Furusato Travel Village Former Watanabe Family Residence Main House

Four rooms in a square, under one large roof

Furusato Travel Village Former Watanabe Family Residence Main House (ふるさと旅行村旧渡邊家住宅主屋) is a thatched farmhouse of 1879 standing in the Shimohatanogawa district of Kumakogen Town, Ehime Prefecture, and it was entered on the national register as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 31 January 2003.

At 149 square metres it is the largest of the five registered buildings gathered inside Kumakogen Furusato Travel Village. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as a relatively large farmhouse, which in the context of a mountain basin where flat land is scarce is worth taking literally. It was built twelve years into the Meiji era, and moved to the present site in 1980.

The plan is the one Japanese carpenters call ta-no-ji, after the character 田: four rooms arranged two by two, with a beaten-earth Doma alongside. This arrangement spread across rural Japan in the early modern period and remained the standard farmhouse layout well into the twentieth century.

Why the building carries a registration number

It is register number 38-0034, accepted in the thirty-fifth round of registrations, notified on 26 February 2003 and registered on 31 January of that year. The criterion applied, the first of the three used for Registered Tangible Cultural Property listings, covers buildings that stand as a model of design in their class.

The listing rests on a straightforward argument. The building keeps, at full size and without alteration to its type, the form that ordinary farming households in this district built after 1868, and its large thatched roof reproduces inside the travel village the appearance the surrounding countryside had at that date. Furusato Travel Village Former Watanabe Family Residence Main House is the piece of the group that supplies scale: the other four buildings are read against it.

What to look at

Walk to a corner first, not to the front door. From an oblique angle the roof reads as a single mass of Kayabuki with the walls almost disappearing beneath it, and the sheer depth of the thatch becomes measurable against the height of the wall below. This is the view the surveyors had in mind when they called the roof surface the building's defining feature.

Then look for doorways where you do not expect them. Most farmhouses of this type are entered from the long side, under the eaves. Here the gable ends carry openings as well, which changes how the household moved through the building and how light reached the interior.

The Doma walls repay attention too. They are boarded at the lower level and finished in white plaster above, a division that is practical before it is decorative: the board takes the knocks and the damp from tools, animals and wet straw, while the plaster above stays clean. On the formal side of the plan the construction opens up, with fewer solid walls and more sliding partitions, so that the four rooms can be thrown together when the household needed one large space.

Visiting

Furusato Travel Village Former Watanabe Family Residence Main House stands at 488 Otsu, Shimohatanogawa, Kumakogen Town, inside the grounds of Kumakogen Furusato Travel Village. The site belongs to the town and has been run under contract by a local operating company since 2023. The office receives visitors from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; the number is 0892-41-0711.

The village shuts for the winter. In the 2026 season the campsite operated from 1 April to 23 November and the cottages from 11 April to 14 November, so anyone travelling outside those months should telephone first. The operator's fee list sets no admission charge for the registered buildings, and no scheduled interior opening is published; the office can say on the day which buildings are accessible.

Nothing on site restricts photography of the exteriors, though the buildings stand among camping pitches and rental accommodation. Driving, it is roughly 40 minutes from the Matsuyama interchange, with parking in the grounds. Otherwise the JR Shikoku Bus Kumakogen Line runs from JR Matsuyama Station to the Kumakogen stop in about 1 hour 20 minutes, leaving 7 kilometres by taxi.