Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building

What the Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building Is

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building (永瀬孝男家住宅和館) is a single-storey wooden reception wing of about 1905 in Honmachi 1-chome, Kawaguchi City, Saitama Prefecture, listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 March 2019. It joins the Western-style building on the east side and covers 71 square metres. It was remodelled in the early Showa era.

The roof is hipped, Yosemune-zukuri, laid with pantiles, Sangawara-buki, and a lean-to roof, Geya, runs along the east, south and north faces. Being single-storeyed, and skirted on three sides, the wing reads as a low horizontal line from outside. The steep gable of the Western wing next door belongs to a different world of roofing.

The plan exists to receive people. Two antechambers sit on the west, a ten-mat formal room, Zashiki, on the east, and a veranda, Engawa, runs along the south and east faces to open toward the garden. Entrance, antechamber, formal room: the sequence a guest walks is written directly into the floor plan.

Why It Was Listed

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building was listed for its contribution to the historic character of the landscape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs entry describes it as a carefully built reception wing using good hinoki cypress throughout the formal room, and places it at the core of a formal estate combining Japanese and Western wings.

That word core carries the argument. The eye goes first to the Western building of about 1922, but the Japanese wing is some seventeen years older. The Western wing arrived later, as a suburban Tokyo fashion; the room this household had always used for receiving guests is this one. Paired Japanese and Western wings went up all over Japan from the late Meiji into the Taisho era, and in most of them the Japanese side was principal and the Western side subordinate. Here the order of building lets you read that relationship directly.

The choice of timber says something about rank as well. Hinoki is used generously around the formal room because in a room finished with exposed posts and Nageshi tie-rails, where nothing is plastered over, the grade of the timber is the design. Being able to choose wood good enough to leave bare coincided with the years the foundry business was expanding.

What to Look For

Look at the junction. The Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building attaches to the east flank of the Western wing, and the two differ in roof form, pitch and covering: hipped pantile against gabled Western tile, a low running eaves against an abruptly rising gable end. Few estates set two buildings of such different temperament shoulder to shoulder.

The lean-to roofs on three sides are the other thing to trace. A geya is a secondary roof pitched below the main one, and running it along the east, south and north faces creates a sheltered band around the outside of the wing. It keeps rain and sun off the veranda, and it is the counterpart of a formal room designed to be thrown open to the garden.

The interior is closed, but the record allows a few observations. The ten-mat room meets the veranda on its south and east sides, so opening it makes room and garden continuous. Two antechambers rather than one means guests of different standing, or different numbers, needed different rooms. The owner's history lists a drawing room and a telephone room on the Western side, which means Western reception and Japanese reception were running in parallel in the same household.

Visiting

The Nagase Takao Family Residence Japanese-Style Building is part of a private home and the interior is closed. The owner's introductory site lists no visiting hours and no booking procedure (checked 13 September 2026). The formal room and veranda cannot be entered.

The exterior is difficult too. Standing low toward the east of the grounds, the wing is almost entirely hidden by the 2.7 metre brick wall along that boundary. From the public road you can make out the ridge line of the hipped roof and a little of the pantiling, no more. Of the seven structures, this is among the hardest to see from outside.

No notice prohibiting photography was found, but the house is occupied, so keep the lens off the grounds. If you are photographing only the roof above the wall, the far side of the road gives a better angle.

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