Yamamoto Residence Gate

Yamamoto Family Residence: Gate (Mon)

The gate is small, its opening only about 1.2 metres wide, but it does a particular job. Set at the east end of the main house front and facing west, it leads from the everyday frontage of the living quarters into the garden of the formal reception wing. It marks the line between the working part of the house and the part kept for guests.

It 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, the same years in which the three-storey reception wing was added to the main house. Modest as it is, the gate was built to complete the formal face of the estate.

How the gate is made

This is an udemon, a bracket-arm gate, in which the roof is carried not on a full beam frame but on udemo, arms projecting from the two posts. The opening is four shaku, about 1.2 metres, closed by a pair of doors each cut from a single board. The gabled roof is tiled in maru-sangawara, the round-ribbed pantile characteristic of Wakayama, and the eaves are carried on widely spaced rafters that keep the whole thing light on its feet.

Flanking wing walls, or sode-bei, run out to either side. They are finished in the same black lime plaster as the main house, with a band of vertical boarding along the base and the same round-ribbed pantile on top. The south wing wall is where the property's blue-stone wall takes over and continues along the road, so the gate is also the hinge between two stretches of boundary.

Why it is registered, and what makes it valuable

The gate was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 2 October 2007 (registration number 30-0128). The registration system, brought in during 1996, gives modern buildings a lighter protection than the strict permit controls of an Important Cultural Property, working instead through notification and guidance, so that the broad stock of recent structures is not lost without record. The gate qualifies for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

Its value is as a piece of the whole. A merchant compound was read partly through its gates and walls, the formal boundary that announced the household to the street, and this small bracket-arm gate, with its black-plastered wing walls and Wakayama tiles, is part of that announcement. Listed together with the main house, storehouses and stone wall, it helps keep the estate front complete rather than piecemeal.

What to look for

Look at the round-ribbed pantile, a regional touch you will see echoed across the older roofs here, and at the light eaves on their spaced rafters. Notice the single-board doors, and follow the black-plastered wing walls out to where the south one meets the blue-stone wall along the road. The gate, the wing walls and the stone wall are best read as one continuous boundary rather than separate objects.

The gate stands on a working business property, not a museum. It can be appreciated from the public road, which is where its street-facing detail is meant to be seen, so there is no need to seek access beyond it.