Kawakami Family Residence

A Row House at the End of an Alley

Kawakami Family Residence (川上家住宅, Kawakami-ke Jūtaku) is a small two-storey wooden house in Chūō 1-chōme, Ōtsu City, Shiga Prefecture, built around 1933 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 3 April 2020. Its registered footprint is 37 square metres, which makes it one of the most modest buildings on the national register anywhere in Shiga.

You reach it by leaving the old Tōkaidō highway and following a lane back between the buildings. The lane ends, and the house faces you, looking south.

What stands at the end of that lane is not a single house but half of one. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as the western half of a nagaya, a two-unit terraced dwelling under one roof. The eastern half carries its own registration under a different family name, Marugame. Frontage is a little over two ken (roughly 3.7 metres); depth runs to five ken, about nine metres. A person standing in the lane can take in the whole street elevation without turning their head.

The date matters. Around 1933, Ōtsu's main streets were being widened, and the merchant houses that fronted them were losing their eaves to the work. This building went up at the back of the block, out of the road's way, at exactly the moment the street front was being cut back.

Why the Registry Took Notice

Japan's Registered Tangible Cultural Property system, introduced in 1996, sits below the more familiar National Treasure and Important Cultural Property tiers. It was designed for buildings roughly fifty years old or more that would otherwise fall through the cracks: shops, factories, bridges, ordinary houses. Registration brings light-touch protection and tax relief rather than the heavy obligations of designation, and owners keep using their buildings.

Kawakami Family Residence was registered under the first of the three criteria, contribution to the historic landscape of the country, and carries registration number 25-0450. The Agency's own assessment is blunt about what earns it a place: the building shows the street-front character of the Ōtsu row house clearly.

It did not arrive alone. On the same day in April 2020, six buildings in and around the 115 block of Chūō 1-chōme went onto the register together. The Hashiwada Family Residence main house fronts the old Tōkaidō with a wide 185-square-metre facade, built by a kimono merchant, and the Agency notes that its present front is the shape left behind after the eaves were cut for the road widening. Behind it, up the same network of lanes, sit the Fujiwara, Kawakami, Marugame and Shibayama houses, all of them terraced dwellings or former terraced dwellings.

Read together, the six make an argument that no single building could make alone. A merchant frontage on the highway, altered by a public works project; behind it, a cluster of small rented units put up in the same years. The register captured the whole arrangement, landlord's face and tenants' quarters, rather than only the handsome part.

What to Look For

The street elevation does the talking, since the interior is a private home.

Toward the eastern side of the front stands the entrance, fitted with glass doors. Glass in a domestic doorway was still a marker of the modern in early Shōwa Japan, and its use here dates the building as surely as any document. To the west of the entrance projects a degōshi, a shallow bay of vertical wooden slats set out from the wall plane. The degōshi is one of the signatures of the Ōtsu townhouse, and on a building this narrow it takes up most of the remaining frontage.

Upstairs, according to the registry record, the second-floor reception room contains a tokonoma alcove and an openwork ranma transom panel. Neither is visible from outside. It is worth knowing they are there: a rented unit of 37 square metres was still given the formal fittings of a proper guest room, which says something about what tenants in this quarter expected.

The most rewarding thing to do at the end of the lane is to compare the two halves. Marugame Family Residence next door, 41 square metres, shares the plan and the general shape of the facade. The Agency's description points out where the two diverge, in details such as a circular shitaji-mado window and the transom designs. Two units built as a pair, then diverging over ninety years of separate ownership, are on view side by side, which is a rarer sight than a single well-preserved house.

Note the roof line as well. Pantiles, unbroken across both halves, confirm that this reads as one building even though it has always held two households.

Visiting

Kawakami Family Residence is privately owned and remains a home. There is no interior access, no opening hours and no admission charge, and the property is not staffed. Registration under this system does not oblige an owner to open the doors, and most registered houses in Ōtsu never do.

The lane leading to the house is narrow, and the ground around the building is private. Look from the public lane and go no further. Photography of the exterior from public ground is not restricted, but this is somebody's front door: the sensible practice is to keep people and interiors out of frame and to avoid lingering.

Getting there is easy. From JR Ōtsu Station the walk north is roughly ten minutes; from Biwako-Hamaōtsu Station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line it is about five minutes south. The whole 115 block sits within the district known as Ōtsu Hyakuchō, the hundred-odd blocks of the old post town, and the other five buildings registered in 2020 are within a few minutes' walk of each other.

Ōtsu Hyakuchō rewards an unhurried hour on foot in any case. Machizukuri Ōtsu publishes a free walking map of the district's townhouses, and Ōtsu Hyakuchōkan, a short walk away, is the one Ōtsu townhouse in the quarter that can be entered.