Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant

What the Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant Is

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant (永瀬孝男家住宅旧発電所) is a single-storey brick-and-timber building of about 1900 in Honmachi 1-chome, Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019. It stands in the southeast corner of the estate and covers 63 square metres. It was remodelled around 1939.

It began as a private generating station. Nagase Shokichi, third head of a foundry household, adapted a steam engine of his own making, installed a thermal plant inside his own grounds, and started the first electric lighting business in Saitama Prefecture from this building. The history published by the owner records some four hundred lamps lit along the streets of Kawaguchi. No power company was involved. The engine that drove the foundry was simply put to a second use.

The construction is brick infill within a timber frame. The roof is gabled on an east-west ridge and covered in sheet metal. The interior divides into two rooms, east and west, each with its own doorway on the north side.

Why It Was Listed

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant was listed for its contribution to the historic character of the landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry calls it a valuable survival, a generating facility attached to a house of a kind with few parallels. Among the seven entries for this estate, it is the only one that comments on rarity.

The rarity is in the combination. Meiji-era generating structures survive in a good many places, but most were purpose-built by electricity companies. A plant raised on a domestic plot, derived from the power the family already used in its trade, and surviving on grounds that stayed in residential use, is a narrower category. The Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant sits awkwardly between industrial heritage and domestic heritage, and belongs fully to neither.

The brickwork is the second point. The shell is laid in Flemish bond, and the doorway of the east room is arched, evidence of care taken over a working building. Flemish bond alternates headers and stretchers within a single course. Japanese practice through the Meiji period moved toward English bond, so Flemish work is comparatively scarce here. Set beside the brick storehouse on the same grounds, which is English bond, the change of method across eleven years becomes visible.

What to Look For

Follow the joints. Because Flemish bond alternates long and short faces within one course, the wall carries a near-chequered rhythm of short and long rectangles. The pattern shifts along each course rather than between courses, which is what distinguishes it from English bond at a glance. If you can get near the wall of the Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant, trace a single course sideways and the alternation reads immediately.

The east doorway is arched. This was machinery housing, yet a semicircle was turned over the opening. The trouble taken here is the clearest sign that the building was never treated as a shed.

The sheet-metal roof is worth noting too. The Japanese wing, the storehouse and the brick storehouse on this estate are all tiled; only the former power plant and the barn are metal. One building made heat and soot, the other held tools and goods. The roofing follows the use.

One discrepancy should be flagged. The history published by the owner calls the generating building the renga-gura, the brick storehouse, and gives its dimensions as five and a half by three and a half Ken with Flemish brickwork. In the Agency for Cultural Affairs database, however, the Flemish-bond building of 63 square metres is the former power plant, while the brick storehouse is a separate listing, a two-storey tool store of 19 square metres in English bond. This article follows the database.

Visiting

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Former Power Plant stands on private ground and the interior is closed. The owner's introductory site lists no visiting hours and no booking procedure (checked 13 September 2026). Whether any of the generating machinery survives could not be confirmed.

Of the seven structures, this one sits closest to the public road, in the southeast corner. Even so, the 2.7 metre brick wall runs along that boundary, and the building is single-storeyed, so expect to see the upper part of the roof and little else. Wall and building are both brick, so the colour carries across the top of the boundary without a break.

No notice prohibiting photography was found. If your interest is the brickwork itself, the boundary wall beside the front gate faces the road directly and is the practical subject.

Directions to the estate and the conditions for seeing it are set out on the Nagase Takao Family Residence page.