MEET IT IN 30 SECONDS
町家
Machiya are traditional urban houses, many combining a shop or workplace with domestic rooms. Kyoto’s long timber houses are one regional tradition within a wider range of Japanese town houses.
A machiya often places business or work at the street edge, with domestic rooms extending inward. Its relationship to the street helps distinguish it from a farmhouse set farther inside a plot. Both 町家 and 町屋 are used in writing; the spelling alone does not establish two rigid architectural categories.
Kyoto City’s handbook illustrates a larger omoteyazukuri house with separate roofs over the street-front business block and the domestic block behind it. An earthen passage, the tōriniwa, runs inward. A middle door divides its front mise-niwa from the rear hashiri-niwa. The front section receives visitors and supports work; the rear contains the cooking hearth. The passage lets people and goods move inward without crossing every raised, tatami-floored room.
Above the hearth, the tall hibukuro handles cooking smoke, heat and sparks. Beside the earthen cooking area, a raised room called the daidoko serves as the family’s dining and living room. Its name should not be confused with the location of the hearth itself.
A tsuboniwa sits between rooms; an okuniwa lies farther back beside a reception room. These openings, together with high windows or skylights, admit light and air. Street-facing latticework mediates visibility as well as ventilation, and its design may relate to the business conducted inside.
A large ōdo opens for bulky goods. For everyday or night-time access, a smaller wicket door, the kugurido, allows passage without opening the whole frontage. Beneath the eaves, a folding platform called a battari shōgi can display goods or provide a seat; folding it away frees space along the frontage. Latticework mediates light and visibility: Kyoto City describes how occupants can see the street more easily than passers-by can see into the house.
In the handbook’s omoteyazukuri example, business occupies the front room. Farther in, a formal entrance receives important visitors before they enter a zashiki facing the rear garden. Family dining and everyday living therefore occupy different positions from formal reception. Fusuma partitions between rooms can also be removed for festive hospitality, joining rooms into a larger space. Daily separation and occasional opening are two uses of the same building.
Weaving houses in Kyoto’s Nishijin district need working space for looms. Larger merchant houses can separate the street shop and domestic rooms into front and rear blocks. Other towns have storehouse-style shop buildings, with surviving streetscapes in places such as Kawagoe and Sawara. Kyoto’s familiar long, narrow plan does not describe them all.
Kyoto City’s handbook traces early forms to small buildings facing the streets of Heian Kyoto, illustrated in late-Heian picture scrolls. By the Muromachi period, townspeople were building along street-facing plots, forming rows of commercial frontages. During reconstruction after the Ōnin–Bunmei wars, households on both sides of a street formed neighbourhoods called ryōgawachō. The street connected a community as well as individual businesses.
Upper storeys did not simply grow taller over time. In a study of written records and paintings, 丸山俊明 traces two-storey Kyoto town houses to the later medieval period. In the early seventeenth century, the Tokugawa authorities restricted overlooking from upper floors and urban pleasure businesses while seeking orderly frontages. His analysis connects these conditions to renewed use of low tsushi-nikai forms: closed upper frontages and continuous eaves made the second storey less conspicuous.
In the Edo period, developments in carpentry tools and skills enabled fine latticework and larger interior spaces. Components and arrangements continued to develop. Early depictions show building forms; they do not date every surviving timber. The Sugimoto residence’s present main building was rebuilt in 1870, so the history of its business and the date of its fabric need to be read separately.
The street-facing upper storey of an older tsushi-nikai house is low, often with plastered mushiko windows. Kyoto City’s handbook describes the spread of full-height upper storeys in the late Meiji period, with alternatives such as timber-framed glass windows. From the late Taishō period, some frontages acquired stone or tile below projecting latticework and metal bars above; others were remodelled with Western-style fronts. New materials and uses entered existing houses through different changes, rather than a single simultaneous conversion.
Kyoto adopted its machiya preservation and succession ordinance in 2017. Article 2 covers wooden buildings already present or under construction when the Building Standards Act took effect, with traditional structure and forms or designs arising from urban life. The local shorthand of a pre-1950 building belongs to this scheme; it is not a national definition of every machiya.
Nakamuraya Shōten in Sawara has an 1855 shop building fitted to an irregular corner plot, with a shop and kitchen below and reception rooms upstairs. Kawagoe’s Kurazukuri Museum occupies the former tobacco wholesaler Koyama Bunzō’s shop, built after the 1893 fire. These buildings show how plots and fire-resistant construction could change the relationship between trade, storage and domestic space.
Nishijin weaving houses arrange work differently from a street-front shop house: living rooms are at the front and the weaving workshop is behind them. The rear commonly has an earthen floor and a tall open space for handlooms or power looms, with skylights admitting light. The handbook’s Ikoma residence retains large power looms whose pattern control has changed from punched cards to computers. The workshop’s height, floor and lighting serve the equipment used there.
Kawagoe’s storehouse-style shops apply fire-resistant construction to commercial frontages. The museum explains that their heavy paired window shutters meet stepped frames, improving the seal when closed. A platform below the windows, above the lower roof, provides access for packing earth or similar material into the joints during a fire. Protection thus involves the earthen envelope and its components together with the act of closing and sealing openings.
The Tanimura couple in Kyoto City’s handbook moved into a Nishijin weaving house after marrying; the wife makes tapestry textiles there. They employed a carpenter and undertook some work themselves, removing plywood and other coverings from earthen walls and posts. They retained traditional elements while adding measures to improve earthquake resistance, and fitted a new Japanese-style room into part of the former earthen space.
Living there still brought difficulties, including winter cold. Preservation in this case meant adapting rooms and structure while continuing to use older fabric.
Along the earthen tōriniwa, through its front mise-niwa and rear hashiri-niwa.
The daidoko is a raised dining and living room; the hearth is in the adjoining earthen area.
The large door admits bulky goods, the wicket provides smaller everyday access, and the platform unfolds for goods or seating and folds away to free space.
Removing fusuma joins adjacent rooms into a larger space.
The rear workshop accommodates handlooms or power looms, with height and skylights serving the equipment and work.
A platform gives access to pack earth or similar material into the shutter joints.
Full-height upper storeys and glass windows spread; some later frontages gained tile, stone, metal latticework or Western-style remodelling.
They exposed and retained older walls and posts while adapting structure and rooms; winter cold remained a difficulty.
