Ishimoto Family Residence Main House

What the Ishimoto Family Residence Main House Is

The Ishimoto Family Residence Main House (石本家住宅主屋, Ishimoto-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a late Meiji-era farmhouse in Higashihoncho, Konan Ward, Niigata City, enlarged and redecorated in the early Showa era and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2007.

It stands a little north of the center of the Ishimoto estate, facing south. The house is timber-framed, two stories high with single-story sections, roofed in tile, and covers 352 m² of ground. A small lookout room, a belvedere, rises above the roof. The Agency for Cultural Affairs reads the building name as shuoku, not the more familiar omoya.

The core is a working farmhouse plan: an earth-floored Doma beside six living rooms set in two rows of three. The early Showa additions were a Western-style reception room, a room decorated with Raden mother-of-pearl inlay and known simply as the Raden-no-ma, a row of three rooms upstairs, and the belvedere.

Why the Ishimoto Family Residence Main House Was Registered

Of the six Ishimoto registrations, only the Ishimoto Family Residence Main House qualified as "a model of design." The gates, walls and corridors were registered for their part in the landscape; the main house was judged on the building itself, and above all on its interiors.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a modern Japanese-style house with a wide range of decorative work inside. What makes the Ishimoto house interesting is how visibly the two purposes are stacked. The earth floor and six plain rooms of a rural household are still there, and on top of them sit rooms made for receiving and impressing guests, one in a Western idiom and one named after a traditional lacquer craft.

The database is not consistent about when the remodeling happened. Its description and period field say early Showa, while its Western-calendar field gives 1912 to 1925, which is the Taisho era. This article follows the description.

What to Look For at the Ishimoto Family Residence Main House

The Raden-no-ma is the room that catches the imagination. Raden is the technique of cutting thin pieces from the pearly inner layer of shells and setting them into lacquer or wood to form patterns. Naming a whole room after the technique suggests how much this one space mattered to the household.

The belvedere is the other signature. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, the walls of this lookout room are painted from end to end. A painted room perched on a farmhouse roof is an unexpected flourish, and its outline is what would identify the Ishimoto main house from a distance.

Read as a floor plan, the house splits cleanly in two. The doma and six rooms are the Meiji core; the reception room, the Raden-no-ma, the upstairs rooms and the belvedere are the Showa additions. Daily work and display share one roof without blending.

Seeing the Ishimoto Family Residence Main House

The Ishimoto Family Residence Main House is a private home and its interior is not open. As of September 30, 2026, there was no announced opportunity to see the reception room, the Raden-no-ma or the painted belvedere.

Because the house stands toward the north of the plot, behind the front gate, the nagayamon and the courtyard corridor, little of it can be seen from outside the grounds. Directions and general visiting conditions are on the Ishimoto Family Residence page. Please do not enter the property.