Naka Family Residence (Kumatori Town, Sennan District, Osaka Prefecture)

A Wealthy Farmer's House from the Early Edo Period

The Naka Residence (中家住宅, Nakake Jūtaku) stands in Gomon-nishi, Kumatori Town, Sennan District, Osaka Prefecture; its main house dates to the early Edo period and was designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 May 1964, with the front gate and the Chinese-gabled gate registered as attached structures.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the main house as 24.5 metres along the ridge and 16.1 metres deep, roofed in irimoya style with thatch, entered from the gable end, and ringed on all four sides by tiled eaves. A projecting wing on the north side adds a further 9.1 by 5.9 metres. The Agency's own note calls it one of the older surviving houses in the Kinki region.

The Naka family's standing in the area was considerable. During the Edo period they served the Kishiwada domain as ōjōya, senior village headmen with authority over a group of settlements. Among the seven headman families of the domain, the Naka of Kumatori Valley and the neighbouring Furui family carried enough weight to be spoken of together as a pair apart from the rest.

Family tradition reaches further back. Retired Emperor Go-Shirakawa is said to have stopped here on a pilgrimage to Kumano, and the Chinese-gabled gate is held to commemorate the carriage porch built to receive him. The migi-mitsudomoe crest painted large on the gable end of the main house is attributed to the same visit, by way of a story about a melon offered to the retired emperor and approved by him.

The Doma, and Why the Plan Matters

Pass through the three-bay yakuimon front gate, which faces south, and the main house presents its gable end straight ahead. Step inside and the reason for the designation becomes physical rather than documentary.

The earthen-floored working space, the doma, is among the largest in any old house in the Kinki region. It reads less like a farmhouse kitchen than like the service wing of a temple or the kitchen of a samurai establishment. Kumatori Town describes it as strongly self-contained, meaning that it functions as a room in its own right rather than as a passage into the living quarters. The exposed frame overhead belongs to a structural tradition older than the building itself; combined with living rooms in which many posts have been omitted, the interior carries a distinctly medieval air.

The floor plan repays attention. The daidokoro pushes out well into the doma. The nando sleeping room has a stepped entry, and it and the zashiki reception rooms are arranged in a kuichigai-sanmadori layout, three rooms set slightly out of alignment with one another rather than squared up. This scheme belongs to the Sennan district and the Kinokawa valley in Wakayama, and it represents an earlier stage of a sequence: the staggered three-room plan later develops into the grid-like four-room plan that became standard across much of Japan. Standing in a house that sits before that transition is the point of coming.

An old drawing from the late Edo period shows how much has gone. The grounds were once far larger, with the front gate set well forward of its present position. A detached guest hall with a formal stepped entrance stood on the east side of the main house. The Chinese-gabled gate, west-facing and carrying bracket complexes, served as the entrance for honoured guests approaching that hall. Beyond these were a nagayamon gatehouse, a village storehouse, other outbuildings, and a moat behind the whole arrangement.

Lightning, a Pine Tree, and Practical Details

One episode here belongs to the history of Japanese science rather than architecture. A pine of some 600 years' growth, five metres around, once stood west of the main house. In the middle Edo period Hashimoto Sōkichi (1763-1836), a pioneer of Dutch learning in Osaka, used that tree with the cooperation of the Naka family to repeat Franklin's investigation of atmospheric electricity.

Sōkichi published the result in his treatise on electricity with an illustration captioned as a diagram of taking heaven's fire at Kumatori Valley in Senshū. The picture shows a figure on a platform holding a wire that runs from a bucket-like vessel fixed to a branch roughly 34.5 metres up; a second figure stands nearby with sparks visible at his fingertips. The illustration was drawn by Iwahashi Zenbei of Kaizuka, better known as a maker of telescopes. What separates Sōkichi from most Dutch-learning scholars of his generation is that he did not stop at translating a foreign account. He carried out the experiment. The pine has since died and been removed; a stone marker now stands where it grew. Kumatori Town designated the site a historic landmark on 13 March 1996.

The residence was privately owned until 1994, when Kumatori Town acquired it and opened it to the public. Admission is free and no reservation is needed for individual visitors; groups arriving by coach are asked to contact the site beforehand. Opening hours run 10am to 4.30pm, with last entry at 4pm.

The closing days need care, because they invert. In January, February and August the house is closed on weekdays and open at weekends and on public holidays. In every other month it closes on Wednesdays instead, moving to the following day when a holiday falls on one. It also closes for the new year period, 29 December to 3 January.

Reaching it is straightforward: about fifteen minutes on foot east of Kumatori Station on the JR Hanwa Line, or a Nankai bus toward Yamanotedai and Kotani from Izumisano Station on the Nankai Main Line, alighting at the Gomon stop. The Kumatori Exchange Centre Rengakan, a former cotton mill of the early Shōwa period converted into a community facility, stands a few minutes away and pairs naturally with a visit.