Kido Family Residence Main Building

Rebuilt After the Fire of 1866

The Kido Family Residence Main House (城戸家住宅主屋, Kido-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber merchant house at Sewamachi in Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, put up in the early Meiji period and entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 December 2000, with gazettal following on 20 December. It has a registered floor area of 191 square metres under a tiled gable roof, and the eaves face the street in the hirairi arrangement.

The reason it dates from the early Meiji period rather than earlier is a fire. Namerikawa burned in 1866, the second year of the Keio era, and the Kido property burned with it. What stands on the site today is the replacement, raised within a few years of the disaster on a street that was rebuilding itself all at once.

The family had arrived at Sewamachi in the first half of the nineteenth century. They brewed and sold miso, vinegar and soy sauce, dealt in hardware, and ran a pot-lending business, trading under the shop name Jindenya, taken from the place they had come from. The Agency for Cultural Affairs files the building under a category that surprises people who expect a house to be filed as a house: tertiary industry. That classification records what the building was for.

The Criterion Was Craftsmanship

Registered Tangible Cultural Properties are filed under one of three criteria, and which one applies tells you what the assessors saw. Many town houses are registered for contributing to the historic landscape. This one is not. It was registered under the second criterion, as a model of design and construction, and the reason lies in the materials.

Both the Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary and Namerikawa City's own documentation stress the same thing: good timber throughout, with meiboku, choice decorative woods selected for grain and figure, used where they would be seen. A merchant rebuilding after a fire could have economised. This household did the opposite.

The most substantial survival is inside. Across the front of the ground floor runs a boarded mise, the shop room, with a built-in chōba, the low railed counter where the master sat with the account books and dealt with customers. Fixed chōba of this kind were once standard on merchant streets across Japan and are now uncommon, because they are the first thing removed when a shop front is modernised or converted to living space. This one stayed.

One more feature deserves mention. Above the hiroma, the large open room, the roof carries a small raised turret built to bring daylight down into the interior. In a deep, narrow town-house plan closed off from the street, that opening is not decoration but the solution to a practical problem.

Walking the Old Hokuriku Highway

The house faces the old Hokuriku Highway, the route that carried traffic along the Sea of Japan coast before the railways. Sewamachi was the commercial heart of Namerikawa, and the building stands among neighbours of similar age. Directly next door at 1860 Sewamachi is the former Miyazaki Sake Brewery, four registered structures of its own, once the property of a pharmaceutical fortune and a designated alternate honjin, the official lodging for travelling officials. Yurin-an, the former Dohi residence, sits diagonally opposite.

Namerikawa now counts nineteen nationally registered properties, ten of them added in a single round in June 2017. A visitor with an afternoon can string a good number of them together on foot, and the city publishes a walking route through the district.

Be clear about one thing before you come. This is a private house, still in private hands, and the interior is not open to the public. Everything described above about the chōba and the turret is known from the registration record and from the city's documentation, not from a visitor route. What you can do is look at the facade from the street, which is where a merchant house was always meant to be judged from anyway: the proportion of the two storeys, the run of the eaves, the way the tiled roof meets its neighbours.

Photograph the exterior from the public road and keep clear of the entrance. The residents live there.

Namerikawa Station on the Ainokaze Toyama Railway is the arrival point, roughly ten minutes on foot from the district. Trains from Toyama Station take about fifteen minutes. If you time a visit to the firefly squid season in spring, the illuminated squid boats and the Hotaruika Museum are on the coast a short distance away, and the historic street makes a natural second half to the day. Note that other properties elsewhere in Japan share the Kido family name; the registered building described here is the one at Sewamachi in Namerikawa.