Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House

A Meiji merchant's house on Negicho street

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House (旧堀田廣之家住宅主屋, Kyū Hotta Hiroyuki-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) is a two-storey timber house with a tiled roof in Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, begun in 1912 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. Its footprint covers 205 square metres.

The street it stands on runs toward Tsushima Shrine, and the block still holds a run of old merchant frontages. Immediately to the west sits the Hotta Family Residence, an Important Cultural Property dating from the middle of the Edo period. The two houses belong to the same family but not to the same century, and the difference shows in the rooflines.

Hotta Hiroyuki (1887 to 1962) was the third son of the Hotta Riemon house, a family that had made its money in moneylending and sake brewing. When he was established as the head of a branch line, his father had a new residence built on the plot next door. What went up was not a copy of the old house. It was designed from scratch, at the very end of the Meiji era, by a client who had studied law in Tokyo and kept meticulous records of everything he spent.

A building you can date to the day

Most registered houses of this period are known only through their fabric. The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House is unusual because the paperwork survives. The Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko, a family archive exhibited by the Tsushima City Library, contains the owner's diaries, his drawings, and his receipts, and it lets the construction be followed almost day by day.

On 2 May 1912 Hotta sketched a rough plan himself. On the 28th of the same month he took it to a diviner in Nagoya to have the house's orientation checked, and came away with advice about which way the bath and the two lavatories should face. In June he hired a draughtsman to work the sketch up into proper drawings. From July he was placing orders for timber with suppliers in Kuwana, Nagoya and Gifu, travelling between the three towns to settle terms. The master carpenter he engaged, from 18 August, was Sugita Wahei of Tsushima, who already worked for the main Hotta household.

The ground-breaking ceremony took place on 30 October 1912, led by a priest of Tsushima Shrine. The date for raising the frame was again referred to the diviner, who settled on 12 April 1913. Some 2,000 logs were carted in from a local timber yard to build the scaffolding. It rained on the day. The frame was substantially up by July 1913, but the interior joinery ran on until May 1914.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date of the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House as 1912, which appears to be the year work began. The family's own papers put completion one to two years later. Visitors comparing the two figures are not looking at an error so much as at two different ways of deciding when a house is finished.

Living downstairs, entertaining upstairs

The feature the Agency for Cultural Affairs singles out is the way the plan separates daily life from hospitality by floor rather than by depth. Kitchen and living rooms occupy the ground floor. The formal reception rooms are upstairs.

That inversion is worth pausing over. In an Edo-period Machiya, a guest was led along an earth-floored passage and further and further back through the building, with the best rooms at the rear of the plot. Here the sequence turns vertical. A visitor climbs instead of walking in, arriving above the noise of the street and clear of the household's working rooms below. The arrangement is recorded as characteristic of what was fashionable in Tsushima houses around the turn of the Meiji and Taisho eras, and the joinery of the alcove fittings in the reception rooms is described in the official commentary as precise work, which is part of why the building is treated as a leading example of modern Japanese domestic architecture in the district.

A Dozo-zukuri storehouse joins the west side of the building. It is an internal storehouse, reached from inside the house rather than from the yard. On the street side stand a gate and a boarded fence, and along the western edge of the plot runs a brick wall. All four of those structures were registered on the same day as the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House, which is a reminder that the design was conceived as a walled compound rather than as a single object.

Access and what you can actually see

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Main House is closed to the public. Tsushima City's cultural heritage archive lists it plainly as not open, there is no interior visiting, no entry to the grounds, and no advance-booking scheme. It remains a private home.

What the street gives you is the outer envelope. The gate, the boarded fence and the brick wall all front Negicho street and can be studied from the pavement. The house itself sits behind them, so you will catch the ridge of the tiled roof and the upper windows rather than an elevation. Photography from the public road is not restricted, though people live here, so it is worth keeping the camera off the gate doors and the entrance. The walls alone repay a slow look.

The nearest station is Tsushima on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines, about one kilometre east, or roughly fifteen minutes on foot. The route doubles as the approach to Tsushima Shrine.

The Hotta Family Residence next door is owned by the city and does open, on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00, for 300 yen for adults and 100 yen for schoolchildren (checked August 2026). Walking through that older interior first, then looking at the branch house from outside, is the most useful way to read what changed between the two generations. One caveat about the geography: the main house was moved about sixty metres west in 1973 to make room for a road widening, so the gap between the two properties today is wider than it was when the younger house was built.