Asano Family Residence

An Estate in the Kyuhoji Temple Town

The Asano Family Residence (浅野家住宅, Asano-ke Jūtaku) is a household estate in Kyuhoji 5-chome, Yao City, Osaka Prefecture, whose five buildings, a main house and a storehouse of the late Edo period (1830 to 1867) and three outbuildings from around 1935, were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 8 November 2004.

All five stand on a single plot. The main house faces north onto the street, with the Inui Storehouse beside it at the northwest corner. Walk round to the back and the East Barn runs along the eastern edge of the lot, ending against the Tatsumi Storehouse in the southeast corner. The South Barn sits midway along the southern boundary. The house closes the north side, the outbuildings wrap the east and south, and a yard opens in the middle.

The storehouse names work like a compass. Inui (乾) and tatsumi (巽) are old names for the directions northwest and southeast, and the two storehouses occupy exactly those diagonal corners, pinning down the extent of the property from either end.

Two Building Campaigns

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database dates the main house and the Inui Storehouse to the late Edo period, 1830 to 1867, the Tatsumi Storehouse to 1935, and the East Barn and South Barn to about 1935. The estate reads as a street-front core from the closing decades of the shogunate, with the working buildings at the back put up in the early Showa era.

An explanatory board by the Yao City Board of Education supplies a firmer date for the house. It reports that a prayer tablet of 1848, the first year of the Kaei era, was found in the main house, and counts the building among the oldest townhouses in Kyuhoji.

The registration numbers run consecutively from 27-0304 to 27-0308, and all five were listed under the same criterion: buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. The case rests less on any single structure than on the set, and the Board of Education text says the same, describing the five together as a well-kept picture of a temple-town household.

Where It Sits in the Old Town

Kyuhoji took shape around 1541 as a jinaimachi, a town of Jodo Shinshu followers laid out around a temple, here Saishoji, founded by the priest Rennyo and later renamed Kenshoji (顕証寺). An earthen bank and moat once enclosed it. The grid of streets survives almost unchanged, lined with white-walled townhouses and mushiko-mado, the small plastered slit windows typical of machiya in the Osaka area.

The Asano Family Residence stands about 100 metres west of Kenshoji, close to the heart of the old town. Its main house carries the vocabulary of that streetscape: a projecting lattice on the ground floor, mushiko-mado above, and a secondary eave of Sangawara-buki tiles below the main roof. Behind that front, the Agency describes a farmhouse-type plan of an earth-floored Doma and four rooms. A townhouse face on the street and a farmhouse layout inside is the key to reading this estate as a temple-town home.

Visiting and Getting There

The Asano Family Residence is a private home, and none of the five buildings is open inside. Neither Osaka Cultural Properties Navi nor Yao City lists any public opening or booking arrangement (checked 27 September 2026). What you can see is the exterior, from the public road.

The easiest building to read from the street is the main house, whose front faces the road on the north. The outbuildings sit toward the back of the plot and are only partly visible from outside. Keep photography to the street and avoid shooting through the gateway or the windows.

The Agency database gives the address in lot-number form as 69 Kyuhoji 5-chome; in the postal system it is 4-76 Kyuhoji 5-chome. The nearest station is Kyuhoji on the JR Yamatoji Line (Kansai Main Line), about a 10-minute walk to the north. Kintetsu Kyuhojiguchi Station on the Osaka Line is also within walking distance.

Inside the old town, the Yao City Machinami Center (寺内町ふれあい館, 3-3-20 Kyuhoji) is open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with free admission, closing on Mondays (the following Tuesday when Monday is a holiday) and over the New Year period. Getting your bearings there first makes it easier to place the Asano estate in the grid of the town.