Front Gate of the Ichida Family Residence

Ichida Family Residence Front Gate: The Two-Metre Frontage That Sets the Tone of a Ueno Street

The gate is two metres wide. Behind it stands a house of 111 square metres, a brick storehouse, and a garden, none of which you can see from the pavement. What the street gets is this: a gabled roof of pantiles carried on timber brackets, a wing wall running off to one side, and a strip of open air between the gate and the road, because the whole thing was deliberately pulled back from the property line.

The type is an udegi-mon, a bracket gate. Two posts carry a roof by way of horizontal arms, udegi, that project from the posts to support the eaves. It is a form used across Japan for the entrances of houses that want to be dignified without being grand, and it is among the least expensive gate types capable of carrying a proper tiled roof. The roof here is kirizuma-zukuri, gabled, laid with sangawara pantiles. The gate sits on an east-west ridge, just south of the main house entrance.

Look up at the small wall panel above the opening. Set into it is a renji window, a horizontal lattice of slender vertical bars. It has no function beyond letting light and air through and giving the eye something to rest on, and its presence in a gate this size says a good deal about the priorities of the man who commissioned it.

Chamfers, Black Plaster, and a Deliberate Setback

The Agency for Cultural Affairs uses the word teinei for the workmanship here, which means careful, attentive, done properly. The evidence it cites is chamfering: the posts, the brackets, and the rafters have all had their arrises taken off. A chamfer is a small thing, a few millimetres of wood removed along an edge, and no one needs it. It softens the profile, catches light along a thin bright line, and takes a carpenter time to execute on every member. On a two-metre gate, that is a choice about how much the entrance is worth.

The wing wall, the sodebei, does most of the work of composing the frontage. Its upper portion is finished in black lacquer plaster, kuro-shikkui, a lustrous dark render that was expensive to apply and difficult to keep. Below the waistline the wall is boarded with vertical planks, and the whole is capped with a board roof. Black above, timber below, tile alongside.

The setback matters as much as the gate. Rather than meeting the road on the south, the gate stands back from it, which gives the passer-by room to see the composition whole and gives the household a threshold of space before the street begins. The register's own description calls the resulting frontage shosha, elegant and unfussy. Restraint, executed at expense.

Registered for the Landscape, Not the Building

Here is the detail that distinguishes this structure from the main house behind it. Japan's registration system applies one of three criteria to each entry, and the main house and the storehouse were both registered under the first: that they are models of their form and construction. The front gate was registered under the third. It contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

The difference is not a demotion. It is a statement about what the gate is for. The Agency did not register it as a specimen of gate design. It registered it because of what it does to a street in Ueno Sakuragi, a district that was temple land under the Tokugawa shoguns, subdivided from the middle of the Meiji period, and settled by artists and writers drawn to the neighbourhood around the art school. The gate is one of the surviving pieces of that street, and the classification says so.

Note that the register itself carries a small inconsistency: the structural field gives the frontage as 2.0 metres, while the descriptive text gives it as one ken, a traditional bay of roughly 1.8 metres. The figures are close and the difference is likely a matter of where the measurement was taken.

The gate was registered on 26 December 2005, with notice the following day, as number 13-0193 in the 48th round. Unlike almost everything else on the property, it can be seen at any hour, from the street, for nothing. The house behind it is a private residence leased since 2001 to the Taito Historic City Study Group, and its interior opens only for the nonprofit's events. The gate asks no such permission.