Shiraishi Family Main Building

A Merchant House Built by Carpenters from Kyoto

The Main House of the Shiraishi Family Residence (白石家住宅主屋, Shiraishi-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Shiraishike Jutaku Shuoku) is a 1918 merchant dwelling in Miyaichi-cho, Hofu City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, added to Japan's Registry of Tangible Cultural Properties on 2 November 2018 under registration number 35-0099.

It sits at the centre of a walled compound behind a kimono shop that the Shiraishi family has run since 1765. The building covers 274 square metres of ground area, with a two-storey core under a tiled irimoya roof, the hipped-and-gabled form used for buildings of some standing, and a lower single-storey wing pushing out to the south.

A ridge tag recovered from the roof names the men responsible. The master carpenter was Mamiya Kichisaburo of Kyoto; his second was Hayashi Komajiro, also from Kyoto. The family did not hire locally. They brought in miyadaiku-trained hands from the old capital, and the shop's own account of the work says the great roof was raised first, with the rooms built underneath afterwards, a sequence used for temple and shrine construction rather than ordinary houses.

Miyaichi was a good place to be rich in 1918. The district grew up as the approach town to Hofu Tenmangu, a shrine founded in 904 and counted among the three principal Tenjin shrines of Japan, and in the Edo period it also served as a post station where the San'yodo highway met the Hagi Okan route inland. Merchants here dealt with pilgrims, daimyo retinues and shrine business alike.

Why the House Was Registered

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, covers buildings roughly fifty years old or older and applies one of three criteria. The Main House was accepted under the criterion that it constitutes a model of design quality. The two storehouses on the same site were registered on the same day under a different criterion, that of contributing to the historic landscape.

What the assessors singled out was control of register. The core rooms are handled in sukiya taste, the deliberately informal manner developed for tea architecture: woven ajiro ceilings, shelving arranged in the drifting, staggered pattern known as kasumi-dana, and a tea room where the joinery is allowed to show off. Then the south wing changes tone completely. Its 12.5-mat great room carries a full set of formal alcove fittings at generous scale, the vocabulary of shoin reception architecture.

Sliding between those two idioms inside one roof is difficult. Do it badly and the house reads as two houses. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assessment describes the result as a fine example of Japanese-style design in which the strength of the manner is varied with skill, and Yamaguchi Prefecture's cultural property database adds that the building has come to stand for the character of the Miyaichi streetscape.

Registration is a lighter category than Important Cultural Property status. Owners are asked to notify the authorities before altering more than a quarter of the exterior, and in return receive tax relief and technical advice. The house remains a private home and an operating business, not a museum, and that distinction shapes everything about how it can be seen.

What to Look For Inside

The west entrance sets the terms. Below waist height the doors are woven from straight-grained hinoki in an ajiro plait, with frosted glass above; the earthen floor beyond is a washed-out aggregate of black Nachi pebbles. In the six-mat room that follows, a log beam carries a boat-bottom ceiling that widens as it rises, a shape read in Japan as an omen of expanding fortune.

The tea room repays slow looking. A round window and a shitaji-mado, the opening made by leaving part of the bamboo lath wall unplastered, sit in walls finished around a wrinkled red pine alcove post. The ceiling combines woven ajiro with reed screen. According to the shop's published description of the house, the materials were gathered deliberately: reeds from Lake Biwa, cedar from Kitayama north of Kyoto, bamboo from Sagano, and a framed calligraphy by the painter Tomioka Tessai hung at the entrance.

In the great room the ceiling is suspended and set high, with vents cut under the roof to move air, and boarded in Jomon cedar and straight-grained hinoki. The fusuma panels are gold-leafed and the tatami are edged in a narrow braid, a detail that quietly raises the rank of the room. Above them a transom is cut from a single board of jindai-sugi, cedar buried and mineralised in the ground for centuries, framed in wiped lacquer.

Two more things worth catching. The outer corridor doors are glazed with German glass, an expensive import in 1918 and a reminder that this was a house built at the crest of a trading fortune. And the central staircase has hinoki treads laid as a nightingale floor, so the boards chirp underfoot. Upstairs, the eight-mat room to the southeast keeps the sukiya manner with a sloping kakekomi ceiling, while the southwest room switches to a coffered ceiling and full shoin fittings.

Getting inside takes planning. The house is closed to the public for most of the year and opens around twice annually, in spring and autumn, alongside the shop's exhibitions; dates go up on the shop's website and Facebook page. Yamaguchi Prefecture's tourism office also lists booked experiences at the property, including a guided tour of the registered buildings paired with a look at the family's surviving pattern books, and a furoshiki-wrapping session held during a special opening. Photography rules are set by the household on each occasion, so ask at the door rather than assuming.

The walk from JR Hofu Station takes about twelve to fifteen minutes from the Tenjin exit on the north side. Hofu Tenmangu is a few minutes further along the same street, and the gate of the Miyaichi honjin, the Kobe family's official inn for travelling lords, stands nearby.