Kato Family Residence Main House

A Farmhouse Raised by a Village Officer's Family

The Kato Family Residence Main House (加藤家住宅主屋, Katō-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a large farmhouse in the Kokaba district of Iwatsuki Ward, Saitama City, Saitama Prefecture, built around Ansei 6 (1859) and entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 27 October 2017.

It stands at the centre of its plot, facing south, which is the standard orientation for a farmhouse of consequence in the Kanto plain. The frontage measures eleven and a half ken and the depth seven and a half, a traditional module in which one ken runs to roughly 1.8 metres. That works out to something close to twenty-one metres across and thirteen and a half deep. The registered floor area is 185 square metres.

The roof is yosemune-zukuri, hipped on all four sides, and it is covered not in ceramic tile but in copper sheeting pressed into the profile of tiles. Saitama City records the technique as kawaragata dōban-buki. From a distance the roof reads as a conventional tiled farmhouse roof; up close the metal gives itself away in the seams and in the dull green the copper has taken on.

Inside, the eastern half is given over to the doma, the packed-earth working floor where a farming household threshed, cooked and stored. The raised-floor portion holds six rooms arranged three deep in two rows. One of those rooms, the zashiki reserved for guests, carries a hirashoin, a shallow writing alcove built into the wall beside the alcove proper. A hirashoin is not something a working farmhouse needs. It is a marker of rank.

The Kato family is recorded as having served as kumigashira of Kokaba village, the deputy to the village headman under the Tokugawa administrative system. The quality of the guest rooms follows from that position.

Registered, Not Designated: What the Status Means

Japan runs two parallel systems for protecting historic buildings, and the difference matters when reading about a property like this one. Designation (shitei) covers Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures. It is selective, it is decided by the state, and it comes with tight controls on any alteration. Registration (tōroku), introduced in 1996, is lighter. It applies to buildings more than fifty years old, it is usually initiated with the owner's consent, and it leaves the owner considerable freedom to keep using and adapting the building. The Kato Family Residence Main House is registered. It is not an Important Cultural Property, and the two terms should not be swapped.

Registration proceeds against three criteria. This house was accepted under the first of them, contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. The Council for Cultural Affairs took up the case in July 2017 and the registration was gazetted that October, with the registration number 11-171.

What made the case was scarcity. Saitama City has grown into a designated major city of well over a million people, and its early-modern building stock has thinned accordingly. A farmhouse of this scale, put up in the last decade of Tokugawa rule and still standing on its original plot, is now unusual within the city limits. The prefectural announcement of the registration described it plainly as a large farmhouse of the closing years of the shogunate, valuable as surviving early-modern housing in Saitama City.

The building has not been frozen. An extension went up in Meiji 12 (1879), twenty years after the main construction, and repairs were carried out around 1984 and 1986. Registration accommodates that kind of layered history rather than penalising it.

The Lattice Doors in the Butsuma

The detail that visitors and researchers return to sits in the butsuma, the room along the doma that houses the family Buddhist altar. Lattice doors are built into all four sides of it, and they are said to have been installed against the threat of uchikowashi.

Uchikowashi were the destructive riots that broke out repeatedly in the last decades of Tokugawa rule, when rice prices spiked and crowds moved on the houses of the wealthy, on pawnbrokers and on grain merchants, smashing storefronts and dumping stock into the street. The Kanto plain saw a series of them through the 1860s. A household of standing in a farming village had reason to think about what would happen if a crowd came down the road.

So the room where the family kept its altar was ringed with lattice: strong enough to slow entry, open enough to see through, and unremarkable enough that a casual eye would take it for ordinary interior joinery. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the doors as surviving on all four sides. No record survives of the doors ever being tested, and the attribution to riot defence comes down as tradition rather than as documented fact, which is why official descriptions hedge it as something handed down.

One practical point before anyone plans a trip. This is a private property, and only the exterior may be viewed. Saitama City states clearly that the interior of the building and the grounds are closed to visitors. The lattice doors, the hirashoin and the doma cannot be seen. What can be seen, from the public road, is the broad hipped roof and the south front, and even that should be approached with restraint: the site is in a residential and agricultural area, and the city asks that visitors avoid causing trouble to the owner, the neighbours or other people looking at the building.

Getting there takes some planning. The nearest railway station is Iwatsuki on the Tobu Urban Park Line, roughly four kilometres to the south. Local bus service in this part of the ward is thin, so a taxi from the station is the practical option, and there is no visitor parking at the site. Photography is possible from the public road only.

If the trip is going to be built around Iwatsuki, there is a good deal nearby that does open its doors. Iwatsuki has been Japan's centre of doll manufacture since the Edo period, and the Iwatsuki Doll Museum near the station covers that history with a substantial collection. The Iwatsuki Folk Museum occupies the former Iwatsuki Police Station building of 1930, itself a registered property. Iwatsuki Castle Park, on the earthworks of the castle that gave the town its name, is a short walk further and is at its best in early April. Questions about the Kato house itself go to the Saitama City Board of Education's cultural properties section on 048-829-1723.