Former Tada Family Residence Main Building

A Townhouse on a Kyōmachi Lane

The Former Tada Family Residence Main House (旧多田家住宅主屋, Kyū-Tada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber townhouse in Kyōmachi 2-chōme, Ōtsu City, Shiga Prefecture, built in the middle Meiji period between roughly 1883 and 1897 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 19 December 2014. It occupies 82 square metres and faces west onto a lane in the old quarter of the city.

Ōtsu owes its shape to three overlapping functions. A castle went up on the lakeshore around 1586, and the town that grew beneath it became a port for Lake Biwa shipping, a post station on the Tōkaidō highway, and the approach town to Miidera temple. By the middle of the Edo period the built-up area covered more than a hundred blocks, which is where the district name Ōtsu Hyakuchō comes from. Kyōmachi is one of those blocks, and the Tōkaidō itself runs through it.

This house, though, does not front the highway. It stands on one of the narrow lanes that thread the block, presenting a frontage of three and a half ken, about 6.4 metres, to the west.

Why the Registry Took Notice

The Registered Tangible Cultural Property system, in place since 1996, was built for exactly this kind of building. Above it sit the National Treasure and Important Cultural Property tiers, which impose strict controls on alteration. Registration works differently: owners notify rather than seek permission for changes, receive tax relief, and above all keep living in or using the building. Tens of thousands of structures across Japan now carry it, most of them still in everyday use.

Registration number 25-0355 was granted under the first criterion, contribution to the historic landscape of the country. The Agency for Cultural Affairs justifies it on the evidence of the interior as much as the street front, citing the sliding board doors set behind the lattice bay as characteristic of the Ōtsu townhouse.

That reasoning repays a moment's thought. Ōtsu is a short train ride from Kyoto and its townhouses are often read as provincial cousins of the Kyō-machiya. The registry declines that framing. It treats the Ōtsu townhouse as a type with its own detailing, and this house as a specimen clear enough to argue from.

The date of registration places the house in company. On the same day in December 2014 the Shiga Prefectural Government Main Building of 1939, four blocks north in Kyōmachi 4-chōme, went onto the register, along with a 1930 house in the Otowadai hills. A prefectural office block, a suburban villa and a Meiji merchant house entered the register together, which is a fair snapshot of what the system is for.

Reading the Street Front

Start at the northern end of the facade, where the doorway opens. Behind it runs the doma, a passage of packed earth that goes straight through the building from front to back. This is the organising device of the Japanese townhouse: it separates the working route from the raised living floor, and it lets a merchant bring goods, water and customers deep into a narrow plot without stepping on the tatami.

South of the doorway, the wall pushes forward into a degōshi, a shallow bay faced in close-set vertical wooden slats. In front of it stands a komayose, a low fence of stout wooden bars that runs along the ground outside the lattice.

The komayose deserves attention because it needs something a townhouse cannot always spare, namely a strip of open ground beyond the building line. Its original job was defensive: horses were tied to it, carts scraped past it, and it kept both off the fragile lattice behind. In the early Shōwa years Ōtsu widened its main streets, and townhouses along them lost their forward projections to the work in an operation locals call nokigiri, eaves-cutting. Buildings set back on the lanes were spared. Here the lattice and its guard rail both survive, standing where they were built.

Look up. The second floor opens in a broad tategōshi window of vertical bars, generously wide rather than the small plastered mushiko aperture found on many townhouses of this period. Short sodekabe, wing walls, close off either end of the upper storey.

The interior, which is not open, follows a single-row four-room plan running back along the doma. The Agency singles out the sliding board doors that retract into a wall pocket on the inner side of the lattice bay: a device for switching the front room between an open shopfront and a closed private room within seconds. The Agency also records a renovation in 2007.

Visiting

The Former Tada Family Residence Main House is privately owned and closed to visitors. There are no opening hours, no admission charge and no interior access, and the registration system places no obligation on the owner to provide any. What can be seen is the west elevation, from the lane.

Photography from the public lane is not restricted, though the lane is narrow and residential, so a quick, considerate approach is the right one. Keep residents out of frame and do not step onto private ground for a better angle.

From JR Ōtsu Station the walk north takes about six minutes. From Shimanoseki Station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line, allow roughly eight minutes west. Both routes pass through the old post town, and Kyōmachi-dōri, the former Tōkaidō, runs the length of the district.

Anyone making the trip should plan on more than one building. Ōtsu Hyakuchō holds several dozen registered structures within walking distance, among them Ōtsu Hyakuchōkan, the one townhouse in the quarter open to the public, and Machizukuri Ōtsu publishes a free map that links them into a route.