Kanazawa Family Residence Gate and Fence

The Part of the House the Street Is Allowed to See

Kanazawa House Gate and Fence (金澤家住宅門及び塀, also written Kanazawa-ke Jūtaku Mon oyobi Hei) is a timber gate with a tiled roof and an attached board fence 10.7 metres long, standing at 2-2-7 Nishikata in Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, built in 1930 and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 11 December 1998. The Agency for Cultural Affairs classifies it not as a building but as a structure of another kind, and counts it under registration number 13-0047.

Gates rarely get written about. They are read in a second and forgotten, and most surveys of Japanese houses treat them as an afterthought to the rooms behind. This one repays the attention it seldom gets, partly because of what it is and partly because of where it stands.

Bunkyo Ward, explaining the registration system on its own website, points out that what the register covers in cases like this is the exterior as seen from the road. For the Kanazawa property that is close to literal. The main house and the small atelier stand behind; the gate and fence are the surface the neighbourhood actually encounters, day after day, for almost a century.

Reading the Carpentry

The gate is a munemon, a type in which two main posts carry a ridged roof directly, without the supplementary struts that heavier gate forms require. It is the restrained option. A doctor or a merchant of the same period might have chosen a yakuimon or a nagayamon, both of which announce more. A munemon says that the household has a position and does not need to argue about it.

Across the top of the posts runs the kabuki, the horizontal tie beam. Above it sits a transom filled with kumiko, the fine lattice joinery in which slender strips of wood are notched and interlocked without nails. The Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out the delicacy of this work. Kumiko of that quality takes a joiner days rather than hours, and it is placed here at the one point where every visitor's eye passes.

The gate doors carry a diamond-pattern lattice in their upper section, a second and coarser rhythm set below the transom's fine one. Two grids, two scales, one above the other.

The fence deserves its own look. Set on ground sills to left and right, it is built of vertical boarding and capped with horizontal rails arranged in the manner of a balustrade, a middle rail and a top rail running the length of the run. That capping is what lifts it above ordinary boundary fencing. The Agency's assessment credits gate and fence together with sound proportion and a composition of real dignity, which is unusually warm language for a database entry about a garden wall.

Standing in Front of It

Nishikata was laid out as a residential quarter by the Abe family, former lords of the Fukuyama domain, on the land of their Edo-period mid-residence. Professors and writers moved in because the Imperial University was close, and by the end of the Meiji period people were calling the neighbourhood the scholars' town. The district is said to have escaped serious damage in both the 1923 earthquake and the 1945 air raids, which is why walls and gates of this vintage still line its lanes.

Walk the street slowly and the fence gives you 10.7 metres of continuous vertical boarding before the gate breaks it. Behind the fence, close against it, runs the single-storey atelier of 1930 with its glazed north-west face. The three registered structures were designed as one composition and registered as three separate items on the same December day.

This is a private residence. There is no admission, no interior access and no opening time, and the gate is in daily use by the people who live here. Photographing from the public lane is not restricted, but the courteous approach is to stay on the road, keep the lens off the interior of the plot, and move on rather than linger.

Todaimae Station on the Tokyo Metro Namboku Line is about a seven-minute walk, Hakusan Station on the Toei Mita Line about twelve. Two blocks north-west at 2-9-12 Nishikata, the Hirano House group registered in September 1998 includes two gates of its own, by the architect Katsuya Yasuoka, from around 1922. Comparing the two properties' entrances takes ten minutes and teaches more about interwar Tokyo domestic taste than most guidebook chapters.