Senda Family Residence Main House

A Late Edo Merchant House on the Old Amaki Road

Senda Family Residence Main House (仙田家住宅主屋, Senda-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a merchant house in Fujito-cho Amaki, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, built in the late Edo period (1830–1868) and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2018. The family ran a retail shop here, and Okayama Prefecture's notes record a local tradition that the house went up in 1860.

Amaki lies in the suburbs south-east of central Kurashiki, in what was once the shop-lined quarter of the old village of Amaki. The house faces north onto the old road, with its ridge running parallel to the street in the Hirairi manner, so the long side of the roof and the full shopfront meet anyone walking past.

It is a two-storey timber building under a gabled (Kirizuma-zukuri) roof of Hongawarabuki tiles. The Agency for Cultural Affairs gives a building area of 120 square meters; the prefecture's leaflet gives 121. Renovations in 1975 and 1981 reworked the interior. Today the Senda Family Residence Main House serves as a medical clinic, so it is still a building local people walk into on an ordinary weekday.

Why It Was Registered

The Senda house was entered on the national register on May 10, 2018, as registration no. 33-296. The criterion cited is that it contributes to the historic landscape of the country. In other words, the value lies less in rarity than in the part the building plays in the streetscape of a road town.

The Agency's description is frank that the interior has been altered. What earns the listing is the front: a ground floor opened up across its whole width for trade, an upper floor sealed in white Shikkui plaster, and panels of Namako-kabe, the tile-and-plaster lattice wall common on Edo-period storehouses and shops. These are the elements a merchant family presented to its customers, and on this house they survive in their traditional form.

The name is read two ways in official sources. The Agency's register gives Senda-ke Jūtaku Shuoku; Kurashiki City's list reads the last word as omoya. Both refer to the same building.

What to Look For

Stand on the far side of the street first and take in the whole elevation of the Senda Family Residence Main House at once. The two floors read as two different ideas. Below is a wall that is almost entirely opening, designed so goods and people could pass freely. Above, the plaster closes everything up, a sensible precaution in a town of timber houses.

The roof uses true hongawara tiling, with rounded and flat tiles laid in alternating courses, a heavier and costlier finish than the simplified pantiles common on later houses. Walk to the gable end to see the pitch and the rhythm of the tile rows. Lower down, look for the diagonal grid of the namako walls, where flat tiles are fixed to the surface and the joints are built up in raised bands of plaster. In strong daylight the white joints stand out sharply against the grey tile.

Because the rooms inside were reworked in the 1970s and early 1980s, everything worth seeing here is on the outside. The owners modernized the building without disturbing its street face, and that restraint is exactly what the registration recognizes.

Visiting

The Senda Family Residence Main House is privately owned, and the Okayama Prefectural Board of Education lists it as exterior viewing only. As it is a working clinic, please view it from the public road and keep clear of the entrance during consulting hours. No official guidance on photography was found; if you take pictures from the street, avoid capturing patients or neighbors.

By public transport, take a Shimoden bus bound for Kojima via Amaki from JR Kurashiki Station, ride about 20 minutes to the Fujitoji-shita stop, and walk about 3 minutes (route as listed for the clinic at the same address on the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's medical information service). By car, the prefecture puts the house about 10 minutes from the Mizushima interchange on the Seto-Chuo Expressway. The surrounding streets are residential, so plan where to park before you arrive.