Kondo Family Residence Main House

A Meiji Merchant House on the Pilgrim's Corner

The Kondō Family Residence Main House (近藤家住宅主屋, Kondōke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Kondo-ke Jutaku Shuoku) is a merchant house of the middle Meiji period in Bandō, Ōasa-chō, Naruto City, Tokushima Prefecture, entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 26 January 2011. It sits on the corner where the approach road to Ryōzen-ji, the first of the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage, meets the old Muya Kaidō highway.

The building runs on an east to west axis, twelve metres across the front and 8.1 metres deep, with a registered building area of 96 square metres. The Agency for Cultural Affairs places construction in the middle Meiji years, roughly 1883 to 1897, and records repairs in 1951 and 1955.

Above sits an irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form in which a triangular gable rises out of a four-sided slope, laid in hongawara tiles. That tiling pairs flat pan tiles with semicylindrical cover tiles, and in the Meiji countryside it signalled money. Lower pent roofs called geya wrap around all four sides of the core, and the Agency's record observes that the eaves on the north and east sides sit at different heights, which keeps the long silhouette from reading as a single flat band. The city of Naruto describes the varied sides as north and south instead, so the exact pairing is worth checking against the building itself.

Walk up close and there is no exposed timber to see. The walls use ōkabe construction, plastered over the posts and beams so that the structure disappears under a continuous skin, and the plaster is carried right up under the eaves. Houses built this way resisted sparks from neighbouring roofs, which mattered on a crowded street of wooden shops.

One point in the official record deserves explanation. The Agency's structural field lists the house as single storey, while its own descriptive note, and the city's account, both describe a tsushi-nikai: a low upper floor tucked under the roof, too shallow to stand upright in, used for storage and sometimes for sleeping. The gap comes from how half-height floors are counted in the register rather than from any disagreement about the building.

What Registration Recognised

Japan protects historic buildings through two parallel systems. Designation, which produces Important Cultural Properties and National Treasures, brings strict controls and heavy obligations. Registration, introduced in 1996 for buildings of roughly fifty years or more, is deliberately lighter: the owner notifies the government before making changes, receives tax relief and technical advice, and keeps the building in ordinary use. Most of the houses along Japan's old highways survive under this second system.

The Kondō house was accepted under the criterion covering buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country. It carries registration number 36-0086 and entered the register in the sixty-ninth round of listings.

The Agency files the building under tertiary industry rather than housing, and the reason lies in the family trade. Naruto City records that the household first made and sold sōmen, the fine wheat noodles eaten cold in summer, then switched to printing during the Taishō era. The building is a shop and workshop that happened to be a home, which is exactly what the corner of a temple-gate town produced.

Bandō grew up as a monzen-machi, a settlement clustered at the gate of a temple, serving both Ryōzen-ji and Ōasahiko Shrine, the first-ranked shrine of the old province of Awa. Pilgrims arriving from Awaji Island crossed into Shikoku here and began walking. Most of the old shopfronts have gone. The Kondō house holds the most conspicuous position left, and the city's registration file calls it the building that gives the Bandō streetscape its character.

Seeing It on Foot

Come by train. Bandō Station on the JR Kōtoku Line is about ten minutes' walk away, and local residents have marked the route with a green line painted along the road surface, so there is no need to navigate. Follow it and the Kondō house appears at the junction where the pilgrimage approach turns north.

This is a private house, still lived in and worked in, and there is no interior visit. Everything the register describes can be read from the street: the difference in eave heights, the unbroken plaster, the way the two street frontages meet at the corner without a break in the roofline. Photography of the exterior from the public road is unrestricted, and the usual courtesy applies to windows and doorways.

Naruto City notes that the building now also functions as a settai-jo, a rest point where pilgrims are offered tea or a place to sit. Settai is the Shikoku custom of giving to walkers without expecting anything back, on the understanding that each pilgrim travels in the company of Kōbō Daishi. Arrive in the early morning and you will see the white-clad walkers setting out from Ryōzen-ji past this corner.

Give the area half a day. Ryōzen-ji stands three minutes further north. Ōasahiko Shrine lies about two kilometres up the same road, its grounds holding a camphor tree said to be around a thousand years old. Between the two is the Naruto German House and the site of the Bandō prisoner-of-war camp, where German internees gave the first full performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Japan in June 1918. The walk from Bandō Station out to the German House and back takes roughly three hours with stops.