Main House of the Terada Family Residence (former office and main house of the Maruyon Textile Company)

A Weaving Town's Best House

The Terada Residence Main House (寺田家住宅主屋, Terada-ke Jūtaku Shuoku), formerly the office and residence of the Marushi Textile Company (旧丸四織物合名会社事務所兼主屋), stands in the Fukude district of Iwata City, Shizuoka Prefecture, was completed in 1937, and was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 21 June 2013.

Fukude reads "Fukude," not "Fukuda," and the distinction matters to people here. This flat coastal strip east of the Tenryū River spent the twentieth century weaving velveteen and corduroy. The trade goes back further: local accounts credit a village headman named Terada Hikozaemon with bringing a heavy twilled cotton weave back from a journey to Yamato in 1831, thinking it would suit farming and fishing families looking for winter work. The Terada surname is common across Iwata, and by the 1930s one branch of it had built the Marushi Textile Company into something substantial enough to justify the house that survives today.

What was built in 1937 was not a house with an office attached. It was both at once, which is why the Agency for Cultural Affairs records it under the category of secondary industry rather than housing. The mill owner worked and slept under the same roof.

The structure is timber, two storeys, roofed in pantile with a gabled main volume, and covers 165 square metres at ground level. A hipped section projects from the southeast corner, clad in horizontal weatherboarding. Four sash windows sit in that face, two above and two below, arranged with the regularity of a small factory office. They are the first thing anyone notices, and they announce the building's dual purpose before you reach the door.

Why It Was Registered

Japan operates two separate systems for protecting historic buildings, and confusing them is a common error. Important Cultural Properties are selected, few in number, and tightly regulated. Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, a category created in 1996, work by notification rather than permission: owners keep normal use of their buildings and simply inform the authorities before major alterations. The system exists because thousands of modern buildings were vanishing before anyone had time to assess them.

The Terada house was registered under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic character of the national landscape. Its registration number is 22-0191, assigned in the seventy-fifth round of listings. It received a renovation in 1967, thirty years after construction, and that intervention is recorded in the national database alongside the original date.

Inside, the plan reads as a compromise between two ways of living, worked out in a single household. The southeast ground-floor room is Western in style, matching the weatherboarded exterior of that corner. Elsewhere the rooms are Japanese: an eight-mat room on the ground floor and a ten-mat room above, both fitted with zashiki-kazari, the formal alcove and shelving that mark a reception room. A wide veranda runs along the south face. The Agency's assessment calls it a well-made modern dwelling with a Western room, which is a plain description of a plain fact: this was a prosperous provincial manufacturer building to the best standard available to him.

Registration in 2013 covered two buildings on the same plot. The second is the company's old timber warehouse, and its story turned out to be the more public one.

The Warehouse That Became a Concert Hall

Behind the main house, at the southeast edge of the site, stands the former Marushi Textile Company Warehouse. It is timber-framed, gable-roofed in pantile, and covers 129 square metres. Weatherboarded walls carry paired casement windows on the east, south and west faces, with high windows in both gable ends. During the closing period of the Second World War the building served as a government cotton store.

In April 1997 the late Terada Akiko, first head of the local music society Andante, converted it into a hall. The floor of the loft was taken out, exposing the double-beam roof structure across the full height of the space. It has been known ever since as DOLCE Warehouse. The name came from a visiting player with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, who remarked at the opening concert that the room had a dolce sound.

Musicians describe the acoustic in physical terms: no microphones, the performer's breathing audible from the back, hands visible on the keyboard. Piano recitals, chamber concerts, rakugo storytelling, readings and exhibitions have all been held there. The hall marked twenty-five years in 2022 and remains in family management, available for hire.

This shapes what a visit can realistically be. The main house is privately owned and lived in, and it is not open to the public. There are no viewing hours, no admission fee, and no interior access. The warehouse can be entered when a concert or event is running, and the schedule is announced through the hall's own channels rather than through any tourism office.

Getting there takes planning. Fukude sits well south of the JR Tōkaidō Line, and the walk from Iwata Station runs to well over an hour. Enshū Railway buses serve the area, with the Shindō stop roughly a minute from the site. Most visitors drive.

Photography from the public road is unrestricted, as anywhere. Both buildings are someone's home and family property, so the ordinary courtesies apply: stay on the road, and do not photograph into the grounds. Anyone wanting to see the warehouse interior should attend a scheduled event.

Iwata City holds a scattering of other registered buildings, among them the former Kaketsuka Post Office and the Ōhashi family residence. Read together, they sketch the economic history of a district that made cloth for a living.