Nakayama Family Residence Guest Lodge

What Is the Nakayama Family Residence Guest Lodge?

The Nakayama Family Residence Guest Lodge (中山家住宅寮, Nakayama-ke Jūtaku Ryō) is a late Edo-period guest building on the Nakayama estate in Bessho, Matsubara City, Osaka Prefecture, where visitors on extended stays were lodged; it was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on March 2, 2004.

It stands on the east side of the estate between the nagayamon gate and the Nanban storehouse, and the attendants' room of the gate building runs up to meet it on the south. The lodge is a single-story timber building with a gabled roof of pantiles, 2 and a half bays by 2, with a building area of 21 square meters. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates it to the late Edo period, with alterations in the early Meiji era.

Poets and Patriots: The Lodge's Guests

The Nakayama Family Residence Guest Lodge is where the family entertained. According to Matsubara City, Nakayama Zen'emon Tsunetaka, head of the house in the last years of the shogunate, was a friend of Hirose Kyokusō, a celebrated Osaka poet in classical Chinese, and is said to have hosted Kyokusō and loyalist activists here.

Kyokusō was the younger brother of Hirose Tansō, founder of the Kangien academy in Hita, Kyushu, and ran the school himself before moving to Osaka. Calligraphy he gave the family, the characters seika (tranquil and fine) and a text opening with a line from the Book of Changes about blessings on a house that accumulates good deeds, still hangs in the Nakayama reception rooms, the city reports.

That a village official's family kept a separate building for visiting scholars says a good deal about how far the cultural life of the Kawachi countryside reached by the early nineteenth century.

Details Worth Knowing

Inside is a single guest room with a tokonoma alcove and a closet on the north wall. The outer walls are shinkabe, with posts left visible in the shikkui plaster, above a skirt of vertical boards.

Look at the roof: the half bay that extends to the north is covered in heavier hongawarabuki tiles, unlike the pantiles of the main roof. The Agency describes the lodge as part of the front garden scene, the first corner of the estate a guest would have seen after passing through the gate.

Can You See the Guest Lodge?

The Nakayama Family Residence Guest Lodge faces the front garden inside the gate and cannot be seen from outside. The estate is an occupied private home and is closed to visitors; the Nakayama Family Residence page explains what is visible from the street.