Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate

A gate between the gatehouse and the main house

Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate (奥野家住宅中門, Okuno-ke Jūtaku Chūmon) is a late-Edo gate 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 27-0499, together with its flanking walls.

It is a timber gate with a pantile roof, 4.2 meters wide, standing between the southwest corner of the main house and the gate row house. Once a visitor has passed the outer gate, this is where the homestead checks them a second time.

Eaves on bracket arms

The Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate hangs a pair of board doors in a 1.9 meter opening near the middle of its 4.2 meter width. The agency calls it a wicket gate; the city describes it as an Udekimon, a gate whose eaves rest on arms projecting from the posts, with a double door one bay wide. The posts are square.

The walls to each side have board skirting below and Shikkui plaster above, the same pairing of timber and white plaster seen on the storehouses, which keeps the whole homestead visually of a piece.

A gate that creates depth

The Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate divides the route from the entrance to the main house from the forecourt in front of the house. Outer gatehouse, middle gate, then the roji gate and high wall running south from the east side of the main entrance: layering gate upon gate is how the Okuno homestead is organised.

In a headman's house, villagers, officials and honoured guests were each taken to different places, and multiple gates expressed those distinctions in space. The middle gate sits at the pivot of that sequence.

It was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape of the country.

Watch the names

Family records call the Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate the "inner gate", while the roji gate that divides the forecourt from the garden of the reception rooms is written as the "middle gate". Because the registered names and the household names disagree, check location rather than label when reading older documents.

Visiting

The Okuno Family Residence Middle Gate stands inside the homestead and is hard to see from the street. The grounds open for Sakura no Shōbei events and on café days, and on days when events are held in the main house you pass this gate on the way in from the gate row house. When you do, look at how the arms carry the eaves, and at the proportion of the doors to the side walls. Directions are on the Okuno Family Residence (Toyonaka) page.