Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi)

About the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi)

The Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) (竹本家住宅（北町）, Takemoto-ke Jūtaku) is a pair of townhouses in Kitamachi, Kaizuka City, Osaka Prefecture: an East Main House from the late Edo period and a West Main House built around 1932, both registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan in 2003.

The "Kitamachi" in the name is there for a reason. Kaizuka has a second registered property with the same family name, the Takemoto Family Residence Main House in Nishimachi, entered on the register four months later in a separate round. Kaizuka City keeps the two apart by calling them the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) and the Takemoto Family Residence (Nishimachi), and this page follows that usage.

The houses stand on the north side of Horinocho-suji, one of the streets of Kaizuka's Jinaimachi, the temple town that grew up around Gansenji. They face south onto the street. The house immediately to the west is the Risai Family Residence, registered on the same day.

A Comb-Making Household

According to Kaizuka City, the Takemoto family made boxwood (tsuge) combs here until the early Showa era, the late 1920s and early 1930s. Combs from this area are sold today as Izumi-gushi, a craft certified by the Governor of Osaka Prefecture, and the prefecture notes that by the Edo period this district had become the largest producer of boxwood combs in Japan. The Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) was a working home within that trade.

The two main houses began life as two separate dwellings. The East Main House dates from the late Edo period (1830 to 1867); the West Main House went up around 1932, some seven decades or more later. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the east house is now used together with the west one, so what reads from the street as two buildings functions as a single home.

The Two Registered Buildings

Both buildings of the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) were registered on March 18, 2003, in the 36th round of registrations (public notice April 8, 2003). Each was entered under the criterion "contributing to the historic landscape of the country." The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives the following details.

• West Main House (No. 27-0225): c. 1932, two-story timber structure, tiled roof, building area 161 m²
• East Main House (No. 27-0226): late Edo period, single-story timber structure, tiled roof, building area 49 m²

The west house covers more than three times the ground area of the east house. Different in size and separated by roughly a century of building practice, the two survive side by side on one lot.

Reading the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) from the Street

Seen from Horinocho-suji, the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) is tall on the west and low on the east. The West Main House is a full two stories, three and a half bays (ken) wide, with a plastered front that rises well above its neighbor. Pressed against its east side is the East Main House, only two and a half bays long.

The east house sits on ground about 60 centimeters higher than the west house, yet its body is kept low, and its roof settles below the roof of its taller partner. With an Edo townhouse and a Showa townhouse sharing a frontage, you can see from the pavement how much taller a townhouse here could stand a century later.

The construction and details of each building are covered on the pages for the Takemoto Family Residence West Main House and the Takemoto Family Residence East Main House.

Visiting the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi)

The Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) is a privately owned home. Kaizuka City's cultural property pages give no information about opening the interior (checked October 1, 2026), so plan to see it from Horinocho-suji only. If you take photographs, do so from the public street and be considerate of the people who live here.

The nearest station is Kaizuka, served by the Nankai Main Line and the Mizuma Railway. Gansenji, at the heart of the temple town, is about a five-minute walk from the station's west exit, and the Takemoto Family Residence (Kitamachi) lies just north of the temple on Horinocho-suji. Kaizuka City's walking route through the temple town leads from Gansenji past the subtemples and the old townscape in front of the temple to the "Horinocho townscape," which it introduces as a street of registered townhouses.

For questions about the property, contact the Cultural Properties Preservation and Utilization Office of the Kaizuka City Board of Education (tel. 072-433-7126, Japanese).