Nara Station bound for Tenri Station, Shimoyama or Kubonosho stop at Kideracho, a few minutes' walk from the lane. Walking the whole way from Kintetsu Nara Station takes roughly half an hour and carries you through the length of Naramachi; Gangoji, the World Heritage temple at the quarter's core, lies to the northwest. One caution on names: Kidera-cho holds a second registered property, the Machiya in Front of the University of Education (教育大学前の町家), registered in 2018. It is a different building.