Meiji

Inamiya Butsudan-ten, a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property built in 1905 on Takaoka's historic Yamacho-suji, stands out with its distinctive Western-style facade featuring large arched windows adorned with cast-iron arabesque patterns. This Meiji-era Buddhist altar shop showcases a unique blend of Japanese and Western architecture, with an impressive interior atrium and gallery walkways.

The Ozawa Family Residence Storehouse in Aramachi, Namerikawa City, Toyama Prefecture, is a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property built in the late Meiji period as a shop-storehouse for a kimono fabric merchant. Featuring black lacquer plaster walls, hinged doors, sword-shaped snow-splitting roof tiles, and a graceful curved mukuri roof, this imposing kura showcases the distinctive architectural traditions of the Hokuriku region.

A carved late-Meiji gate at Kanseiji in Takaoka, Toyama, three bays wide with one central opening and a coffered ceiling. Tradition ties it to Zuiryuji.

Built in 1906 at Kanseiji in Takaoka, Toyama, this small two-storey annex lodged the teachers of an early seminary for Soto Zen nuns. Two eight-mat rooms per floor.

An early Meiji merchant house on the old Hokuriku Highway in Namerikawa, Toyama, rebuilt after the fire of 1866. Registered in 2000, it keeps its shop counter.

The niwa, or work yard, is the earthen-floored space where the Uchiyama household's farm labour was done, keeping the farming character behind the formal rooms.

The well canopy is the small roofed structure over the estate's well, on the working north side, sheltering the water source that daily life and farm work relied on.

This estate building combines a rickshaw shelter, a driver's hut and a charcoal store in one. The rickshaw points to Meiji, when Uchiyama prosperity peaked.

The rear gate is the household's everyday entrance, opening behind the formal rooms. Where guests used the front gate, family and tradespeople passed through here.

Yauchou is a tea room the twelfth Uchiyama head made from his own study, naming it for rain heard at night. Plain and shoin-like, it adjoins the storehouse.

The storehouse east of the main house is the largest on the Uchiyama estate. One structure outside, it divides within into upper, middle, lower and miso stores.

The chicken coop is the humblest of the estate's registered buildings, kept for eggs and meat and a sign of how fully this farming household provisioned itself.

The east gate opens toward the garden's plum grove and the snow-capped Tateyama range, at the threshold of an early-spring scene of some sixty plum trees.

The inner wall gate is set into a boundary wall within the grounds, dividing the formal, garden and working zones and ordering how people moved through the residence.

Discover Johana-an, a beautifully preserved Meiji-period townhouse in Nanto City, Toyama. This Registered Tangible Cultural Property showcases traditional Johana machiya architecture along the historic temple town of Zentokuji.

A 19-square-metre plastered storehouse of the middle Meiji period in Johana, Nanto City, Toyama. Registered in 2015, it carries torii-shaped frames on its openings.

Built in 1900 and shifted on its frame around 1951, the West Building of Shofuro in Nanto, Toyama carries a plaster cornice marking local teahouse architecture.

Largest of four registered buildings at Shofuro in Nanto, Toyama. Built in 1900, its fourteen guest rooms were each detailed differently, two by Kanazawa carpenters.

A three-storey timber townhouse on the old Hokuriku highway in Namerikawa, Toyama, rebuilt after the 1866 fire that destroyed Sewamachi. Registered in 2017.

Dairakuji Priests' Quarters at Imizu in Toyama was raised in the month after the 1869 port fire, pairing a sukiya reception hall with beamed farmhouse rooms.