Yamamachi

Yamamachi is a historic merchant district in Takaoka, Toyama, whose main street, Yamamachi-suji, is lined with traditional shophouses. The district keeps the layout of the castle town laid out at the start of the Edo period.

History

A great fire on 27 June 1900 burned about 60 percent of the city. Toyama Prefecture's building rules of 1899 already required new buildings in the prefecture's busy shopping streets to be fire-resistant, so the rebuilt shophouses were made in the thick-walled storehouse style. The city describes the street as a monument to the fire-conscious town planning of the Meiji era. On 4 December 2000 an area of about 5.5 ha was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, with 99 traditional buildings and 12 other structures.

The name Yamamachi comes from the mikurumayama (御車山), festival floats that Maeda Toshinaga gave the townspeople and that the district still keeps. The street is the route of the floats' procession in the Takaoka Mikurumayama Festival.

Buildings

The buildings date from the middle of the Meiji era to the early Showa era: dozo-zukuri shophouses with thick plastered walls like a storehouse, timber-framed shophouses, houses with Western-style fronts and a brick bank. The dozo-zukuri houses give the street its character.

The Sugano House, built in 1902 for a merchant family that grew rich on trade with Hokkaido, is an Important Cultural Property; its shop and main rooms are open to visitors while the family still lives there. The former Murozaki House, a large shophouse of cotton yarn and cloth wholesalers, is now the Dozo-zukuri no Machi Shiryokan, a museum of the street's history and building methods. The former Takaoka Kyoritsu Bank of 1914, designed by Tanabe Junkichi of Shimizu-gumi, is the only full brick building in the prefecture and is known locally as the red brick bank.