Yoshimura Family Residence (Fukuoka City)

What Is the Yoshimura Family Residence (Fukuoka City)?

The Yoshimura Family Residence (Fukuoka City) is a former samurai-district homestead in Tani 2-chome, Chuo Ward, Fukuoka, where four structures centered on a main house built in 1925 were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 February 2021. In Japanese it is written 吉村家住宅 (Yoshimura-ke Jūtaku).

South of Fukuoka Castle the land rises into a series of low hills, and during the Edo period (1603 to 1868) the valleys between them held the houses of the domain's retainers. According to Fukuoka City, the Yoshimura Ichiroji family probably settled here in the late 18th century, in a hollow then known as Ronindani, the "valley of masterless samurai." Today it is a quiet residential street near Ropponmatsu, and the old garden trees still shade the lane.

Almost no samurai houses are known to survive in Fukuoka, and the former castle-town districts at the city's core have been heavily redeveloped. What makes the Yoshimura Family Residence worth registering is that its house plan, its arrangement of buildings, and its garden have all come through together.

The Four Registered Buildings of the Yoshimura Family Residence

The four buildings of the Yoshimura Family Residence were registered on the same day under numbers 40-0177 to 40-0180, each for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. Listed by age, oldest first:

• Former Barn: mid-Meiji period (1883 to 1897), converted to living rooms after the war
• Main House: 1925, built as the retirement house of the seventh head of the family
• Toilet and Bath Building: around 1925
• Well House: around 1925

Apart from the barn, everything was built in the same campaign as the main house. The barn is older and once served an earlier main house said to date from the Bunsei era (1818 to 1830). That earlier house was demolished in 2007.

How the Yoshimura Family Residence Is Laid Out

Fukuoka City records that the main house was built as a retirement home for Isotaro (1869 to 1936), the seventh head of the Yoshimura line. A single-storey reception wing runs into a two-storey kitchen wing, and the formal rooms on the northeast side open onto the garden. The three service buildings stand on their own near the kitchen, along the south side of the plot.

The garden is built around Japanese yew (inumaki) and Hirado azaleas more than 120 years old. The city's assessment treats the garden and the four buildings as a single scene that preserves the look of the southern samurai quarter, and notes that although the buildings are modern, they carry many features of late Edo samurai housing. Each building's structure is covered on its own page.

When the registration was announced, the Nishinippon Shimbun reported the owner's account that during the Fukuoka air raid of 19 June 1945, when the Ropponmatsu area burned, an incendiary bomb that fell inside the grounds failed to explode and the house survived.

Visiting the Yoshimura Family Residence (Fukuoka City)

The Yoshimura Family Residence (Fukuoka City) is a private home that is still lived in. No public or seasonal openings were announced as of October 2026, the grounds cannot be entered, and there is no official guidance on photography. If you look from the street, keep the residents' privacy in mind.

The nearest station is Ropponmatsu on the Fukuoka City Subway Nanakuma Line. On the map the house lies about 700 meters south of the station in a straight line, so allow roughly 10 minutes on foot. Ropponmatsu is a direct ride on the Nanakuma Line from Tenjin-minami.