Mie Residence Gate

A Gate of About 1931 on Hachiman-dōri

Mie Residence Gate (三重家住宅門, Mie-ke Jūtaku Mon, also written Mieke Jutaku Mon) is a small timber gate built around 1931 at Wakita-machi in Kawagoe City, Saitama Prefecture, and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 December 2014. It measures 1.7 metres across the opening, carries a copper-sheeted roof, and comes with wing walls on both sides and a wicket door.

One point seven metres. That is narrower than a domestic doorway is wide in most Western housing, and it is the entire frontage of a structure the Japanese government thought worth listing separately from the house behind it. The gate stands at the southern end of the eastern boundary of the plot and opens onto Hachiman-dōri, the north-south street one block east of the Crea Mall shopping arcade.

Its type is udegimon, and the name describes the construction. Two main posts carry brackets, udegi, that project forward and back to support the purlins that in turn carry the roof. Nothing spans between the posts overhead except what those brackets hold up. Japanese gate types form a rough hierarchy, running upward through the munemon, the yakuimon with its offset ridge and rear posts, and the four-posted shikyakumon of temple approaches. The udegimon sits near the bottom. It is what a well-off household built when it wanted correctness rather than rank.

The gate is ikken ikko: one bay, one opening. A kugurido, a low wicket door, allows everyday passage without swinging the main leaves.

Why a 1.7-Metre Gate Earned Its Own Registration

The registration number is 11-0143 and the entry came with the seventy-ninth round of registrations, on the same day as the main house at 11-0142. The criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape of the nation, and that criterion explains the listing better than any account of the carpentry would.

A house shows the street its gate. Everything the Agency for Cultural Affairs values in the main house behind this one, the coffered ceiling, the formal alcove fittings, the six-room plan with its encircling corridors, is invisible from the road and always will be, since the property is a private home. The gate is the part of the composition that does public work. Registering it separately recognises that the streetscape of a Japanese residential district is assembled from exactly these small structures, and that losing them one at a time dissolves the character of a neighbourhood more completely than losing any single house would.

Registration is worth distinguishing from designation. Designation as an Important Cultural Property is the stronger instrument, restricted to a small number of buildings and enforced through tight control of alterations. Registration, introduced in 1996 for structures over fifty years old, works by notification: the owner informs the national government before significantly changing the exterior, receives tax and repair support, and continues normal use. For a working gate on a lived-in house, the lighter instrument is the only one that makes sense.

The detailing rewards a second look. The gable roof carries a slight mukuri, the convex swell also used on both roofs of the main house, so the two structures share a curve. Copper sheeting keeps the roof light enough that the modest posts and brackets can hold it without thickening, and in 1931 copper was still a modern and costly choice for a private house. Six decades of weather have taken it from its original salmon colour through brown to the muted green of patina. The wing walls flanking the gate are built as vertical board fences with an open transom above, a mesukashi ranma made by setting sawn boards with gaps between them, and each wing wall carries its own small copper roof. The Agency's description credits the gate together with the garden in front of the house for the quiet character of the frontage.

Kawagoe City records the gate as privately owned and counts it as one ki, the unit used for structures rather than buildings; the national database counts it as one tō, the unit for buildings. The national database is the authoritative record.

What the Street Shows You

Mie Residence Gate is part of a private, occupied home and is not open to the public. There are no visiting hours and no admission. The gate is visible from the public road, which is where the whole of the experience takes place.

Stand across Hachiman-dōri rather than directly in front. From the far pavement the roof's convex curve reads clearly against the sky, the eaves lines of gate and wing walls resolve into a single low horizontal, and the tiled roof of the house appears above and behind. Approach and the transom above the wing wall becomes the thing to look at: through the gaps between its boards the garden in front of the house shows as a horizontal band of green, screened but not hidden. That is precisely the calculation such a transom exists to make. A solid wall would refuse the street; an open fence would surrender the garden. The slotted board does neither.

Please stay on the road. Do not enter the gateway, do not push at the wicket door, and photograph the street elevation only. Residents live behind it.

The gate stands roughly 400 metres north of the east exit of Kawagoe Station on the Tobu Tojo and JR Kawagoe lines, about five minutes on foot. Honkawagoe Station on the Seibu Shinjuku Line is some 700 metres to the northwest. Walking a few minutes south along the same street brings you to Kawagoe Hachiman-gū, the shrine that gives Hachiman-dōri its name, founded by tradition in 1030 and free to enter.

For gates, gardens, and pre-war domestic architecture you can actually walk through, continue fifteen minutes north to the Former Yamazaki Family Villa at Matsue-chō 2-7-8. Built in 1925 for the fifth-generation head of the Kameya confectionery and designed by Yasuoka Katsuya, its main building became an Important Cultural Property in 2019 and its garden was placed on the national register of monuments as a place of scenic beauty in 2011. Admission is 100 yen; opening runs 9:30 to 18:30 between April and September and 9:30 to 17:30 between October and March, closed on the first and third Wednesday of each month and over the New Year. Confirm current hours on the city's page before setting out. Another twenty-five minutes north lies Ichiban-gai, the street of fire-resistant kurazukuri merchant houses that forms a nationally selected preservation district and shows what Kawagoe put at its street edge a generation earlier.