Sugata Family Residence Main House

A Three-Storey Merchant House on the Old Hokuriku Highway

The Sugata Family Residence Main House (菅田家住宅主屋, Sugata-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, the second element also read omoya) is a timber merchant townhouse of three storeys at Sewamachi 1855 in Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, built in the early Meiji period and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 June 2017.

The house presents its gable end to the sky and its long side to the road, facing north across what used to be the Hokuriku Kaidō. That highway ran along the Sea of Japan coast and carried the processions of daimyo travelling to and from Edo under the alternate attendance system. Namerikawa sat on it as a post town, and the Sewamachi district was where the money was: shippers, brewers, cloth merchants, pawnbrokers, all packed along a few hundred metres of frontage.

The Sugata plot runs south from the road in a long thin strip. Frontage on a highway was expensive and depth was cheap, so merchant families built narrow and deep, putting the shop and living quarters at the street and pushing storage to the rear. Here the main house takes the frontage. Behind it, across a small interior courtyard, stands the family's costume storehouse of 1855, registered on the same day as a separate property.

Four generations of Sugata heads used the name Yoemon. According to accounts collected by Namerikawa City, the first dealt in salt, the second in timber, the third in cotton, and the fourth opened up farmland, expanded into kimono fabrics and bolt cloth, and added medicine peddling and pawnbroking to the household's business. Toyama's itinerant medicine trade was one of the great commercial networks of the Edo period, and a good many merchant houses along this coast were paid for by it.

Rebuilt After the Fire That Took the Whole Street

In 1866, the second year of the Keiō era, fire broke out in a carpenters' shed at Yōshōji, the temple standing immediately south of the Sugata plot. The temple was then under reconstruction after an earlier fire of 1838, which gives the episode a certain bleak symmetry. The blaze spread and took Sewamachi with it. Local usage still calls the disaster the Yōshōji-yake, the Yōshōji burning.

What stands on the street today is the replacement. The family's own tax schedule enters the building under Meiji 4, placing its construction within a handful of years of the fire, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date more loosely as early Meiji, between 1868 and 1882. The exact year has not been recovered.

Neighbours repeat the pattern. The Kido house at Sewamachi 1862, a soy-sauce and hardware merchant trading under the shop name Jindenya, also burned in 1866 and also went back up in the first years of Meiji; it too is now registered. Reading the street as a sequence of buildings of roughly the same age is reading the shape of a single afternoon in 1866.

Registration is the lighter of the two national instruments for protecting buildings in Japan. Introduced in 1996, the register was designed for the enormous stock of ordinary older architecture that would never be designated an Important Cultural Property but would be missed if it went. Owners keep broad freedom to repair, adapt and continue living in the building, and receive limited support in exchange for notifying the state before major alteration. The main house was listed under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, which is the register's way of saying that the value here lies in the street rather than in any single beam.

What to Look at From the Pavement

Count the storeys and the building starts an argument. The Agency for Cultural Affairs register and the Toyama prefectural heritage database both record three timber storeys, with a total floor area of 192 square metres under a gabled roof of pantiles. A photograph caption on Namerikawa City's own cultural-property page describes it as two. The discrepancy is worth knowing about before anyone stands on the road and starts counting windows.

Three features of the front carry forms older than the building's Meiji date would lead you to expect. The entrance retains its ōdo, the broad sliding leaf that shut a merchant house at night and could be opened wide for goods by day. Alongside it are shitomido, shutters hung to lift and drop rather than slide sideways, a medieval arrangement that had largely disappeared from urban housing by the nineteenth century. Over the ground floor runs a pent roof the local carpenters call koyane, clad in thick boards instead of tile.

The interior is closed, being a private home, but the survey record describes a plan that Toyama Prefecture calls the standard Namerikawa arrangement. An earth-floored passage, the tōriniwa, runs the full depth of the house along the right-hand side. The principal room, called the oi in this district, is framed in the wakunouchi manner, with heavy posts and beams left exposed to form a visible squared frame around the space. A kitchen projects at the back, towards the west. Upstairs, storage occupies the street side and the family rooms sit behind it, away from the noise and dust of the highway.

Practical matters. The exterior can be looked at from the public road at any hour and photographed freely; the interior is not open, and people live here, so cameras stay pointed at the elevation. Naka-Namerikawa Station on the Toyama Chihō Railway main line is about eight minutes on foot, and Namerikawa Station, where the Ainokaze Toyama Railway and the same private line meet, is roughly twenty. Namerikawa City has installed interpretive boards at its registered buildings, the Sugata pair included, so the basic facts are available on site.

Twenty-odd metres across the road stands the former Miyazaki Sake Brewery, registered in 2010, which now holds a shared café and hosts the Namerikawa Lantern Festival on two nights each August. A short walk west brings you to Yūrin-an, the former Doi house of 1867, which operates as a base for local history and townscape work. Half an hour covers the three of them comfortably, and the walk is the point: no one of these buildings is remarkable in isolation, and together they are the last legible stretch of a highway town.