Mukai Family Residence Main House

What Is the Mukai Family Residence Main House?

The Mukai Family Residence Main House (向井家住宅主屋, Mukai-ke Jūtaku Omoya) is the home of the Mukai family in Kada, Wakayama City, Wakayama Prefecture, a single-storey timber house raised in 1860 that became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 4 February 2021. It covers 162 square meters and was renovated in 2000.

The Mukai Family Residence Main House faces south toward the old Awashima Kaidō road, but it stands well back from the street, in the middle of the lot behind the front gate. The roof is a hip-and-gable Irimoya-zukuri covered in Hongawarabuki, the heavy round-and-flat tiling of temples and old houses, and even the lean-to Geya around the building is tiled the same way. The prefecture's description adds that a smoke vent sits on the main roof.

A Ridge Tablet with the Whole Story

The Mukai Family Residence Main House still has its Munafuda, the wooden tablet fixed in the roof at the ridge-raising ceremony. According to Wakayama Prefecture, it records that Mukai Kazaemon raised the ridge on the fourth day of the fifth month of 1860, that the timber came from land under the family's control, and that carpenters from Kada and the nearby villages of Motowaki and Miyama worked on the job.

The Mukai tablet names not only the year and the patron but where the wood came from and who cut it, a snapshot of a leading Kada family building with its own timber and local hands in the last decade of the Edo period.

Four Rooms and an Open Ceiling Frame

The Mukai Family Residence Main House follows a regular Yomadori plan, four rooms in a grid. Two ten-mat rooms line the front, and the western one serves as the zashiki, the formal room, with a Tokonoma alcove and a Buddhist altar. The two front rooms are screened toward the street by projecting lattices, Degōshi, and the open lean-to in front of them forms a deep sheltered strip under the eaves.

Every room is floored with tatami, yet the ceilings are ōbiki-tenjō: instead of a planed board ceiling, the heavy beams and boards of the loft floor above are left exposed. There are no Nageshi rails even in the formal room. Instead, thick sashimono tie-beams, mortised into the posts, and big timbers lock the frame together, a sturdy structure that the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out as the building's defining trait.

With its lattice front, deep eaves and a hipped roof topped by a smoke vent, the house keeps, in the prefecture's words, the traditional form of a local dwelling. It was registered under number 30-0291 for its contribution to the historic landscape.

Visiting

The Mukai Family Residence Main House is a private home and its interior is not open to visitors. Because it stands so far back from the old Awashima Kaidō, it is hard to see the whole building from outside the front gate.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs database carries a full front view that shows the lattices and the open lean-to clearly. On site, please stay off the private grounds and look from the street.