Mizuno Family Residence Main House

About the Mizuno Family Residence Main House (Kakamigahara)

The Mizuno Family Residence Main House (水野家住宅主屋, Mizuno-ke Jūtaku Shuoku) in Kawashima Matsubara-cho, Kakamigahara City, Gifu Prefecture, is a two-story timber farmhouse built in 1928 and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan in 2007.

Gifu has a second registered building with the very same name, the Mizuno Family Residence Main House in Shinmachi, Gujo Hachiman, which is a Taisho-period townhouse belonging to a different household. This page is about the farmhouse in Kawashima, a district in the south of Kakamigahara along the Kiso River.

Why It Was Registered

The Mizuno Family Residence Main House was registered on December 5, 2007, in the 57th round of registrations, with public notice on December 19. It holds registration number 21-0153 and qualified under the criterion of serving as a model of its type of design.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs explains that the house preserves the features of a modern sericulture farmhouse of this region. Silk farming once thrived across what is now Kakamigahara; according to the city, the site of today's city hall housed the prefectural sericulture experiment station until 1964. The Mizuno house shows, in a dated example from the early Showa period, how raising silkworms for cocoons shaped the form of a family home.

Construction and Features

A Full Two-Story Block

The house stands toward the west edge of its plot and faces south. It measures eight ken (about 14.5 meters) by four ken (about 7.3 meters), and the upper floor is the same size as the ground floor, a full two-story arrangement known as so-nikai. A lean-to Hisashi eave runs around the ground floor. The gabled roof is laid with Sangawara-buki pan tiles, and the building area comes to 179 square meters.

That boxy, full-height volume is what defines the house from outside. On the south front, the line of the ground-floor eave draws a level band between the lower walls and the upper story.

An Earthen Floor and a Row of Tatami Rooms

On the ground floor, a Doma, or earthen-floored work area, occupies the east end. To the west are four eight-mat tatami rooms and a butsuma, the room for the household Buddhist altar, among others. Upstairs, the space above the doma is floored with boards, and five rooms line the west side.

Boarding over the doma and making the whole upper floor usable appears to reflect the needs of silk farming, which called for large indoor space to rear silkworms. It is this layout, together with the full two-story form, that the agency points to when it describes the house as typical of modern sericulture farmhouses.

Visiting the Main House

The Mizuno Family Residence Main House is not open to the public. We found no notice of interior viewings in materials from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Gifu Prefecture or Kakamigahara City (checked October 2, 2026), and the national database does not list an owner. If you go to see the exterior, stay on the public road, keep any photographs to the outside of the building, and be considerate of the residents and neighbors.

Kawashima lies several kilometers from the nearest railway stations, so a visit realistically means a car or a local bus. We have not been able to confirm how much of the south front can be seen from the road.