Former Hotta Family Residence (Negi-cho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture)

What the Former Hotta Family Residence Is

The Former Hotta Family Residence in Minamimonzencho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, is a late Edo period merchant townhouse whose main house and three earthen storehouses were designated an Important Cultural Property on 31 May 1978. Nine old plans of the estate were included in the designation as attached items.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers the property as the Former Hotta Family Residence (Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, in Japanese 旧堀田家住宅). The name points to Negichō, the district where the Hotta family once had its estate, rather than to the address the buildings occupy today.

The Hotta were descended from priestly families attached to Tsushima Shrine. The first head of the line, Yukimasa, served the warlord Fukushima Masanori; when Masanori was transferred to Hiroshima, Yukimasa is said to have returned home and built a house in Negichō. In the Edo period the family made its money in sake brewing, moneylending and land reclamation, held a purveyor's licence to the Owari domain's magistrate of shrines and temples, and was permitted a surname and the wearing of swords, privileges normally reserved for samurai.

The buildings do not stand where they were built. In 1973 a road-widening scheme pushed them roughly 60 metres west, and the whole compound was rotated 45 degrees to the north as it was dragged, so the Former Hotta Family Residence now faces almost due north. The grounds cover about 2,055 square metres. Tsushima City bought the land and received the buildings as a gift from the family in March 1996.

The Main House and Three Storehouses

The main house of the Former Hotta Family Residence runs together in three linked wings. The living wing measures 14.2 metres along its frontage by 12.6 metres deep, two storeys under a gabled roof with an eave canopy on the east side. The reception wing joined to its west is 10.0 metres each way, with canopies east and north, meeting the living wing on the south. The kitchen wing is 6.5 metres by 10.5 metres, canopied on the north and attached to the living wing on the east. A tea room, a bath and privy, and a maids' room are counted as part of the main house, and every roof is laid with pantiles.

Ridge tablets fix the dates. The living wing was raised in 1765 using timber salvaged from an earlier building on the site, and the reception wing followed in 1770. The kitchen wing is regarded as a nineteenth-century addition. Tsushima City records a tradition that the house was founded in the Shotoku era, between 1711 and 1716, which sits some fifty years earlier than the tablets; the Agency for Cultural Affairs simply dates the main house to the late Edo period.

West of the reception wing stand three storehouses in a row, tied to the house by a continuous eave. The east storehouse held rice and grain: two storeys of mud-walled construction, 8.2 metres by 5.5 metres. The west storehouse, also two storeys, served for general storage at 7.3 metres by 5.6 metres. Between them sits the small storehouse, a single-storey structure of 3.0 by 4.8 metres whose roof slopes down on both sides to meet its neighbours.

Aichi Prefecture's account notes that all three storehouses were badly damaged in the Nobi earthquake of 1891 and repaired the following year, which is the fabric visible now. The national register dates the west storehouse to the closing years of the Edo period and the east and small storehouses to the Meiji era.

Why the Former Hotta Family Residence Is an Important Cultural Property

When the designation was made in 1978, the citation rested on scale, quality of workmanship and state of preservation. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes a townhouse belonging to a family in the sake trade with close ties to Tsushima Shrine, and calls it an important surviving example of the townhouse in Aichi Prefecture.

For architectural historians the decisive point is that the dates are known. Most surviving town dwellings can only be placed approximately, by comparing details of style. Because the ridge tablets of the Former Hotta Family Residence name 1765 and 1770, the house works as a measuring stick against which other Owari townhouses can be ordered in time.

The nine old plans attached to the designation carry their own weight. Set beside the standing building, they show how the estate and its room layout shifted over generations. Aichi Prefecture's commentary treats this ability to trace later alterations against the drawings as part of what makes the house valuable.

The plan of the living wing is the standard Owari arrangement: an earth-floored passage running down the east side, six rooms in two rows beside it, lattice screens across the openings on both floors, and fire-break walls raised at each gable end. Those raised walls, called udatsu, were expensive enough that keeping them up became a byword for prospering. The low eaves complete a merchant's frontage of a type that was once ordinary in this district.

What to Look For

Step through the great door and the shop room lies to the right, with a raised shop parlour behind it where customers of standing were received. To the left is the small waiting room. Business was conducted in this front band of the house.

The inner entrance opens onto a broad earth floor with a kitchen range built against it, kept as a shrine to the kitchen deity as much as a place to cook. The rooms facing this earth floor carry a set of old household names and were formal enough to be used for receiving guests. There is no partition between them and the earth floor, and a god-shelf is fixed above. Rooms of this kind usually leave the beams exposed overhead; here the ceiling is boarded, and hung a little higher than in the rest of the house. Living rooms, bedrooms and the Buddhist altar room lie further in.

On the guest side are a study room, a middle room and a tea parlour. The interior finish of the reception wing dates from a remodelling in 1888 and follows the light, deliberately understated sukiya manner. The wing is set back from the street behind a wall, with a small garden in front.

The tea room is a two-mat space with a partial third mat for the host, under a single-pitched copper roof. Beside the entrance is a sword rack made of bamboo. Racks of this kind, made for townsmen rather than warriors, have almost entirely disappeared. Tradition attributes the design to Sosan of the Hisada family of Ryogaemachi, an acquaintance of Tomoyuki, the sixth head of the Hotta house, and puts the building in the second half of the eighteenth century. With its enclosed garden path, it is known as a complete tea suite.

Tsushima City points out that the route from the entrance, through the reception rooms and on to the storehouses at the back, is characteristic of Owari townhouse planning. At the Former Hotta Family Residence that route ends with the three storehouses standing in line.

Visiting the Former Hotta Family Residence

The Former Hotta Family Residence is owned by Tsushima City and open to the public on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00. Admission is 300 yen for adults and 100 yen for elementary and junior high school students, falling to 200 and 50 yen for groups of fifteen or more. Visitors holding one of the Japanese disability or war-wounded certificates are admitted free.

The house closes on Mondays, opening instead when a Monday falls on a public holiday, and from 1 to 3 January and 29 to 31 December. It may also close at short notice in rough weather, since the building itself is the object being protected.

Tuesday to Friday visits are possible for groups of five or more by prior application, filed no earlier than three months and no later than 17:00 three working days before. Applications go to the Lifelong Learning and Cultural Promotion Group of the Tsushima City Board of Education, by post or through the Aichi electronic application system. Hours and admission are the same as at weekends. The rooms can also be hired for exhibitions and tea gatherings from Tuesday to Friday at 10,280 yen a day.

The city's pages do not state a rule on photography for ordinary visitors. Since Tsushima City itself invites proposals to hold photographic exhibitions inside the Former Hotta Family Residence, cameras are clearly not banned outright, but it is safest to ask at the reception desk on arrival.

The house is about a fifteen-minute walk from Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines, and roughly fifteen minutes by car from the Yatomi interchange of the Higashi-Meihan Expressway, though there is no visitor car park. Enquiries go to the Tsushima City Board of Education on 0567-24-1111. Prices, hours and closing days given here were confirmed on 30 August 2026.