Naruko Family Residence Main House

A Shopfront Eleven Bays Wide

The Naruko Family Residence Main House (成子家住宅主屋, Naruko-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) in Ozaki, Hannan City, Osaka Prefecture, is the combined shop and home of the Naniwa Shuzo sake brewery, dated by the Agency for Cultural Affairs to 1916 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 12 October 2001. It is a full two-storey timber building under a hip-and-gable Irimoya-zukuri roof of Hongawarabuki tiles, with a building area of 224 square metres.

Its street front runs 11 bays, wide enough that the agency's own description calls it a large townhouse, and it fills most of the compound's frontage. A wall runs off to the right, and the front gate opens in that wall.

Shop counter, office and family rooms all sat under this one roof. A guest annex turns off its southeast corner at a right angle, and across the rear courtyard the main house faces a small storehouse. The four brewhouses guard the outer edges of the site; the house is the domestic heart inside them.

Modern Rooms Behind a Traditional Face

The agency sees two things in the Naruko Family Residence Main House: an interior that belongs to the modern Machiya townhouse, and an exterior that holds on to older ways.

The plan sets six rooms in three rows. The modern touches are in the formal rooms and upstairs. The reception room was fitted out in the shoin manner, with an alcove and a writing bay, and the upper floor was made into proper living space. In older townhouses the upper floor was often little more than a low-ceilinged loft for storage, so the shift toward using it as rooms is a sign of the times.

From the street you would never guess. The upper storey is kept low, and every opening on it is a mushiko-mado, a small window of vertical slats plastered into the earthen wall. Seen from outside, the second floor reads almost as a blank band of wall. Inside, the family was living up there; outside, the house kept the face of a traditional machiya.

All ten structures of the estate were registered on the same day for their contribution to the historic landscape, and none carries more of the street than the main house. The agency's note on the wall points out that the tiled pent roof running along the main house from Brewhouse No. 4 visually merges with the wall's own tiled coping.

What to Look For from the Street

Start by comparing the two floors. The upper eaves sit low, with the row of slatted windows squeezed beneath them. If you are used to later townhouses with tall upper floors, the roof here seems to press down on the ground floor.

Then look up at the roof. Rounded cover tiles alternate with flat pan tiles in long ribs across all 11 bays, and the hip-and-gable ends show small triangular gables. Follow the pent roof sideways and it runs without a break from the brewhouse at the southwest, along the house and on to the wall.

There are two accounts of the date. The agency gives 1916; Naniwa Shuzo's company history says the main house and its formal rooms were built in 1904. The published record does not decide between them. Either way, this is how a sake brewer in the Senshu region presented his shop to the street in the late Meiji and early Taisho years.

Seeing the House

The exterior of the Naruko Family Residence Main House can be seen from the front street at any time. It is a working residential road with cars, so step to the side if you stop.

The interior is shown only on Naniwa Shuzo's paid, reservation-only brewery tour, which takes in the formal rooms, a Western-style room and a tea room. According to the agency, the Western-style room is in the annex, so if the main house's shoin-style reception room is what you want to see, say so when you book.

No published rule on indoor photography turned up; ask your guide on the day. Directions and booking details are on the Naruko Family Residence page.