Nagase Takao Family Residence

What the Nagase Takao Family Residence Is

The Nagase Takao Family Residence (永瀬孝男家住宅) is the estate of a foundry family in Honmachi 1-chome, Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, where seven structures built between about 1900 and the late Taisho era were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019. A Japanese-style building and a Western-style building stand side by side at the centre; a storehouse and a barn sit to their west and north, a former power plant and a brick storehouse occupy the southeast corner, and a brick wall runs along the east and north edges. Locals know the place as the Kyu-Nagase-tei, the old Nagase house. It remains in private hands and is still lived in.

Kawaguchi has cast iron since at least the end of the Muromachi period, and by the Edo period the foundry masters had clustered here into one of the country's main casting districts. The Arakawa and Shibakawa rivers supplied sand and clay suited to moulds, and Edo, the largest market in Japan, lay just across the water. The Nagase Takao Family Residence survives in the middle of that district.

The seven structures span roughly a quarter of a century. The estate was never laid out in one campaign. Buildings were added as the foundry business grew, so the order in which they went up reads as a timeline of the family firm.

The House They Called Yagenya

The Nagase family is said to have opened its foundry in 1801. So many Kawaguchi casters bore the surname Nagase that households were distinguished by shop names instead. This one made the yagen, the boat-shaped mortar used to grind herbs for Chinese medicine, and so became known as Yagenya, the yagen shop.

The estate took its shape under Nagase Shokichi, the third head of the house (1857 to 1945). According to the history published by the owner, Shokichi entered the Ministry of Public Works foundry at Akabanebashi in Tokyo at sixteen and learned green-sand moulding and steam-driven blowing from a British engineer there. Within about three years he had a steam engine of his own making running in the family works, replacing the foot-pumped bellows that had supplied the furnace air. He then sold the same engines and blowers to other Kawaguchi founders.

New technique changed the product line. Pots and kettles gave way to cast-iron water mains. On the large-diameter specials supplied to the City of Tokyo, the owner's history gives two dates, 1887 for the first casting and 1892 for the order. In 1909 the works delivered the front gate and iron railings of the Akasaka Detached Palace, along with water valves and pipe.

Then, in 1900, Shokichi installed a thermal generating plant inside his own grounds, driven by a steam engine he had built, and began the first electric lighting business in Saitama Prefecture. Some four hundred lamps are said to have been lit along the streets of Kawaguchi. He served many terms on the town council and later became mayor of Kawaguchi town.

His eldest son Nagase Torakichi (1890 to 1965) took over the firm, chaired the Kawaguchi foundry association and the chamber of commerce, and in 1935 became the third mayor of Kawaguchi City. The Western-style building at the centre of the grounds was put up around 1922 as a reception house for Torakichi, then active in politics and business. The owner's history names the architect as Yui Chiyo and says the design drew on a house competition scheme published in an American architectural magazine.

How the Grounds Are Laid Out

The east side of the Nagase Takao Family Residence faces the street. The gate opens toward the southern end of that side, and from it a brick wall 75 metres long runs along the east and north boundaries. Seen from outside, the wall is what you meet first.

Straight ahead of the gate, at the centre of the grounds, the Western-style building faces south. The Japanese-style building joins it on the east and the storehouse on the west, so reception rooms in two idioms and a household strongroom line up in a single row. It is a formal arrangement, typical of a well-off Meiji and Taisho household and rarely preserved this completely.

North of the Western-style building the barn faces south. The southeast corner holds the former power plant, with the brick storehouse just west of it. These two are the only masonry-framed structures on the site, and both belong to the working side of the family business.

• Western-style building (about 1922; register no. 11-178)
• Japanese-style building (about 1905, remodelled in the early Showa era; register no. 11-179)
• Storehouse (1905; register no. 11-180)
• Barn (late Taisho era; register no. 11-181)
• Former power plant (about 1900, remodelled about 1939; register no. 11-182)
• Brick storehouse (about 1911; register no. 11-183)
• Front gate and brick wall (early Taisho era; register no. 11-184)

The seven were not all listed on the same ground. The Western-style building qualified as a model of design; the other six qualified for their contribution to the historic character of the landscape.

Visiting and Getting There

The Nagase Takao Family Residence is a private home and its interiors are closed. The introductory site run by the owner publishes no visiting hours and no booking procedure (checked 13 September 2026). What a visitor can see is the exterior, from the public road outside the grounds.

The east side is the one to work from. Gate and brick wall front the street, close enough to read the pantiled roof capping the wall and the two projecting bands of moulding below it. Of the Western-style building, only the steep roof and the brick chimney clear the wall.

No notice prohibiting photography from the public road was found. Even so, this is a lived-in house: keep the lens off the inside of the gate and away from the windows. Standing across the road rather than against the wall also gives a better reading of the whole.

Getting there is a walk from the station. Kawaguchi Station on the JR Keihin-Tohoku Line lies about 800 metres west, roughly 10 minutes on foot. Kawaguchi-Motogo Station on the Saitama Railway is about 600 metres away, roughly 8 minutes. There is no visitor parking.

Two addresses circulate. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database records the site as Honmachi 1-chome 21-1, while the Kawaguchi City list of cultural properties gives the residential-display address as Honmachi 1-5-12. For a map search, the second one works.