Rear Gate of Ichida Family Residence

Ichida Family Residence Back Gate: The Tradesman's Entrance That Was Given a Lamp

Every house has a side people are not supposed to look at. The Ichida property, built in Ueno Sakuragi in 1907 by a Nihonbashi cloth wholesaler, has one too: the north edge of the plot, where the kitchen is, where deliveries arrived and rubbish left. The gate serving it is 1.5 metres wide, roofed in sheet iron rather than tile, and stands toward the eastern end of that northern boundary, opposite the kitchen's service door at the north-east corner of the main house.

It should be plain. It is not.

The gate is an udegi-mon, a bracket gate, with a gabled roof carried on arms projecting from the posts. Its doors are sliding boards, running past each other in a pair rather than swinging open, which is the practical choice for an opening that gets used with hands full. And from the centre of the space between the lintel and the ridge beam, a light fixture hangs.

Two Details Worth the Walk Around

The first is that lamp, or rather the fact that someone planned for it. A hanging light in a service gate is a decision about the hours the gate would be used and about the people using it: staff coming in before dawn, tradesmen arriving after dark, a household going out through the kitchen door at night. Someone thought about what the back of the house looked like when the sun was down.

The second is on the brackets. The arms carrying the roof have been given kurikata, a shaped moulding, a profile cut into what could perfectly well have been a straight length of timber. The Agency for Cultural Affairs remarks on the attentiveness of the work, and the moulding is the proof of it. This is the tradesman's gate. It received a cut profile anyway.

Compare it with the front gate on the south side of the same plot, registered on the same day. That one is two metres wide, roofed in sangawara pantiles, and accompanied by a wing wall finished in black lacquer plaster above and vertical boarding below. The back gate has none of that. It is narrower, its roof is metal, and it stands alone. What it shares with the front gate is the type, the chamfered attention to the timber, and the assumption that a boundary is a thing you compose rather than a thing you close.

The Agency's description ends by saying that this gate puts the rear elevation of the property in order. That is the whole argument in one clause.

Registration, and Seeing It Today

The back gate was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property on 26 December 2005, announced the next day, as number 13-0194 in the 48th round. It is classed among other constructed works rather than buildings, and the criterion applied was contribution to the historic landscape, the same one used for the front gate. The main house and the storehouse were registered under a different criterion, as models of their form and construction.

Registration is the lighter of Japan's two systems for historic buildings, brought in by the 1996 revision of the cultural properties law. It works through notification rather than permission, and it exists for structures that are privately held and still in use. All four Ichida structures qualify on both counts. The family retains ownership, and since 2001 the property has been leased to the Taito Historic City Study Group, a nonprofit set up by local residents together with people connected to the Tokyo University of the Arts. Members live in the main house as a shared household and look after the buildings.

The gate stands on the lane along the north side of the plot. It can be seen from outside; the interior of the property cannot, except at the nonprofit's scheduled events. Anyone walking the back streets between the university's main gate and Yanaka will pass close to it. The point of the detour is that most people never think to look at the back of a house at all, which is exactly the assumption this gate was built to defeat.