Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence

Called a board fence, built as an earthen wall

The Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence (旧堀田廣之家住宅板塀, Kyū Hotta Hiroyuki-ke Jūtaku Itabei) is a twelve-metre boundary wall in Negicho, Tsushima City, Aichi Prefecture, completed in 1913 and entered on the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Property in 2016. It stands west of the main house along Negicho street, closing the northern edge of the plot.

The registered name reads board fence, but the structure field of the Agency for Cultural Affairs database reads earthen wall with a tiled roof. Both are true. The core is a thick earthen wall, and boarding is applied only to the lower half, the part Japanese carpentry calls the koshi. Above that the earth is left exposed. The boards are what a passer-by meets at eye level, so the boards gave the thing its name. At 2.6 metres it is the tallest of the boundary structures around this compound, higher than the brick wall on the western edge.

A Sangawara-buki pantile roof caps it. Earth walls fail from the top down once water gets in, and the roof is there to keep the head dry rather than to look like architecture. The wall became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on 29 November 2016.

Two faces, two finishes

The point of interest at the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence is that the street side and the garden side are not finished the same way. The official commentary puts it as differentiating the design inside and out so that the wall contributes to the character of both the street and the grounds.

On the outside, the koshi is sasarago shitami itabari: horizontal boards lapped over one another, their joints held down by vertical battens notched along the edge. The same technique clads the storehouse and the base of the wing wall by the gate, so everything the town sees has been finished by one method.

On the inside, the koshi is split bamboo, laid vertically side by side. Bamboo is lighter than board and easier to source locally, and it would be easy to read the choice as economising on a surface nobody outside would judge. Stand in the garden, though, and the reading changes. A run of split bamboo catches light differently from lapped board, rounder and less rigid, and this is the face the household looked at every day.

Giving one wall two characters fits the thinking behind the whole compound. On the western boundary, the brick wall carries its buttresses on the garden side so that the face toward the town stays flat. Who is looking decides how it is finished. The logic runs right through the site.

The wicket door toward the east end

One small opening is cut through the wall toward its eastern end, a kugurimon, a wicket low enough that you duck to pass through it. Wickets exist for daily traffic, separate from the formal entrance.

That gives the north frontage two ways in: the 2.0 metre bracket-arm gate east of the main house, and this wicket. Front and back, guest and household. Two people arriving from the same street on the same day would have entered by different openings depending on who they were, and the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence is where the lesser of those two doors sits.

The dates are documented. According to material from the Hotta Hiroyuki Bunko, the family archive published by the Tsushima City Library, carpenters were assembling the main house in April 1913 while the street fence went up alongside it. The fence was blackened with ink on 21 May 1913 and its tiling was finished on 29 June. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the date as 1912, which appears to follow the year the compound as a whole was started, but the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence itself was completed in the early summer of 1913.

Access and what you can see

The residence is closed to the public. Tsushima City's cultural heritage archive records it as not open, with no entry to the grounds, no interior visiting and no advance-booking or special-opening scheme. The split-bamboo inner face is therefore out of reach for now.

The outer face is another matter. It fronts Negicho street, and you can follow all twelve metres of it from the pavement. The lap of the boards, the spacing of the notched battens, the texture of the earth wall rising above them, the way the tiles sit at the head: at 2.6 metres none of this is above your sightline. The wicket toward the eastern end is visible too. Photography from the public road is unrestricted, though people live here, so keep the lens off the openings.

Tsushima Station on the Meitetsu Tsushima and Bisai lines is about one kilometre east, roughly fifteen minutes on foot along the approach to Tsushima Shrine. Turning into Negicho street brings you into a stretch where old frontages survive, and the Former Hotta Hiroyuki Family Residence Board Fence is part of that run rather than an isolated object.

The Hotta Family Residence immediately to the west, an Important Cultural Property of the mid Edo period, is city-owned and open on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays from 10:00 to 15:00 (300 yen for adults, 100 yen for schoolchildren, checked August 2026). Going through that older Machiya and then coming back out to the street is the cheapest way to see how one family drew its boundary in two different centuries.