Manabe Family Residence Front Gate

The Gate of an Island Family

The Manabe Family Residence Front Gate (真鍋家住宅表門, Manabe-ke Jūtaku Omotemon) is a timber gate with a tiled roof standing before the main house at 4026-1 Manabeshima, Kasaoka City, Okayama Prefecture, built in the early Meiji period and entered on the national list of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2006.

It faces south, directly onto the lane, and it is the first thing a visitor to the property sees. The opening measures 3.2 metres across. That is modest, and modesty is part of what the gate is saying: the Manabe were the leading family of this island, and their gate makes the claim through proportion and finish rather than through scale.

The family's standing here goes back a long way. The Manabe are recorded as a power on the island from the late Heian period, and the medieval Manabe were a naval house, one of the seafaring clans whose control of the sea lanes across the Bisan archipelago mattered to anyone moving stone, salt or rice through the Inland Sea. Their earlier base was the Iwatsubo settlement on the steep eastern slope, where the clan's five-ring stone pagodas still stand. The move down to Honura, where the registered buildings are, came in the Edo period.

A Gate That Breaks Its Own Type

The Agency for Cultural Affairs description of the gate is unusually specific, and repays slow reading.

In its basic arrangement the gate approaches a shikyakumon, the four-legged gate: two main posts carrying the ridge, with four subsidiary posts front and back. This is a standard and rather formal type, familiar from temple precincts and samurai residences. The Manabe gate takes that framework and then distorts it. The depth, the span measured across the beams, is drawn in to an extreme degree relative to the width along the ridge. The gate is wide and thin, compressed almost to a plane. And in the original construction there was no post at all at the northeast corner, an asymmetry that leaves one quarter of the expected frame simply absent.

The roof is gabled, laid with sangawara pantiles. The centre carries the main opening; beside it, on the east, sits a kugurido, a low wicket door for everyday coming and going, so that the large opening need not be worked each time somebody steps out. Anyone who has lived behind a formal gate understands why the small door exists.

The front wall is finished in irotsuchi, coloured earth plaster. Rather than the flat white lime of the storehouses further into the compound, the gate presents a tinted clay surface, warmer and softer under low sun, and it is this that gives the frontage its particular character. The Agency's assessment holds that the gate forms a facade appropriate to an old family, which is the whole function of a gate of this kind: to state, before anybody crosses the threshold, what sort of household lies behind it.

The Lane the Gate Opens Onto

The gate cannot really be understood apart from the street it addresses.

Honura's lanes do not meet at right angles. They bend, kink and dogleg, so that no straight sightline runs more than a short distance, and proper crossroads are almost absent from the village plan. Local accounts hold that this is the surviving pattern of a medieval defensive settlement, the kind of layout that slows an attacker and denies him a view. Walking it now, the effect is that buildings arrive one at a time, revealed at the turn. The Manabe gate is a case in point. You do not see it from a distance and approach it; you come round a bend and it is there.

The registered group at the Manabe residence numbers five buildings, all entered on the same day in 2006: the main house of 1870, the warehouse and shed of 1874, the Inui-gura storehouse of 1893, the former post office building of 1917, and this gate. Together they were recognised for their contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. The residence is also a component property of the Japan Heritage narrative covering the stone islands of the Bisan archipelago, which frames Honura as one of the representative historic settlements of the region.

Some practical notes. The Manabe residence is a private home, occupied, with no admission fee, no opening hours and no interior access. The gate faces the public lane and can be examined closely from there, which is more than can be said for most registered gates. Photography from the lane is not restricted; the courtyard beyond, and the family's horutonoki tree said to be some 250 years old, warrant the discretion due any private house. Reaching the island means a boat from Sumiyoshi Port, roughly seven minutes on foot from JR Kasaoka Station, on the Kasaoka to Sanagi-Honura route. The ordinary service takes about seventy minutes to Honura Port, and the residence is around two minutes from the pier. Sumiyoshi is not the same as Fusegoshi Port, a mistake visitors make often enough to be worth flagging. In the first days of May the village hosts the hashiri-mikoshi, a portable shrine run through these same lanes at speed, and the island fills up.