Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House

The front gate on the street

Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House (奥野家住宅門長屋, Okuno-ke Jūtaku Monnagaya) is a late-Edo gatehouse of between 1751 and 1829 in Nakasakurazuka, Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on July 8, 2008, under number 27-0498.

It stands at the middle of the western edge of the plot and gives the homestead its street front: a single-storey timber building with a hipped-and-gabled Irimoya-zukuri roof in pantiles and a building area of 33 square meters. Its north end joins the west storehouse, so gate and storehouse run on along the street as one line of buildings.

A gate row house combines a gateway and rooms in a single long building, a common front gate for prominent rural families. The Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House is the entrance to the homestead of the Okuno family, Shōya of Sakurazuka village in the Edo period.

Gateway and attendants' room

The southern half of the Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House is the gateway. A pair of board doors hangs in the middle, with a small wicket door to the north: the big doors for goods or a palanquin, the wicket for everyday comings and goings.

The northern half is an attendants' room, about six tatami mats in size according to the city, where servants accompanying a guest or waiting on the master sat. The west front facing the street is clad in overlapping horizontal clapboard, and the room's window carries a monomi-gōshi, a lookout lattice for watching the street from inside.

The agency records a renovation in Heisei 10, which is 1998, but the Western-calendar field of the same record gives 1999, so the two do not agree.

The lost southern half, and why it was registered

According to the city, the gateway of the Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House was once continued to the south by a row 5 bays long holding a men's room, later a shed, and a storeroom. That southern half is gone, but the essential parts of a gate row house, gateway and attendants' room, survive.

It was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The city credits the gatehouse, storehouses and board fences along the side road, together with the big trees inside and outside the walls, with preserving the feel of the old village in a thoroughly urban district. The dark clapboard wall and lookout lattice facing the street are the heart of that scene.

What to look for

Look first from across the street. Under one irimoya roof the Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House holds the gateway to the south and the attendants' room to the north, and the west storehouse continues beyond. Gate, room and store read as a single frontage.

Closer in, compare the size of the main doors with the wicket, then look at the lookout lattice. Keeping watch on the street from behind the lattice was part of a gatehouse's job, and here that job has become ornament.

Visiting

The exterior of the Okuno Family Residence Gate Row House can be seen from the street on the west side of the plot at any time. The attendants' room is not open. On event days and café days at Sakura no Shōbei you enter the grounds through this gateway, which is the moment to look at the doors and the underside of the roof from inside. Directions and event information are on the Okuno Family Residence (Toyonaka) page.