Former Igarashi Family Residence (Tadami, Fukushima)

A Farmhouse That Can Be Dated to the Day

The Former Igarashi Family Residence (旧五十嵐家住宅, Kyū-Igarashi-ke Jūtaku) in Tadami Town, Minamiaizu District, Fukushima Prefecture, is a thatched farmhouse of the mid-Edo period, built in 1718 and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 15 May 1972. It is the oldest surviving farmhouse building in the prefecture.

Farmhouses of this age usually reach us without a birthday. Nobody signed them, and the families who lived in them kept no construction papers. This one is different. When the house was taken apart for relocation in 1973, the crew found ink writing on a post, legible after two and a half centuries: the first day of the fourth month of Kyōhō 3, and the name of the carpenter who raised the frame, Sakai Kōzaemon. A second inscription gives the name Takiguchi Daisaku, understood to be the man who paid for the work.

The writing ends with a short phrase that can be read as "the snow has all melted."

That is not decoration. Tadami lies in one of the heaviest snowfall regions in Japan, where the ground stays buried for months and the mountain passes close. A carpenter starting a frame at the beginning of the fourth lunar month was working in the brief opening between the thaw and the start of the rice season, when every pair of hands in the village would be needed in the paddies. The phrase records a working condition as much as a date.

The Igarashi family, whose name the house now carries, was not the original household. Ownership sat with the Sakai family until 1914, when it passed to the Igarashi. Both were honbyakushō, landholding farmers who held their fields in their own name and paid tax directly rather than working as tenants for someone else. Beyond that, the family's lineage and how the house changed hands are not recorded.

What the 1972 Designation Recognised

Two arguments carried the designation.

The first concerns how the house is built. The timbers are cut noticeably thick, with posts and beams heavier in section than a building of this size strictly requires. Architectural historians read this as the framing tradition of the Japan Sea side of Japan, where a roof carries wet snow for a large part of the year and the frame is sized for that load rather than for an average day. The commentary published by the Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the impression on a visitor as one of physical strength, and this is fair: standing under the beams, you are looking at structural insurance against winter.

The second concerns the date. A rural house tied to a documented year by physical evidence gives researchers a fixed reference point. Undated farmhouses can then be placed earlier or later by comparing joinery, proportions and plan against a building whose year is not in doubt. That is a large part of why a modest three-room house owned by a farming family sits on the national list alongside temples and castles.

One point of caution for anyone checking the official record. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database lists the era name as Kyōhō 3, which corresponds to 1718, but its Western-calendar field reads 1743, and Cultural Heritage Online repeats the 1743 figure. The two do not agree with each other. Tadami Town's own publication, working from the ink inscription found during the 1973 dismantling, gives 1 April Kyōhō 3 (1718), and local reference works follow it. This article uses 1718.

The structural description in the national database also deserves a note. It records a lean-to roof on the north side and an attached projection on the south, and the accompanying commentary states that the house had become a chūmon-zukuri type with a projecting wing, though it began as a simple rectangular sugoya. That description reflects the house as it stood in 1972, at the moment of designation. The wing was removed the following year.

Reading the Rooms

The building measures roughly 13.3 metres across the front by 7.6 metres deep, seven bays by four, under a hipped roof of thatch. The plan is straightforward and worth walking slowly.

You enter into the niwa, a wide earth-floored work space that runs across one end of the house. In a farming household this was the indoor extension of the yard: threshing, tool repair, wet work in bad weather. The umaya, the stable, opens off it. Horses were housed under the same roof as the family, close enough to share warmth.

Beyond that come the boarded rooms. The ima was the daily living room, with the hearth. The heya was for sleeping, the zashiki the formal room where guests were received, and the mizuya the water and cooking area. A passage, the tōri, links them.

What makes this house instructive is that you are looking at a reconstruction of its earliest state rather than its final one. The house was altered repeatedly across two and a half centuries. Boards went in during the late Edo period. In the Meiji era the heya was remodelled and given a ceiling. In the Taishō era a two-storey chūmon wing was added to the north-west using salvaged timber from the house itself, and floorboards were laid in the niwa and mizuya. Later still the mizuya became a bathroom and glass was fitted into window lattices that had been papered.

When Tadami Town moved the house from Kamimachi in the town centre out to Kanōzu in 1973, the decision was to strip those layers back. The Taishō wing came off. The added floorboards were lifted. What stands at Kanōzu today is the house as the 1718 carpenter left it, which is why the building on site no longer matches the description filed at the time of designation.

There is a case for and against this kind of restoration, and it is worth thinking about as you walk through. Removing the wing recovered an early plan of real scholarly value. It also erased two hundred years of one family adapting a building to a changing life. Both things are true.

The roof has been fully rethatched twice in recent decades, in 1991 and again in 2007, when damage to the roof structure was also repaired. Earth walls were patched in 1983.

Visiting

The house is open to the public free of charge, and you can go inside. Tadami Town's official leaflet gives opening hours of 9:00 to 17:00 during a season that runs from the last Saturday of April to the fourth Sunday of November. Other published listings give shorter hours, including 10:00 to 16:00 and 9:30 to 16:00, and some note a Monday closure with the following weekday substituted when Monday is a public holiday. Because the figures differ between sources, it is worth a phone call to the Tadami Town Board of Education (0241-82-5320) before making the trip, particularly at the edges of the season. The building closes for winter.

Photography of the interior is generally permitted for personal use, though the site is unstaffed at times and there is no formal published policy, so ask if anyone is present.

Getting there: the house sits about 3 kilometres from Tadami Station on the JR Tadami Line, roughly ten minutes by car. There is parking. Coming by road, allow about an hour and a half from the Aizu-Bange interchange on the Ban-etsu Expressway, or about the same from the Koide interchange on the Kan-etsu Expressway, though the Koide route closes in winter.

Do not stop at the first building you see. The Former Igarashi Family Residence stands behind the Former Hasebe Family Residence, known as the Kanōzu Barrier Station, a larger and more formal house that served as a checkpoint on the road between the Aizu and Nagaoka domains and is designated an Important Cultural Property by Fukushima Prefecture. The two are a few steps apart and are normally visited together. The contrast is the point: an official's house and a farmer's house, side by side.

One naming caution. Fukushima Prefecture has two nationally designated Important Cultural Properties called the Former Igarashi Family Residence. The other is in Tōdera, Aizubange Town, Kawanuma District, built in 1729 and designated in 1971. The two houses are unrelated buildings with unrelated histories, about an hour and a half apart by car, and are frequently confused in search results and guidebooks. If you are planning a route, check the town name before you set out.