Kamihaga Family Residence (Uchiko Town, Kita District, Ehime Prefecture)

What the Kamihaga Family Residence Is

The Kamihaga Family Residence (上芳我家住宅, Kamihaga-ke jūtaku) is a Meiji era merchant estate in Uchiko Town, Kita District, Ehime Prefecture, whose main house and nine other buildings were designated an Important Cultural Property on 11 September 1990. It faces east onto the old highway through the Yokaichi-Gokoku quarter, and it keeps the equipment for making wax standing alongside the rooms the family lived in. Uchiko Town now runs it as the Japanese Wax Museum, Kamihaga Residence, and the interior is open. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it as the Kamihaga Family Residence (Uchiko Town, Kita District, Ehime Prefecture).

The Haga family laid the foundations of wax production in Uchiko. The senior house is known as Honhaga, and the branch further up the highway as Kamihaga. That branch began when it opened a shop on this site in 1861, and from then on it produced and sold wax alongside the main house. Behind the buildings lies a broad open yard, the sarashiba, where wax pressed from the berries of the haze sumac tree was laid out to bleach in the sun.

The main house was raised in 1894, at the peak of the town's wax industry. The oldest of the ten buildings is the branch shop storehouse of 1861, put up when the family separated from the senior line. The remaining outbuildings date from around 1894, so the estate holds together as a picture of one trade at its high point rather than as an accumulation of periods.

Why Ten Buildings Are Designated

The designation covers the main house, the kitchen, the combined store room with privy and birthing room, the detached parlour, the bathhouse and privy, the cauldron house, the branch shop storehouse, the shed, the plastered storehouse and the detached room: ten buildings, all listed on 11 September 1990. The Honhaga Family Residence and the Omura Family Residence in the same street were designated the same day. Attached to the main house as Tsuketari, subsidiary items belonging to the same designation, are a Munafuda ridge tablet, a carpenters' attendance board and three drawings.

What carries the listing is that the workplace was never separated from the home. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the cauldron house, the branch shop storehouse and the plastered storehouse stand to the south and east of the living quarters, with the wide bleaching yard beyond, and that the buildings are finished to a high and decorative standard throughout. In most surviving merchant estates either the living quarters alone were preserved or the production sheds were cleared away. Here both remain, and so does the ground they sat on.

Follow the arrangement and the logic appears. The main house meets the highway. Behind it, around a courtyard, the kitchen runs south from the Doma earthen floor of the main house; the bathhouse, privy and detached parlour stand to the east; the store room with privy and birthing room closes the north side. A small Hokora shrine sits in the courtyard garden. East of the detached parlour the ground drops a step, and the detached room stands there, linked by a covered walkway. The working ground lies south of the main house and kitchen, and on that lower eastern terrace.

Around the work yard, the cauldron house, the branch shop storehouse and the shed line up along the western side from the main house outward, with the plastered storehouse to the south. The lower eastern bleaching yard still has its well and its gate onto the old footpath, enclosed by a rogaki, a fence of round logs stacked in a rail. Those fences were built for the bleaching work, and they are particular to Uchiko.

One further designation belongs here. The set of 1,444 wax-making implements from Uchiko and its surrounding area was designated an Important Tangible Folk Cultural Property on 19 April 1991, and part of it is shown in the exhibition hall on the estate. Because tools and buildings survive in the same place, an explanation of the process can point at the actual object.

Walking the Estate

The main house is 15.9 metres along the front and 12.0 metres deep, in two storeys. It is Kirizuma-zukuri with pent roofs on the west, south and east faces, tiled in Sangawara-buki. The posts are buried in a thick plaster skin, and the wall facing the street carries Namako-kabe lattice tiling and modelled lime work. A projecting bay on the north side and a walkway to the store room are part of the same listed building. Climb to the upper floor and the hills that ring Uchiko come into view, so pause at the top of the stairs before moving on.

The detached parlour measures 8.6 metres by 4.9 metres, Irimoya-zukuri on its south face and Kirizuma-zukuri on the north. Its rooms overlooking the courtyard, and those of the store room diagonally opposite, are worked with the care that Meiji domestic architecture reserved for the parts guests would see. Putting the birthing room in the same building as the privy tells you something else again about how a Meiji merchant household allotted space to the business of living.

On the production side, the length of the plastered storehouse is what registers. Built Dozo-zukuri, it runs 19.7 metres by 6.9 metres over two storeys, longer than the main house itself. The cauldron house, 9.7 metres by 5.0 metres, held the vessels in which wax was boiled. The branch shop storehouse of 1861 is a modest 5.9 metres by 4.9 metres and is the oldest of the ten. Set that first shopfront against the main house and storehouse raised some three decades later, and the difference in scale shows how far the family had risen in between.

The exhibition hall explains the wax process with models and film and displays part of the designated tool collection. Wax pressed from haze berries went into candles, but also into pomade, coloured pencils and pharmaceutical preparations. Look at the process first, then walk back out to the cauldron house and the bleaching yard; the order of the buildings reads differently afterwards.

Visiting

The Kamihaga Family Residence is open as the Japanese Wax Museum, Kamihaga Residence, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., closed from 29 December to 2 January. Admission is 500 yen for adults and 250 yen for children, the child rate applying to elementary and junior high school pupils. Groups of 20 or more pay 380 yen and 200 yen. Part of the estate can be seen without paying.

A combined ticket for three town-run sites, adding the Uchikoza theatre dressing rooms and the Museum of Commercial and Domestic Life, normally costs 900 yen for adults and 450 yen for children. Uchiko Town has reduced it to 700 yen and 350 yen from 1 August 2025 until the end of 2028, provisionally, while the Uchikoza undergoes conservation work. Payment is accepted in cash and also by credit card, PayPay and LINE Pay.

Uchiko Town states that photography inside the museum is unrestricted, with one exception: during special exhibitions, no photographs may be taken inside the exhibition room. Allow 20 minutes to an hour for a visit. A guide is on duty every day except Wednesday, one person, with no advance time slots, so ask at the reception desk when you arrive. Smoking is prohibited anywhere on the site, and eating and drinking are confined to the café. Dogs on a lead are allowed in the free zone only; in the paid zone, assistance dogs alone.

The nearest station is JR Uchiko, which the town puts at a 20 minute walk. Uchiko is a limited express stop on the Yosan and Uchiko lines, served from Matsuyama by the Uwakai. Drivers use the Machinami car park. Enquiries go to the museum on 0893-44-2771; for a guided walk through the wider streetscape, contact the Uchiko Visitor Center on 0893-44-3790, closed Thursdays.

Two more Important Cultural Properties stand on the same highway. The Honhaga Family Residence is the senior house from which the Kamihaga branch separated, and the Omura Family Residence preserves the shape of a townhouse from before wax money arrived. Step out of the Kamihaga Family Residence onto the street and the spacing of the three houses maps how one family's trade spread along it.