Fujiu Family Residence

Fujiu Family Residence: A Farming Household Kept Whole in Kiryu

The Fujiu Family Residence (藤生家住宅, Fujiu-ke Jūtaku) is the walled homestead of an upper-tier farming family in Hirosawa-chō, Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture, where a main house of the late Edo period (1751-1829) and 16 other buildings and structures were added together to the national register of Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on May 15, 2007.

The estate lies south of central Kiryu, on the right bank of the Hirosawa River. Its 17 registered entries cover almost everything a prosperous rural household needed: 12 buildings (the main house, a retirement house, a tea room, an inner storehouse, a detached storehouse, a miso storehouse, a storage shed, a water mill hut with its own storage shed, a bonsai shed, a firewood shed, a bathhouse and a small shelter for an Inari shrine) plus five structures, namely a front gate, a middle gate, an outer wall and two stone wells.

The registration numbers run in an unbroken sequence, 10-0212 through 10-0228, and every entry was listed under the same criterion: that it contributes to the historic landscape of the country. Several of the Fujiu buildings are tiny on their own. What makes the Fujiu Family Residence worth reading as a set is the way each piece sits in relation to the others.

Two Centuries of Adding On

The main house is the oldest part of the Fujiu Family Residence. It is a single-story timber farmhouse about 11 ken long (a ken is a structural bay of roughly 1.8 meters), with a hipped-and-gabled Irimoya-zukuri roof of miscanthus thatch that is currently protected under temporary copper sheeting.

Most of the other buildings went up in the early Meiji era, after 1868: the retirement house, tea room, inner storehouse, detached storehouse, miso storehouse, storage shed, water mill hut, firewood shed and Inari shrine shelter, together with the front gate, the outer wall and both wells. Later in the Meiji era the retirement house was enlarged and a middle gate with its own short wall was built to close off its forecourt.

The Taishō era (1912-1926) brought two practical additions, a shed for overwintering potted plants and a bathhouse fitted with a iron goemon-buro tub. Then in 1973, when the road along the south side was widened, the family had the front gate moved to its present position by hikiya, the technique of shifting a building intact rather than taking it apart. The storage shed was moved the same way that year.

How the Fujiu Compound Is Laid Out

The main house and the rooms for family and guests

The main house of the Fujiu Family Residence stands at the center of the plot and faces south. A two-story retirement house joins it on the west across a small courtyard garden, and a wall pierced by the middle gate marks off the retirement house's forecourt. At the northwest corner of the main house, a formal room leads into the inner storehouse, and beyond that, to the northwest, a tea room looks onto the garden. The west well, said to have supplied water for the tea room, sits beside the garden pond.

Water, food and firewood behind the main house

North of the main house is the working core of the household. The bathhouse stands between the inner storehouse and the miso storehouse; the miso storehouse lies behind the main house toward the east, with the east well, the family's drinking-water source, just to its south. Near the middle of the northern half is the Inari shrine shelter, a firewood shed runs along the north edge, and the bonsai shed closes the northern end of the east side.

The faces toward the road and the water channel

The front gate opens at the center of the south side. West of it, the long storage shed sits on a base of river cobbles that also serves as the retaining bank of a water channel, and southeast of the main house a two-story storehouse in white plaster anchors the view across that corner. On the east side, the water mill hut once turned its wheel with water from a channel running past the estate. Two stretches of the outer wall survive: 7.5 meters running south from the water mill hut, and 16 meters along the middle of the west side.

Seeing the Fujiu Family Residence

The Fujiu Family Residence is a privately owned home and is not open to the public. As of September 2026 we could find no announced open days or special viewings. Visitors can only look at the buildings from the public road; please do not step through the gates, and if you take photographs, do so from the street without intruding on the residents or their neighbors. No visitor parking is provided.

Only a few of the Fujiu buildings are easy to see from outside, chiefly the front gate and storage shed on the south side and the storehouse southeast of the main house. The wells, bathhouse, miso storehouse and shrine shelter lie deep inside the compound. Each building's own page explains what can and cannot be seen.

By public transport, take the Kiryu city bus (Orihime Bus) Hirosawa Line from the north exit of JR Kiryu Station on the Ryōmō Line, or from Shin-Kiryu Station on the Tōbu Kiryu Line. Get off at the Hirosawa Kōminkan Iriguchi stop; the residence is about a 7-minute walk away by map estimate. Timetables are posted on the Kiryu city website.