Kishida Family Main House

A Late Edo Farmhouse, Taken Apart and Rebuilt in 1872

Kishida-ke Jutaku Shuoku (岸田家住宅主屋, the main house of the Kishida Family Residence, also written Kishidake Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber house at Nakakosaka 3-10-25 in Higashiosaka City, Osaka Prefecture, built in the closing decades of the Edo period and moved to its present site in 1872; it was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 March 2006.

Two dates sit in that sentence, and the gap between them is the interesting part. The national register gives the construction period as 1830 to 1867 and the relocation as 1872, the fifth year of Meiji. A building of this kind was never quite fixed to its ground. Japanese timber framing is joined rather than fastened, so a house could be dismantled, carted and reassembled, and doing so was ordinary practice rather than a heroic rescue. What stands in Nakakosaka today was raised somewhere else under the Tokugawa shogunate and put back together here five years into the new imperial government.

Nakakosaka itself was a village then, one of several in Wakae District of Kawachi Province lying on low ground between old river courses. Not until 1889 did Shimokosaka, Nakakosaka, Hoji and Kamikosaka combine into the single village of Kosaka. The house predates that merger, and predates the railway, the university campuses and the shopping arcades that now define the district.

Registered for Its Contribution to the Historic Landscape

Three criteria govern registration as a Tangible Cultural Property, and the one applied here differs from the criterion used for most registered buildings in urban Osaka. Kishida-ke Jutaku Shuoku qualifies under the third: that the structure contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Registration number is 27-0366, gazetted on 12 April 2006. The distinction matters. This is not a house singled out for exceptional design; it is a house valued for holding a piece of the older Kawachi plain in place while the surrounding fabric changed around it.

The register describes the building with some precision. It stands at the centre of its plot and faces south. The frame is tsushi-nikai, a form in which the upper level is a low half-storey tucked under the roof, used for storage rather than living, with headroom too shallow to stand up in comfortably. The roof is kirizuma, a simple gable, covered in sangawara pantiles. The main volume measures seven ken along the ridge by four ken across, roughly 12.7 by 7.3 metres, and a geya lean-to skirt runs around all four sides. Building area comes to 171 square metres.

Two alterations are recorded, and both are informative. The entrance was originally on the north side and was changed at some later point to the south. The doma, the packed-earth working floor that a rural house of this type would have run along one flank, has had a raised timber floor laid over its northern half in recent years. Neither change is hidden in the record. The Agency's assessment closes by calling it a carefully repaired building, which in the vocabulary of the register is a compliment about stewardship as much as about fabric.

Inside, the western half holds four eight-mat rooms set out on a regular grid, the arrangement Japanese architectural historians call seikei yomadori. Four rooms in a square, two by two, with sliding partitions between them: open the partitions and the whole western half becomes one space for a funeral or a wedding, close them and it becomes four rooms for daily life. This plan runs through farmhouses and merchant houses across western Japan and is one of the most durable ideas in Japanese domestic building.

Reading the Building from the Street

Kishida-ke Jutaku Shuoku is a private residence. There is no admission, no open day and no interior access, and visitors should treat it as somebody's home rather than a site. What can be done, respectfully and from the public road, is to look at how the house sits.

The gabled roof with its skirt of lower eaves gives the building a stepped profile that reads clearly even from a distance: a tall main slope, then a break, then the shallower run of the geya coming down towards the ground. That break is where a modern house has nothing at all, and it is the quickest way to tell an inherited building from a new one on a street like this. The pantiles catch light differently from the flat modern tiles around them.

Higashiosaka holds a scattered set of registered properties that repay a day of walking. Shotokukan with its storehouse, shrine, gate and walls sits at Hishiya-nishi; the Shoin Gakuen Memorial Hall stands nearby; the Kawanaka, Yokouchi and Fujii family residences occupy other quarters of the city; and Tanioka Memorial Hall is at Mikuriya-Sakaemachi. None of these is a temple circuit or a castle town. They are ordinary buildings that stayed put.

For access, take the Kintetsu Nara Line to Kawachi-Kosaka Station and walk south for about twelve minutes; Yaenosato Station on the same line is a similar distance from the northeast. The Shiba Ryotaro Memorial Museum, built around the study of the novelist who lived in Shimokosaka, is a short walk away and does welcome visitors, which makes it a reasonable anchor for anyone coming to this part of the city.