Yamamoto Family Residence Main Building

Yamamoto Family Residence: Main House (Shuoku)

The reception wing of this merchant house carries a third storey, an unusual height for a shop-and-residence on a country road. Open the timber rain shutters of the top room and the view runs out across the tiled roofs of the compound toward the hills of the old Nokami valley. There is no glass up there, only wooden shutters, so a rainy day is a nuisance and a clear one is a reward. The family kept the room for receiving guests.

This is the main house, or shuoku, of Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shōten, a merchant firm in the Sakai district of Kainan, Wakayama Prefecture. The business was founded in 1880 by Yamamoto Katsunosuke (1862–1939), who took over a declining family trade in wax and candles, redirected it toward medicinal plants such as sanshō pepper and cassia bark, and then built his fortune on shuro, the fibre of the windmill palm. Twisted into water-resistant rope and bound into brushes and brooms, it sold across the country. The firm still trades on the same spot under its old house name, Kaneichi.

A house built in two phases

The main house grew in two stages, and its roofline records both. The living quarters to the west belong to the closing decades of the Edo period, roughly 1830 to 1867. They take the form of a tsushi-nikai, a low working two-storey type whose upper floor is a shallow loft rather than a full room, set under a gabled roof with the entrance on the long side. This part is covered in hongawara, the formal roofing that alternates flat pan tiles with rounded cover tiles.

In 1906 the family added the reception block to the east, raising it to three storeys under a hipped roof and finishing it in lighter sangawara pantiles. A railed veranda runs along the top floor. Placing a tall hipped reception wing beside the older low gabled house is what gives the roof its stepped, shifting profile, and it is much of what catches the eye from the road.

The walls are black lime plaster of the shinkabe kind, in which the structural posts are left exposed rather than buried, so a grid of dark timber frames the darker plaster panels. The effect is sober and a little severe, closer to a townhouse than to a farmhouse.

Why it is registered, and what makes it valuable

The main house is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, listed by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs on 2 October 2007 (registration number 30-0123). The registration system, introduced in 1996, is a lighter measure than designation as an Important Cultural Property: it works through notification and guidance rather than strict permit controls, and was created to protect the large stock of modern-era buildings that might otherwise vanish unrecorded. The criterion met here is that the building contributes to the historic landscape of the country.

Its value lies less in any single feature than in survival as a set. The Yamamoto compound keeps its main house, shop, storehouses, gate and stone wall together along the road that was the spine of the Nokami valley's palm-fibre trade, and the firm that built them is still working inside. The three-storey reception wing and the black-plaster walls are uncommon enough on their own; kept in their original setting and still in use, they record how a successful Meiji merchant chose to present himself.

What to look for

From the road the building reads as a play of roofs, the low gabled living part stepping up to the hipped three-storey block, all in black plaster. The entrance earth-floored hall holds six lantern boxes marked with the Kaneichi crest, ranged along the beam above the doorway; they held the lanterns and candles to be snatched up in case of fire. The same crest turns up again on storehouse walls and on round roof tiles elsewhere in the compound.

Inside, a tall chest of many small drawers, a hyakumi-dansu, once held the shop's stock of medicinal materials. The founder's taste shows in the detailing of the reception rooms, where the sliding-door paintings and transoms run to playful, even witty patterns rather than standard motifs. Katsunosuke was a devoted amateur of jōruri puppet-theatre chanting, and something of that theatricality carries into the house.

One practical note. This is an active business, not a museum. The shop welcomes customers, and the streetscape of walls, gate and roofs can be enjoyed freely from the public road, but the residential interiors are not on regular public view, so it is best not to count on going inside.