Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House

What Is the Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House?

The Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House (筒井家住宅門長屋, Tsutsui-ke Jūtaku Monnagaya) is a gatehouse with rooms, a Nagayamon, at the southwest of the Tsutsui estate in Nakamozucho, Kita-ku, Sakai City, Osaka; dated by the national register to the mid-Edo period, it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on April 3, 2020.

The single-storey timber building has a tiled hip-and-gable roof (Irimoya-zukuri, Hongawarabuki) and covers 160 square meters. It runs north to south along the southwest edge of the property, with a gateway 1 bay wide and a side door half a bay wide opening a little north of center. The north end turns west and the south end turns east, so the plan zigzags like two linked right angles.

Why It Was Registered: The Estate's Formal Front

The Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House was registered for its contribution to the historic landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs values it as a record of how the estate's layout developed over time.

Sakai City calls it a nagayamon of unusually varied, crank-shaped form, built in the mid-Edo period when the family settled here, and says it conveys the dignified front of a reclamation family's home.

What to Look For: Solid Plaster Outside, Exposed Posts Within

The walls are plastered in white Shikkui, but the two faces differ. Toward the outside, posts are buried in the wall and the plaster runs unbroken right up under the eaves. Toward the courtyard, the posts are left exposed in the Shinkabe manner. From outside the Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House looks guarded and solid; from within it looks like a house.

Shigeatsu Shimizu's 2025 paper records the uses of its rooms. The gate opens in the central range; south of it is the Tomobeya, a room for attendants, and the north range held the Umagoya (stable), Umeboshigoya (shed for pickled plums) and Shibagoya (brushwood store). The gate was also a working building for people, horses and the household's stores.

Sakai City's leaflet notes that the Mozu camphor tree, a tree protected by Osaka Prefecture and thought by some to be over a thousand years old, stands in front of the gate. Its branches reaching over the white walls are one of the defining views of the estate.

Dating

The national register places the Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House in the mid-Edo period and enters 1661 to 1751 in its dates column. Shimizu points to its roof framing, in which posts carry the beams directly, the weathering of the timbers and its low profile, and dates it to the eighteenth century, most likely built with the family wing between 1681 and 1712. The two readings broadly agree.

Visiting

The Tsutsui Family Residence Gate Row House is the gate of a private home, and neither the gateway nor the rooms are open to the public. Please do not walk through the gate.

Photographs by Yasushi Ichikawa appear on the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and Sakai City's page. Access and visiting conditions are covered on the Tsutsui Family Residence page.