Yamamoto Family Residential Stone Wall

Yamamoto Family Residence: Stone Wall (Ishibei)

Of everything in this merchant compound, the stone wall is the part a passer-by remembers. It runs for a little over 18 metres along the national highway, stands about 1.8 metres high, and is built of Wakayama blue stone, a greenish chlorite schist, in head-sized blocks fitted together as random rubble. The colour shifts with the light and the weather, and it is this low blue-grey wall, more than any roof, that gives the street its particular look.

The wall belongs to the residence of Yamamoto Katsunosuke Shōten, the palm-fibre and medicinal-herb merchants of Sakai in Kainan, Wakayama Prefecture, and dates from about 1906. It was raised along the east half of the property's south side, where it separates the garden of the main house reception wing from the road, beginning at the south end of the gate's wing wall and continuing east.

The stone and the build

The material is aoishi, the blue stone of Kishū, a chlorite schist long prized in Wakayama for walls and gardens for its cool blue-green tone. Here the stones are roughly head-sized and laid as ranseki-zumi, random rubble, fitted by eye rather than cut to courses, so that no two stretches of the wall repeat. The base measures about 40 centimetres across, and the top is finished as a kasagi, a shaped coping that caps the wall and throws off rain.

A wall like this is plain engineering and quiet display at once. It had to hold a garden boundary against a public road, and it had to look like the edge of a prosperous house. The blue stone did both, and because it is local material worked in a local way, the wall ties the Yamamoto compound to the place it stands.

Why it is registered, and what makes it valuable

The stone wall was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 October 2007 (registration number 30-0129). The registration system, introduced in 1996, protects modern structures through notification and guidance rather than the strict permit controls attached to Important Cultural Properties, and is intended to keep a wide range of recent work from disappearing unrecorded. The wall qualifies for contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and it does so as plainly as anything in the compound.

Its value is its effect on the street. A boundary wall is rarely thought of as architecture, yet this one sets the tone of the whole frontage and shows how a Meiji merchant used local stone to define his property with some style. Listed alongside the gate, main house and storehouses, it completes the boundary that the household presented to the road.

What to look for

This is the easiest of the registered elements to enjoy, because it is meant to be seen from the road and asks nothing more. Look at the blue-green cast of the stone and how it changes through the day, at the irregular fit of the random rubble where the builder matched stone to stone by eye, and at the shaped coping along the top. Follow the wall from the gate's south wing wall eastward, and read it together with the black-plastered gate and the white storehouses behind as one composed frontage.

The wall fronts a working business rather than a museum, but since it is a roadside boundary, the public road is exactly the right place to appreciate it.