Tanaka Family Residence Gate and Wall

The Public Face of the House

The Tanaka Family Residence Gate and Wall (田中家住宅門及び塀, Tanaka-ke Jūtaku Mon oyobi Hei) is a gate and boundary wall of around 1934 in Jinba, Yamagata City, Yamagata Prefecture, listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2008.

The gate is an udekimon, 4.3 metres wide, standing directly in front of the main house. From the sodobei wing walls on either side, the wall runs east and west along the street and continues inside the property as a garden wall, 68 metres in all. This is the part of the Tanaka Family Residence that faces the road, the face the house shows the world.

It is also the newest of the five registered structures. The house and its storehouses were in place by the early Meiji era; the street frontage was given its present form in the early Showa years.

Why It Was Registered

The Tanaka Family Residence Gate and Wall received registration number 06-0110 in the 61st round of national registrations, dated 2008/10/23, for contributing to the historic landscape.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs says the gate and wall help make up a traditional streetscape along an old highway. Sixty-eight metres of white plaster above vertical boarding is what anyone walking down the road sees longest, and it also signals the standing of the household behind it. The value of the main house and storehouses lies inside the grounds; the value of the gate and wall lies in the street scene they create.

What to Look For

A bracket-arm gate with a gently swelling roof

In an udekimon, short arms projecting from the posts carry the overhang of the roof. Here the gate is wooden, with a gabled roof clad in copper. Its slopes have mukuri, a soft upward bulge that reads gentler than the upswept curves seen on many temple roofs.

Roofed wing walls

The wing walls on each side of the gate carry small roofs of their own. Stepping down from the gate roof, they make an opening 4.3 metres wide read as a broader, more imposing entrance.

Sixty-eight metres of wall

The wall is wooden, roofed partly in iron sheet and partly in copper. Its upper section is finished in shikkui lime plaster and the lower section is faced with vertical boards, a pairing that runs the length of the frontage. Inside the grounds the same wall turns into a garden enclosure, so the formal street face and the private garden screen are one continuous structure.

Visiting

The gate and wall belong to a private home and the grounds are closed; as of October 2026 we found no announcement of public openings. Because they face the street, they can presumably be seen from the public road, but please do not linger at the gate or look into the property.

The curve of the gate roof and the stepped roofs of the wing walls also show up well in the photographs in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database.