Risai Family Main Building

The Risai Family Residence (Main Building): An Apothecary's House in Kaizuka's Temple Town

On a corner plot just north of what was once the Bokuhan administrative office, in the quiet lanes of Kaizuka's old temple town south of Osaka, stands the main building of the Risai family residence. The Risai were prominent townspeople here, dealers in medicinal herbs who held the post of ward elder for Kitamachi through much of the Edo period. Their house still anchors the same corner where Horinocho-suji meets Onshita-suji, its tiled roof and weathered timber reading as a survivor from the town's commercial heyday.

The building is a single-story wooden structure roofed in tile, with a footprint of about 253 square meters. It faces south onto the street, with a detached annex set behind a small inner courtyard and a clay-walled storehouse along the western lane. Of this compound, only the main building carries the registration discussed here.

Why It Is Registered

The main building is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, listed on 18 March 2003 under registration number 27-0227, with the official notice following on 8 April. This lighter-touch national system, introduced in 1996, recognizes buildings that help sustain the country's historic landscape rather than singling them out as individual masterpieces. The Risai house earned its place by preserving the character of a temple-town streetscape that has thinned over the centuries.

Look up at the roofline and the building's quietest surprise appears. The gabled roof is not a single unbroken slope: the three central bays flanking the ridge are lifted a step higher than the sections on either side, giving the silhouette a tiered, stepped profile. The framing beneath tells a different story, running as a continuous set of raked beams that ignore the visible step. That small disagreement between surface and structure is a clue to successive remodelings. Specialists place the present building in the mid-Edo period, roughly 1661 to 1750, while allowing that its core may reach back into the seventeenth century. The heavy later alterations are the price of so long a life.

The Family and the Temple Town

According to a genealogy kept by the household, the family traced its line to an ancestor named Shikibu, who had taken religious vows at Matsuo-dera before resettling in Kaizuka after the upheavals of 1581. For generations the head of the house took the name Magozaemon, ran a wholesale apothecary trade, and served as elder of the northern ward. Medicine was a respectable and lucrative business in a town that sat astride the Kishu Kaido highway, and the family's standing is written into the position of its house, planted at the gateway corner beside the seat of local government.

That government belonged to the Bokuhan family, who administered Kaizuka as a jinaicho, a self-governing community grown up around a Jodo Shinshu temple. The temple at its center, Gansenji, briefly served as the headquarters of the Hongan-ji sect in the 1580s, and the Bokuhan held governing privileges confirmed first by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and then by Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1610. Their autonomy lasted until 1871. A moat once ringed the town, dug three ken wide in 1613, and the merchant houses lining the inner lanes, the Risai residence among them, formed the prosperous core of that protected enclave.

Visiting the Neighborhood

The Risai residence remains a private home, so its interior is not open to visitors. Its exterior is part of the pleasure of walking the old town, and several nearby buildings do welcome the public. A natural starting point is Gansenji, affectionately called Bokkan-san, whose main hall of 1663, gate of 1679, and drum tower of 1719 were designated Important Cultural Properties in 1993. From there the lanes unfold past clay-walled storehouses, latticed shopfronts, and other registered townhouses such as the Namikawa residence and the Kaizuka Jinaicho Machiya-kan, a former merchant house opened as a local heritage building. Confirm its opening times before you go. Kanda Shrine, the town's tutelary shrine, preserves traces of the old moat within its grounds. In mid-March the streets fill for the Spring Hina Doll tour, when private machiya open their interiors for a few days. The whole district lies about a five-minute walk west of Kaizuka Station on the Nankai Main Line, an easy half-day outing from central Osaka.