Yamamoto Family Residence

About the Yamamoto Family Residence

The Yamamoto Family Residence (山本家住宅, Yamamoto-ke Jūtaku) is the estate of a hemp-palm and medicinal-herb merchant in Sakai, Kainan City, Wakayama Prefecture, where seven buildings put up between the late Edo period and 1937 were listed as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on October 2, 2007. The house still serves as the head office of the family firm, Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten.

The firm has traded under the house mark Kaneichi in the Nokami Valley since 1880. As the Wakayama Association of Architects and Building Engineers tells it, Yamamoto Katsunosuke inherited a failing vegetable-wax business, turned it around by dealing in medicinal ingredients such as sanshō pepper and cassia, and then built it up on shuro, the hemp palm grown widely around Nokami. The shop still sells hemp-palm brooms and scrubbing brushes alongside Kishū sanshō.

The kane in Kaneichi is a carpenter's square, standing for straight dealing; ichi, the numeral one, puts honesty first. Katsunosuke's business motto, roughly "prepare in advance, or the rain will catch you," is still quoted by the firm.

How the Estate Is Laid Out

The Yamamoto Family Residence stands on the old road east of central Kainan, where National Route 370 narrows on its way toward Kimino. The Wakayama Prefectural Board of Education describes the main house, office and shop storehouses along the road, the inner storehouses behind them, and, a little farther off, the retirement house and the Akagura. The architects' association adds two more shop storehouses on the south side of the road and notes that the old Nokami Railway line north of the retirement house is now a walking path.

Start on the road. The east half of the south frontage is closed by a wall of greenish local stone running for more than 18 meters, meeting the flanking wall of the gate at its west end. Behind it lies the garden of the main house's reception wing, whose third-floor roof rises above the street. The main house stands a little back from the road, and from the front you can see the step between its low gabled living quarters and the tall hipped reception wing.

Two inner storehouses stand north of the main house, set at right angles to each other; the first is described as the anchor of the view from the west. The retirement house and the Akagura sit on a separate plot across a lane north of the second storehouse, joined to each other by a corridor.

Seven Registrations

The seven buildings registered on October 2, 2007 are the main house (no. 30-0123), inner storehouse 1 (30-0124), inner storehouse 2 (30-0125), the retirement house (30-0126), the Akagura (30-0127), the gate (30-0128) and the stone wall (30-0129). The registration was gazetted on October 22.

Their dates span a long stretch. The living quarters of the main house are late Edo, and the reception wing was added in 1906. The gate and stone wall date from around the same 1906 expansion, inner storehouse 1 from 1923, inner storehouse 2 from the middle Taishō years, and the retirement house and Akagura from 1937. The order in which one merchant family added buildings, generation by generation, is still laid out on the ground.

Wakayama Prefecture values the group for preserving the whole setting of a leading merchant house in a local industry. Individual buildings have their moments, such as the three-storey reception wing and roof-end tiles shaped like hemp-palm leaves, but the core of its value is that a working business still occupies a lot where buildings spanning the Edo and Shōwa periods keep their original arrangement.

Visiting

The Yamamoto Family Residence is privately owned and still a working home and business. The interiors are not open, and visitors cannot enter the grounds. Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shoten directs individual shoppers to its other store or its online shop, so the head office is neither a showroom nor a museum.

Visiting means looking from public roads. The stone wall, the gate and the roofline of the main house can be seen from the old road. How much of the inner storehouses, retirement house and Akagura is visible from public land has not been confirmed. Please do not linger for long or photograph into the property.

Getting There

By public transport, board the Orange Bus bound for Tozanguchi at JR Kainan Station and get off after about 10 minutes at Kameike Koen; the Yamamoto residence faces the stop.

By car, leave the Hanwa Expressway at Kainan-higashi and drive east on Route 370 for about 5 minutes. The firm places the house on the left, 50 meters before the Sakai post office.