Empty since 2011, and sound to the frame. This is the morning the fire was lit again.
A minka is cured by the smoke of being lived in.
There is no flue. The fire in the floor sends its smoke up through the open frame, out through the thatch and the vent at the ridge, and on the way it lays soot on every beam and every stem of straw it passes. That soot kills the insects, drives out the damp, and stops the rot.
Which means the building is preserved by being inhabited — so a house whose fire goes out is not sad, it is failing. Japan now has nine million empty houses. We take the ones whose frames are still worth the work, and we ask every owner the same question before anything else: will the fire be lit?
Akiya · 空き家
Nine million houses stand empty. Most of them should come down.
An akiya 空き家 is a house nobody lives in. The 2023 Housing and Land Survey counted nine million of them — 13.8% of every dwelling in the country, double the number in 1993. Around six in ten were inherited. In six in ten, the house went quiet when its owner died.
We are not in that business, and we want to be exact about why. Most akiya are post-war frame or prefab, built after 1980, with nothing in them worth a carpenter's year. They have nodaikokubashira 大黒柱 worth keeping, no curved magari-bari 曲がり梁 overhead, and no roof that would take thatch again. The honest answer for those houses is a demolition contractor, and we will tell an owner so in the first hour.
The ones we take are kominka 古民家 — the old houses, pre-war and mostly pre-Meiji, built by hand out of one valley's timber. Those are disappearing faster than the empty flats. Between 2008 and 2013 the count of kominka fell13%. The Japan Kominka Association puts what is left at around 1,250,000. Every one taken down is a frame that cannot be built again at any price, because the trees are gone and so, nearly, are the men who cut the joints.
So we are selective, and not out of taste. A frame either carries another two hundred years or it does not, and saying yes to a house that cannot is how a workshop spends four years proving a point to a building that was always going to lose.
Declined. The ridge has gone and taken the tie-beams with it; the frame is no longer carrying itself. Photographed for the record, not for the pity of it.
Vacant dwellings, 2023
9,000,000 · 13.8%
Kominka, 2008–2013
−13%
Kominka thought to remain
~1,250,000
Asked of us each year
About forty
Taken
Four
The other end of the work · 再び
A house we took, the second winter after. Smoke at the ridge before seven in the morning — which is the only proof any of this works, and the only one we accept.
Two hundred years of soot on a keyaki tie-beam. The adze marks are still legible under it.
Why the smoke matters · 煤
Soot is a finish, not a stain.
A beam over a working irori takes on a hard, near-black lacquer that you cannot buy and cannot fake. It takes decades. Insects will not bore it, water will not sit on it, and the fungi that destroy untreated timber cannot get a hold.
The same smoke rises into the roof and hardens the thatch from beneath, which is why a smoked kayabuki roof lasts three or four times as long as one over a house that stands empty. It is also why the bamboo taken out of an old roof at re-thatch — susutake — is worth more than the bamboo that went in.
The trade-off is real and we will not pretend otherwise: an open hearth means smoke in the room, and a house run this way is warmer, darker at the ceiling, and needs its fire kept. Clients who want the look without the fire get a building that will need us again in thirty years.
The four houses · 四つの民家
One valley, four answers.
Minka 民家 means, plainly, "the houses of the people" — everyone who was not a samurai or a priest. It is not one building type. It is four, and the differences between them are not style: they are answers to four different climates and four different ways of earning a living. From this workshop all four are within a morning's drive.
Before a joint is cut, the tōryō walks the stacked timber with an ink pot and a chalked cord and snaps a dead-straight line onto every crooked log. That marking is called sumitsuke, and it decides the house.
Snap yours. Choose the house, the bays in ken, the weather the site actually gets, and how much of the ground stays earth — and the section and plan redraw from those numbers alone, at a real drafting scale that changes as the house does. The specification it produces is what we would build from.
Ōno Sōhachi marking a tie-beam. Sixth of his line to hold the title of tōryō.
The frame
Posts standing loose on stones so the house can ride an earthquake. Beams left in the curve the tree grew. Joints cut to hold without a single nail — because a nail rusts, and a joint does not.
Earth, then a step, then board, then matting. The house gets softer, quieter, and more formal the deeper you walk, and nobody has to be told where they may go.
