Taketo

What Is Taketo?

Taketo (竹藤, Taketō) is the premises of a bamboo wholesaler dating from the Edo period in Chuo 1-chome, Aizuwakamatsu City, Fukushima Prefecture, whose four buildings, including a shop built in 1841, were registered as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2019.

The Suzuki family has run Taketo for generations. The registered buildings are the Taketo Store on the street, the Taketo Main House joined to its back, and two storehouses at the rear of the lot, the Taketo Takegura and the Taketo Zashikigura. In 1972 Suzuki Hideo, the fourteenth head of the house, turned the business into a shop for bamboo crafts and folk goods. Today the store sells baskets, household wares and Aizu tojin-dako kites, and the main house opens as Taketo Chaya, a café.

A Bamboo Wholesaler on Ichinomachi

The family chronology on Taketo's website says a copy of an 1807 register of the bamboo wholesalers' guild survives in the house, so the Suzuki family was already in the trade before then. Aizu was sake country, and bamboo for the hoops (taga) that bind casks was a large part of a wholesaler's income, the shop explains. Taketo gives its founding year as 1624, and the Aizuwakamatsu Tourism Bureau repeats it. The chronology itself is more careful: it records 1624 as the birth of the second head and only supposes that the first opened the shop around then.

According to the chronology, the family moved after a fire in Tenpo 5 (dated 1835 in the chronology) to Ichinomachi, the busiest street of the castle town and today's Chuo 1-chome, buying land and a house there. A storehouse built in 1823 already stood on the plot; it is the present Taketo Zashikigura. About five years later, in 1841, fire struck again. The storehouse lost only its roof, but the shop and the house were rebuilt and their frames raised that July, and the family regards these as the buildings that stand today.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs agrees on 1841 for the Taketo Store but dates the Taketo Main House to the early Meiji period (1868-1882). The shop's own notes on its restoration project also mention that part of the house is said to have been rebuilt after a fire in early Meiji.

In 1852 the eighth head, Suzuki Tosuke, became head of the bamboo wholesalers. In 1862 a storehouse built elsewhere in 1785 was moved onto the lot to hold bamboo, and that is the Taketo Takegura. Aizuwakamatsu City values Taketo as a wooden merchant building that escaped the fighting of the Boshin War.

The Four Registered Buildings of Taketo

All four Taketo buildings were entered on the national register on December 5, 2019, under registration numbers 07-0220 through 07-0223. The Taketo Store and the Taketo Zashikigura were registered as buildings that contribute to the historic landscape of the country, the Taketo Main House and the Taketo Takegura as buildings that serve as a model of their type. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives the following dates and details.

• Store: 1841, renovated 1970. Two-story timber building, metal sheet roof, building area 82 m²
• Main House: early Meiji period (1868-1882). Single-story timber building, metal sheet roof, 73 m²
• Takegura (bamboo storehouse): 1785, moved here in 1862, renovated around 1985. Two-story earthen storehouse, metal sheet roof, 77 m²
• Zashikigura (parlor storehouse): 1823, renovated in 1983 and around 1985. Two-story earthen storehouse, metal sheet roof, 46 m²

In fiscal 1998 Aizuwakamatsu City listed Taketo as No. 10 among its designated historic landscape buildings. The city notes that the fitted shutters of the shop and the bamboo blinds on its upper floor still show how a merchant's frontage looked, and that the bamboo crafts and folk goods visible at the shopfront add to the street. It gives the building date as Tenpo 12 (1842), while the Agency for Cultural Affairs converts the same era year to 1841.

Taketo's restoration notes say the national registration was approved in July 2019. The registration date recorded in the Agency's database is December 5 of that year.

How the Taketo Premises Are Laid Out

The Taketo Store faces south onto the street with a frontage of 7 ken. The Taketo Main House is joined to its north side, with a corridor along its east side and a courtyard beyond. The Taketo Takegura stands in the northwest of the lot and the Taketo Zashikigura in the northeast, both with ridges running north to south. Taketo calls this long, narrow town-house plot an unagi no nedoko, an "eel's bed," and describes it as the only one of its kind left in Aizu.

All four roofs are now covered in metal sheet. High on the south gable of the Takegura, the shop's igeta mark, a hash-shaped well-curb sign, is modeled in plaster, and the Zashikigura has a pair of plastered doors set in its south end. From the street inward, the buildings run shop, living quarters, storehouses. Each building has its own page with details and what to look for.

Visiting Taketo

The Taketo Store trades in bamboo crafts, household goods, folk crafts and Aizu tojin-dako kites. Taketo's website gives opening hours of 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., closed on Wednesdays (checked October 2026). Since 2022 a corner of the shop has been let as Space Taketoratan, where makers rent shelves to sell their work.

Restoration of the Taketo Main House was finished in May 2020, and it now holds Taketo Chaya and a small museum of merchant-house history. The café is open 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays; from January 1 to March 15 it closes at 3:00 p.m. and also on Sundays. The website says visitors are welcome to come just to see the museum and that photography and posting on social media are encouraged. Whether the interiors of the Taketo Takegura and the Taketo Zashikigura are open could not be confirmed from the website.

The Aizuwakamatsu Tourism Bureau lists two hands-on workshops at Taketo: making an Aizu tojin-dako kite for 1,200 yen and an Aizu pinwheel for 850 yen.

Taketo is about a 15-minute walk from both JR Aizu-Wakamatsu Station and Nanokamachi Station. Drivers can use Happy Parking, a private lot at the northeast corner of the Taketo block; spending 1,000 yen at Taketo Chaya gives 30 minutes free and 1,800 yen gives one hour, according to the website.