Nabechaya Detached Tatami Room

A Detached Wing Built in 1931

The Nabechaya Detached Tatami Room (鍋茶屋離れ座敷, read Nabejaya hanare-zashiki in the Agency for Cultural Affairs register) is a two-story timber wing of the Nabechaya restaurant in Higashibori-dori, Chuo Ward, Niigata City, completed in 1931 and entered on Japan's national register of tangible cultural properties on 28 April 2000. It covers 84 square meters under a tiled roof and occupies the southeast corner of a large walled compound.

Nabechaya itself dates to 1846, according to the restaurant's own account. The founder, Takahashi Tanizaburo, made his name with suppon hot pot, the dish built around soft-shell turtle, and the house crest is a tortoise-shell hexagon for that reason. In 1878 the kitchen prepared a meal for Emperor Meiji during his tour of Niigata.

The buildings a visitor sees today are younger than the business. Two major fires swept Niigata in 1908, and the main house was rebuilt in 1910. The detached tatami wing came two decades after that rebuilding, in a construction campaign that also produced a Western-style reception block on the other side of the compound.

Why the Gable Earned the Listing

Japan's registration system for modern buildings works through three criteria: a building may be listed as a model of design, as something difficult to reproduce, or as a contributor to the historic character of the national landscape. Seven Nabechaya structures were registered together in 2000. The main house and the reception block came in under the second criterion. The detached tatami room and four others came in under the third. The distinction matters. This wing was recognized for what it does to the street, rather than for what it is on its own.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs names two features. One is the wide opening that faces the road. The other is the gable screen, described as a delicate assembly of slender horizontal members combined with short vertical struts.

A gable screen, tsumakazari, fills the triangle of wall left under a pitched roof at its end. The builders here rejected heavy carved timber. They used thin horizontal rails crossed by short posts, laid out like a grid. From across the street the effect reads almost like the lattice of a paper screen.

That choice belongs to the district as much as to the building. Furumachi is Niigata's surviving geisha quarter, and its townhouses are tsumairi: the triangular gable end, not the long slope of the roof, faces the street. Kyoto's quarters do the reverse. Among Japan's still-working geisha districts, Furumachi is said to be the only one built predominantly on the gable-forward plan. Where every façade is a triangle, the gable screen stops being decoration and becomes the face of the house. Build it heavy and the whole street turns heavy with it.

Tea Room Below, Paired Rooms Above

The ground floor holds a tatami room and a tea room. The upper floor holds two tatami rooms in a row. The idiom throughout is sukiya, the residential style that grew out of tea-ceremony architecture and favors slender members, half-barked posts, and unemphatic wall surfaces over the formal geometry of the older shoin manner.

For a restaurant wing the logic is practical. Sliding fusuma panels between the two upper rooms lift out, so one large party can occupy a single space and two smaller parties can be seated separately an hour later. The tea room downstairs runs on a different clock from the banquet floor, which is rather the point of having one.

The reception block put up the same year sits south of the main house and could hardly be more different: a reinforced-concrete ground floor, stone-faced outside, with sash windows and paired pointed-arch windows filled with stained glass. Its designer and builder was Shimizu-gumi, the firm now known as Shimizu Corporation. The register entry for the front gate records that the detached tatami room was built by Shimizu-gumi as well. One contractor, one year, a tea room at one end of the compound and leaded glass at the other.

Seeing It for Yourself

Nabechaya is a working restaurant and the buildings are private property, so there is no ticket desk and no set opening hour for sightseers. Reaching the interior of this wing means a meal reservation, made by telephone on 025-222-6131. The restaurant's own site gives Mondays and Sunday evenings as closing times, with Sunday lunch service only; published hours vary between listings, so confirm directly before making plans. Guests who ask in advance are sometimes shown around the older rooms.

The exterior needs no arrangement at all. The detached wing stands at the southeast corner of the compound and faces Higashibori-dori alongside the plaster storehouse and the brick storehouse. The front gate and perimeter wall face the opposite side, on the lane locals call Nabechaya-dori. Walk both streets and five of the seven registered structures are visible from the pavement.

From Niigata Station, take the Bandaibashi Line (route B1) from the bus terminal and get off at Hommachi, about six minutes on foot from there; a taxi takes eight to ten minutes. There is no visitor parking, and nearby paid lots are used instead. Photography indoors affects other diners, so ask the staff first.