Kawano Family Residence (Izumi)

What is the Kawano Family Residence in Izumi?

The Kawano Family Residence (河野家住宅, Kawano-ke Jūtaku) is the compound of an old farming family in Uchida-cho, Izumi City, Osaka Prefecture, where a main house built in 1851 and five late Edo-period gates and storehouses, six buildings in all, were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Registered Tangible Cultural Property) on March 6, 2024. Their registration numbers run consecutively from 27-0900 to 27-0905, and all six were registered on the same day.

The family name is read Kawano here, not Kōno, and the house now goes by Kawanotei (河野邸), a gallery, café and meeting place open to visitors at the street address 3-5-11 Uchida-cho. The Council for Cultural Affairs recommended the registration on November 24, 2023. Izumi City noted at the time that the Kawano Family Residence would be the fourth registered building property in the city, following a glassworks, a museum tea house and a temple.

The house of the village headman

Uchida-cho sits at the foot of the hills that run down from the Izumi Mountains, and the Kawano Family Residence stands close to the Matsuo River and to the old Matsuo Kaidō, the road up to the temple Matsuoji. According to the family's own account, the Kawano served as Shōya, the hereditary village headmen who ran local affairs, until the end of the Edo period and the Meiji Restoration, and also prospered as rice merchants. Many old documents have been found in the house, and Izumi City's tourism portal presents Kawanotei as a place where you can glimpse how a village was managed from a headman's home.

A local paper reported in 2022 that the house once had a room where rice tax was counted and a granary for the rice brought in by villagers. In the modern era the family moved into cloth weaving and built a spinning mill on the site. The mill is not one of the registered buildings, but it has been converted and now houses the café and workshops.

Six buildings and why they were registered

Izumi City describes the layout of the Kawano Family Residence like this: the main house stands a little north of the center of the plot and faces south; the front gate with its reception room, the front storehouse and the rear gate line the street along the east side; and the east and west buildings of the rear storehouse stand along the north side. The six buildings are:

• The main house, built in 1851, a large farmhouse whose tall thatched roof is flanked by lower tiled roofs to the east, west and south. The thatch is currently covered with sheet metal as a temporary measure.
• The front gate and reception room: a Nagayamon row gate facing east in the southeast corner, with a six-mat reception room running west from it.
• The front storehouse, a 2-story storehouse for household goods on the southern part of the east side and, at 13 square meters, the smallest of the six.
• The west building of the rear storehouse, a 2-story storehouse in the northwest corner that held clothing and bedding.
• The east building of the rear storehouse, a single-story storehouse for household goods next to the west building.
• The rear gate, in the middle of the east side, which also contains a privy and a cattle stall.

All six were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties for their contribution to the historic landscape of the country. Izumi City explained that the Yamatomune main house, together with its gates and storehouses, preserves the layout of a traditional farming household and shapes the streetscape along the Matsuo River. The yamatomune is a roof form found in Nara, Osaka and southern Kyoto: a steep thatched roof framed at both gable ends by plastered walls topped with small tiled roofs that rise above the thatch.

From the street, the Kawano Family Residence shows a run of white gatehouse and storehouse walls along the east side, with the high roof of the main house rising behind them. The gates and storehouses wall in the outer edge of the plot and shelter the main house inside it: an arrangement you can only read because all six buildings survive together.

Visiting the Kawano Family Residence

The Kawano Family Residence is privately owned, and since May 3, 2022, part of it has been open as Kawanotei Art Gallery & Laboratoire. The art gallery, set in part of the main house, opens only while an exhibition is on, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., closed on Mondays. The former spinning mill, now called the Laboratoire, holds the café and workshops and is open Wednesday to Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The official website gives no information on an admission fee.

Visitors enter through the front gate, where the registration plaque sent by the Agency for Cultural Affairs was mounted in April 2026. Visitors with limited mobility are asked to come in from the path along the river instead. The website gives no guidance on photography indoors, so ask at the reception.

The nearest station is Izumi-Chūō on the Nankai Semboku Line. From the station, take a Nankai bus bound for Bijutsukan-mae for about 10 minutes and get off at Uchida-kami, which is about 2 minutes on foot from the Kawano Family Residence. Buses are infrequent, so check the timetable beforehand. On foot from the station it is about 1.8 kilometers, roughly 25 minutes. Exhibition visitors are directed to the parking lot of the Izumi City Kubosō Memorial Museum of Arts, about 400 meters' walk south of the house.