Katagiri Seiryudo Main House

A Bunka-Era Townhouse with the Old Shop Attached

Katagiri Seiryudo Main House (片桐棲龍堂主屋, Katagiri Seiryūdō Shuoku) is the dwelling of the Katagiri Seiryudo kampo pharmacy in Nishiminatocho, Sakai Ward, Sakai City, Osaka Prefecture, built in the Bunka era (1804 to 1817) and entered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 18 October 2000. It is a two-storey timber building with a tiled roof and a footprint of 127 square metres, and it anchors the seven registered structures of the compound.

The roof is hipped and gabled in the Irimoya-zukuri manner, and the entrance opens on the long side parallel to the ridge, the arrangement called Hirairi. The upper floor is a Tsushi-nikai, a low half-storey tucked under the eaves and used for storage, and the outer walls are plastered with earth in the fire-resistant Nuriya-zukuri style common in merchant towns of the Kansai region.

Inside, the plan follows the familiar logic of a Japanese townhouse. An earth-floored work area runs along the north side. Beside it lie a room of seven and a half tatami mats and a tearoom of four and a half; beyond them, to the east, come a Buddhist altar room and a ten-mat reception room. North of the earthen floor, the former shop is joined on. Home, shopfront, tea and ancestors: the whole history of a physician family turned pharmacist is written into one floor plan.

Why It Was Registered, and Where It Sits

Katagiri Seiryudo Main House was registered as difficult to reproduce, under registration number 27-0106, the first of the seven consecutive numbers assigned to the compound.

Everything else is arranged around it. The West Storehouse stands to the west across the approach path; the Middle Storehouse lies to the north-east and the East Storehouse beyond it. To the east of the house spreads the zashiki garden, to the west the entrance garden and a small courtyard garden, all three designated by Sakai City as places of scenic beauty.

Sakai City notes that the entrance garden, with its stone path laid to a fall for rainwater and its two-bucket well framed in granite, was built together with the late Edo house. House and forecourt were conceived as one. The same thinking shows in the placement of the tea-path garden directly east of a house that contains a tearoom.

What You Can Read from Outside

The key to Katagiri Seiryudo Main House from the street is the relationship between roof and upper floor. In a tsushi-nikai townhouse, a short upper wall rises above the ground-floor eaves and the great roof sits right on top of it. The building is lower than a full two-storey house, and from the lane the roof reads as the dominant surface.

Earth-plastered walls and eaves were the Edo answer to fire in dense towns. Because the Nishiminatocho district escaped wartime bombing, other townhouses of similar age survive nearby, and comparing their rooflines and eave depths gives a sense of the street as it looked two centuries ago.

The Osaka Cultural Properties Navi shows photographs of the gate, the approach and an information board marking the registration, which can be seen at the entrance to the property.

Visiting

Katagiri Seiryudo Main House is still the family's home and the front of a working pharmacy. The interior is not open, and Sakai City asks visitors to view it from outside only; the tearooms and reception room are not shown to the public.

The shop can be entered during business hours for consultations and purchases, but not as a museum. Photograph from the public lane and avoid the windows of the house and customers in the shop. Directions and the pharmacy's opening days are given on the Katagiri Seiryudo page covering the whole compound.