Ichida Family Main Building

Ichida Family Residence Main House: A Nihonbashi Cloth Merchant's Retirement Home in Ueno Sakuragi

The national register describes the purpose of this house in a single old word: inkyo. It was the residence a merchant moved into after handing the family business to the next generation, and in 1907 the first Ichida Zenbei, whose cloth wholesaling house stood in Nihonbashi, built one for himself on a quiet plot in Ueno Sakuragi. He was roughly a five-minute walk from what is now the main gate of the Tokyo University of the Arts, and a great deal further, in spirit, from the warehouses and account books of the Nihonbashi trade.

What stands there today is a two-storey timber building with a hipped roof of sangawara pantiles and exterior walls of horizontal weatherboarding held in place by slender battens, a finish called oshibuchi shitami-ita-bari. The building covers 111 square metres. The register counts it as one structure, and that single line has to carry the whole of a house that has been lived in continuously for well over a century.

The plan is worth reading slowly. Two guest rooms, one of six tatami mats and one of eight, sit side by side on an east-west line. Verandas run around the west and south faces, so the rooms open toward the garden on two sides rather than one. Along the eastern flank, from south to north, come the entrance hall, the family tea room, and the kitchen: the working spine of the house, kept deliberately apart from the rooms where guests were received.

The second floor came later. Sometime in the early Taisho years, between 1912 and 1925, a storey was raised above the guest rooms. The house grew, as houses do.

Why It Was Registered, and What That Registration Means

Japan protects its buildings through two quite different mechanisms, and the difference matters here. Designation as an Important Cultural Property or National Treasure is a heavy instrument, reserved for a small number of buildings and accompanied by tight controls on what an owner may do. Registration as a Tangible Cultural Property is the lighter of the two. Introduced by a revision to the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1996, it was designed for exactly this kind of building: privately owned, still in daily use, valuable but not untouchable. Registration asks for notification before major alterations rather than permission, and it exists so that ordinary historic buildings can keep earning their keep instead of being frozen.

The Ichida main house was registered on 26 December 2005, with the public notice following the next day. It carries registration number 13-0191 and belongs to the 48th round of registrations. The criterion applied was the first of the three available: that the building is a model of its form and construction.

The reason given by the Agency for Cultural Affairs is unusually specific. This house was published in a contemporary compilation of illustrated house plans, one of the pattern books that circulated among builders and clients in late Meiji Japan. It was, in other words, considered a worked example of the Japanese-style residence at the moment it was built. Most surviving Meiji houses are valuable because they are rare. This one is valuable partly because it was once thought typical enough to print.

What to Look For, and How to See It

Read the roofline first. The hipped form slopes on all four sides, which is a more expensive way to roof a house than the simple gable, and it signals a certain seriousness of intent even on a building this modest in footprint. Below it, the battened weatherboarding gives the exterior a fine horizontal grain that changes character completely depending on the angle of the light.

Then look for the join. The upper storey was added a decade or more after the house was finished, and the addition sits above the guest rooms rather than across the whole plan. The result is a silhouette that steps rather than stretches.

The house is not a museum, and this is the essential thing for a visitor to understand. In 2001 a group of local residents and people connected with the Tokyo University of the Arts formed a nonprofit, the Taito Historic City Study Group, and took the property on a fixed-term lease from the Ichida family. Younger members live in the house as a shared household and handle its day-to-day upkeep. The ground-floor guest rooms are used for tea gatherings, rice-cake pounding at New Year, storytelling, music, and exhibitions.

That arrangement continues a habit the house had already formed. After the war, Ichida Haruko, the eldest daughter of the family, took in lodgers, mostly students from the vocal music department of the art university across the road, and something like thirty of them passed through these rooms.

There are no regular opening hours. The interior is seen by attending an event, and the study group posts its programme on its own website. From the street, however, the front gate and its plastered wing wall are plainly visible, and Ueno Sakuragi rewards walking: this was temple land under the Tokugawa, subdivided from the middle of the Meiji period into a district where artists and writers chose to settle, and enough of that grain survives to be legible on foot.