Hirano Family Residence Main House

The Heart of Yasuoka Katsuya's House

The Hirano Family Residence Main House (平野家住宅主屋, Hirano-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber house built in 1921 in Nishikata, Bunkyo City, Tokyo, and was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 September 1998. It covers 156 square metres under a tiled roof.

Its architect, Yasuoka Katsuya, is credited by the Agency for Cultural Affairs as one of Japan's first specialist house designers, and the Agency describes the building as his take on wayō setchū, the blending of Japanese and Western elements. The Western-style annex, storehouse, tea room and two gates on the same plot are each listed separately. The Hirano Family Residence Main House is the Japanese-style core where the household lived.

According to the historian Fujimori Terunobu, the first owner, the publisher Asada Komanosuke, made his home in this two-storey wing. It is also the earliest building on the plot by its registered date.

Why It Was Listed: Plan and Fittings

The plan of the Hirano Family Residence Main House begins at the gate. To the left stands the guest wing, clad in sasarako shitami clapboarding held in place by notched battens. Straight ahead, the entrance leads to a stair hall; behind it a passage links the veranda with a central corridor, and beyond lies the chanoma, the family sitting room.

Guests went one way and family life another, with the entrance and corridors doing the sorting. Add the Western-style block to the right of the gate and the division becomes clear: receiving visitors, running a business and everyday living each had their own quarters.

The listing rests on what survives. The joinery of the guest wing and even its light fittings remain largely intact. The house was registered under the criterion for buildings that set a standard of design, as a record of how Yasuoka put together a Taisho-era Japanese home with a Western block attached.

What to Look For: Glass, Shoji and Rain Doors

The feature that has drawn the most attention in the Hirano Family Residence Main House is the layering of its sliding doors. Fujimori chose the house to show how window glass found its way into traditional Japanese homes. In the upstairs family room and the upstairs reception room, the sequence runs outward from the tatami: paper shoji, a veranda corridor, a line of glass doors and, last of all, wooden rain shutters.

The two floors are handled differently. Downstairs, each shoji carries only a small pane of glass at its centre. Upstairs, the corridor on the room side is laid with tatami as an irigawa, and the glass doors hold tall vertical panes, with the shoji muntins stretched vertically to match. Horizontal panes were the norm; Fujimori reads the vertical rhythm as a nod to the Western-style block next door. Above the main glazing sit sliding panels of frosted glass.

On the period floor plan, the glass doors are reportedly labelled garasu shōji, glass shoji: a new material written into the house in the vocabulary of the old one.

Visiting

The Hirano Family Residence Main House is a private home and its interior is not open. From the lane, you can probably see no more than part of the guest wing's roof and walls over the wall to the left of the gate. The glass doors face the garden and are hidden from the street.

The photographs accompanying Fujimori's essay are the best way to see the doors and rooms. Directions and advice on viewing the property from the street are gathered on the Hirano Family Residence page.