The Nose district, as is so called in this paper, is the part administratively consisting of Nose-cho and Higasi nose mura and lying in the northernmost of Osaka Prefecture. Farm houses in the district are of two types ; one is the tumairi-tatewari type, whose plan contains two longitudinally divided parts with rooms arranged mainly in front and the rear, and the other the hirairi-yokowari type. Our previous paper has already testified the oldest houses in the district not only to have been those of the tumairi type but also to have approached the hirairi type in their plan and construction, and finally, to have got fully prepared for an easy transition to it by shifting the direction of roof ridge. Furthermore, not to mention the influence of the hirairi type upon the tumairi, such a trasition as mentioned above was traceable to the unstability of room arrangement and construction comon to the houses of tumairi-tatewari type. Those except a few at Yosikawa at the extreme west of Higasi Nose mura, which lies east of Nose cho, have disappeard. An old resident in the village says that there stood a fair number of the tumairi houses tens of years before ; hence, the whole district turns out to have been the range of tumairi houses. On the other hand, our investigation shows that those houses of hirairi type which wear built in the latter days of the Tokugawa Shogunate and later have been found in Nose-cho where tumairi houses still remain as a group, while in Higasi Nose mura a considerable number of old hirairi houses with four rooms have been found which are judged to have been built at least not later than in the middle Edo period. Such houses with four rooms were widely distributed south of the district over the plains of Osaka and Hyogo Prefectures, and yet, in the plains of Osaka they had already had a difinite form in the early Edo period. Such being the case, from the plain of Osaka the hirairi houses are considered to have been introduced in the Nose district, and the time when they were introduced is concluded to have been about the middle of the Edo period. Thus, the tumairi houses, subdued by the stability of hirairi houses, were to disappear earlier in Higasi Nose mura than in Nose-cho.
