Former Tsushima Family Residence

The Former Tsushima Family Residence: A Banker's Mansion and the Birthplace of Dazai Osamu

On the main street of Kanagi, a town on the Tsugaru Plain in northern Aomori, a two-story wooden house of nineteen rooms stands behind a low brick wall. It was completed in June 1907 by Tsushima Gen'emon, a landowner who ran the local Kanagi Bank, and two years later his sixth son was born inside it. That boy, registered as Tsushima Shuji, grew up to publish under the name Dazai Osamu and became one of the most widely read Japanese writers of the twentieth century.

The building survives today much as it looked when the family lived here, and since 2004 it has carried the country's highest level of architectural protection. Visitors know it by the name it acquired later in life: Shayokan, the House of the Setting Sun.

The Family That Built It

The Tsushimas rose quickly. Through moneylending and trade in the years after the Meiji Restoration, they accumulated more than 200 cho (roughly 200 hectares) of farmland, which made them one of the largest landholders in the Tsugaru region. Gen'emon, the sixth head of the house and a son-in-law adopted into the family, founded the Kanagi Bank in 1897 and served as its president. He also sat in the prefectural assembly, the House of Representatives, and finally the House of Peers.

The house he raised in 1907 reflected that position. The ground floor was a working space as much as a home: just inside the entrance sat the bank counter, called the mise, with a separate clerks' office across from it. The family quarters opened beyond. The whole complex, including outbuildings and a garden laid out around a spring-fed pond, covered about 680 tsubo, close to 2,200 square meters.

Dazai was born here on June 19, 1909, the tenth of eleven children. He lived in the house until he left for middle school in the city of Aomori around the age of thirteen. The wealth and distance he felt inside this large, formal household later surfaced again and again in his fiction.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The residence was designated an Important Cultural Property in the buildings category on December 10, 2004. The designation covers five elements: the main house (shuoku, 1907), the document storehouse (bunkogura, 1905), the middle storehouse, the rice storehouse, and the brick perimeter wall. The main house and storehouses were built by the workshop of Horie Sakichi, the celebrated Meiji master builder of Hirosaki whose work included the Fifty-Ninth Bank there; his fourth son, Saito Isaburo, served as the chief carpenter on site.

What the designation values is the way the house combines two worlds. It follows the layout of a traditional Tsugaru townhouse, with its long earthen-floored passage and tiered family rooms, yet it folds in Western detailing at the bank counter and the upstairs reception room. Aomori hiba, the prized regional cypress, was used throughout the structure, down to the rice storehouse. As a large, finely built example of a modern residence, with its storehouses, brick wall, and garden all intact, the property gives an unusually complete picture of how a wealthy provincial family lived in the early twentieth century.

Inside the House

The main house faces west, with a hipped-and-gabled entrance set toward the south end of the front. The ground floor reads as two halves. Along the south runs a wide doma, an earthen-floored passage; to the north sit six rooms arranged in two rows of three, including a formal front parlor, a sitting room, and a Buddhist altar room.

The detail people stop in front of is the large board-floored hall on the east side. Its ceiling was left open so that the timber truss of the roof shows overhead, an engineering display rare in a private home of the period. A second moment comes at the staircase by the entrance, finished in a Western manner, which leads up to a Western-style reception room and seven Japanese rooms on the second floor.

The storehouses now hold the exhibits. Among them are the cape Dazai wore, his writing tools, handwritten manuscripts, letters, and first editions, along with translations of his books into other languages. Allow thirty minutes to an hour to walk through.

From Inn to Memorial

After the Second World War, land reform stripped the Tsushimas of the farmland that had funded the house, and in 1948 they sold it. From 1950 it operated as an inn. The new owner named it Shayokan after Dazai's 1947 novel Shayo, published in English as The Setting Sun, partly because the word also appeared in verse written on the sliding screens inside. For the next four and a half decades, admirers of the author could sleep in the house where he was born.

The town of Kanagi bought the building in 1996, restored it to its earlier appearance, and reopened it in 1998 as the Dazai Osamu Memorial Museum. Following a municipal merger in 2005, ownership passed to the city of Goshogawara, and the museum is now run by the local nonprofit Kanagi Genki Club.

Around Kanagi

Kanagi rewards a slow visit. The town is regarded as the birthplace of Tsugaru shamisen, and the Tsugaru Shamisen Hall next to the museum stages live performances; a combined ticket covers both buildings. A short distance away, Ashino Park draws crowds for its cherry blossoms in spring and was a place Dazai knew as a child. The temple Unshoji, which he visited with his nursemaid Take, also stands nearby.

The town sits on the Tsugaru Railway, a small private line whose old-fashioned trains are an attraction in their own right, especially the wood-stove cars run in winter. Goshogawara itself is known for the Tachineputa, towering illuminated floats paraded each August and displayed year-round at the Tachineputa Museum.