Tsubokawa Family Residence (Maruoka Town, Sakai District,

Forked Chestnut Pillars Holding Up Fukui's Oldest Farmhouse

Step into the earthen-floored entrance of this house and look up at the posts. They are chestnut, squared by hand, and the surface still carries the scoop marks of the adze and the spear plane that shaped them centuries ago. Three of them are matabashira, pillars that fork into two arms at the top to carry the beams of both the main roof and the lean-to below. Forked posts of this kind, used in this number, are rare anywhere in Japan, and they are the clearest sign that the Tsubokawa residence belongs to an older world of building than most surviving farmhouses.

The house is known locally as Senko no Ie, the "House of Antiquity," and it is the oldest farmhouse standing in Fukui Prefecture. The national register dates its construction to the close of the seventeenth century; older local accounts push it back toward the late medieval period. Either way, it predates the great age of standardized rural building, and its bones show it.

Why It Was Designated

The Tsubokawa residence was designated an Important Cultural Property on June 11, 1966. The national commentary singles out its archaic structure and the bold, almost severe character of its design, calling it by some distance the oldest and finest house in the Hokuriku region.

Part of what gives the house its standing is the family behind it. The Tsubokawa trace their line to Tsubokawa Tajima Sadazumi, held to be a descendant of Minamoto no Yorimasa, a late-Heian warrior who served as a hokumen no bushi, one of the guards of the retired emperor's palace. The family settled in this valley as local landholders and, even after they returned to farming, kept the rank and bearing of a warrior house. That history reads in the building: a folk dwelling in function, but built with the scale and formality of something grander, including a formal Buddhist altar room that signals the household's standing.

What to Look For

Begin with the roof, which does something unusual. The front is built as irimoya, a hipped-and-gabled form, while the back is plain yosemune, fully hipped, the whole thatched in deep layers and weighted with presence. The gable that results is said to be found nowhere else in the country. The outer walls are clad in cedar bark, and against that brown the white paper of the shōji reads clean and quiet.

Inside, the hearth is usually lit, and the smoke that has risen through the roof for generations is part of what has preserved the thatch and timber. A stone basin in the earthen-floored kitchen area was carved from a single block of Shakudani stone, the blue-grey tuff quarried near Fukui, and channels through the wall to drain outside. The house was carefully dismantled and rebuilt in 1968 and 1969, a process that returned it to its original form.

The visit extends beyond the house. Behind it lies the Tsubokawa garden, a small pond-and-stroll garden laid out around the Genroku and Hōei years, between roughly 1688 and 1710, and now a Registered Monument. Its stone groupings carry Buddhist meaning rather than mere scenery, and it turns vivid in autumn. An iris garden next door comes into flower in mid-June. A café and a soba kitchen operate within the grounds, so the house can be visited as a half-day stop rather than a quick look.