Onoguchi Family Residence Nagayamon Gate

What Is the Onoguchi Family Residence Nagayamon Gate?

The Onoguchi Family Residence Nagayamon Gate (小野口家住宅長屋門, Onoguchi-ke Jūtaku Nagayamon) is a single-story stone-faced Nagayamon gatehouse built in 1876 in Tanomachi, Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on October 14, 1999.

It stands on the southwest edge of the Onoguchi estate and serves as the way in. The construction date comes from an ink inscription found on the timbers. The roof is tiled and the building covers 70 square meters, making it the second-largest of the family's listed buildings after the former sake brewery, which covers 115 square meters.

A nagayamon is a gate flanked by rooms, all under one long roof.

A Timber Gate Wrapped in Stone

The Onoguchi Nagayamon looks like masonry, but its skeleton is wood. Builders raised a timber post-and-beam frame and then clad the outside with slabs of stone; the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the walls as faced with Ōya stone. The roof was originally stone as well and has since been replaced with clay tile.

The sources disagree about which stone was used. The national database says Ōya stone, while Utsunomiya City lists the facing as Tokujira stone (徳次郎石), a tuff quarried around Tokujira-machi in the north of the city and generally counted as a relative of Ōya stone. Both agree on the essential point: this is a wooden gate dressed in thin stone.

With a timber frame carrying the load, the stone does not have to be thick. That made the technique well suited to a broad gatehouse, and most of the Onoguchi storehouses were built the same way.

Arches in a Meiji Gatehouse

The feature singled out by the Agency for Cultural Affairs is the Western touch. The entrance is framed as a wooden arch, and the small windows in the walls are arched too, so the silhouette combines a Japanese tiled roof with semicircular openings.

In 1876 Western building forms were only beginning to reach the provinces, and local carpenters seem to have folded what they had seen into a traditional gatehouse. That inventiveness is why the Onoguchi Family Residence Nagayamon Gate was registered as a model of architectural form. It carries registration number 09-0014, the first of the six Onoguchi buildings listed on the same day.

Moved in One Piece

The gate no longer stands where it was built. Surveys carried out ahead of the 1999 registration established that it was shifted to its present position during the Taisho era by Hikiya, the technique of moving a building intact. Utsunomiya City places the move in the middle of that era.

At about the same time the former drying shed went up against the gate's north side, and the stone wall around the estate was built. Moving the Onoguchi Nagayamon appears to have been one step in a larger reworking of the compound's outer face.

How to See It

The Onoguchi Nagayamon can be seen from outside the estate. Together with the western run of the stone wall it forms the front of the property, so from the lane on the west you can take in the arched doorway, the small arched windows and the drying shed continuing to the north in a single view.

You cannot go through the gate. Entering the grounds requires the owner's consent, and details on visiting and access are gathered on the Onoguchi Family Residence page.