Hozumi Family Residence Main Building

A Headman's House on the Left Bank of the Ibara River

The Main House of the Hozumi Residence (稲積家住宅主屋, Hozumi-ke Jūtaku Shuoku, also written Hozumike Shuoku) is a late Edo-period farmhouse at Ibara 1189 in Ōnan Town, Ōchi District, Shimane Prefecture, entered on the national register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 5 December 2007. The surname is written with the characters for rice and stacking, which suggest the reading Inazumi, and some tourism listings do give that form. Both the Agency for Cultural Affairs database and Cultural Heritage Online record it as Hozumi, and that is the reading followed here.

The house sits on the left bank of the Ibara River with its ridge running east to west and its long face turned south. The frame measures ten ken by five ken, which works out at roughly 19 metres by 9.5, and lean-to roofs called geya are carried around all four sides. The Agency records a building area of 256 square metres; Shimane Prefecture's own list of registered properties gives 267, a difference worth knowing about if you compare the two documents.

The Hozumi served as shōya, the headmen who ran Ibara village on behalf of the domain, and local accounts say the family later supplied the village with its mayors. The national record dates the structure to the closing decades of the Edo period, somewhere between 1830 and 1867. A local history is more specific and puts the raising of the frame at Kōka 1 (1844), though that year does not appear in the Agency's entry.

Six Rooms in a Grid, and a Roof Rebuilt in 1910

Japan's registration system, introduced in 1996, lists each building against a stated criterion. The main house was registered as a model of design. The two storehouses and the gate on the same plot were registered under a different heading, for their contribution to the historic landscape. What sets the main house apart is its plan.

The eastern portion of the building is doma, a floor of packed earth where the work of a farming household was done: threshing, cooking over an open fire, the movement of tools and animals. West of that line the floor rises, and the raised half is divided into a regular grid of six rooms, an arrangement Japanese architectural writing calls seikei mutorī. The formal zashiki, the room kept for guests, sits at the southwest corner, as far from the entrance as the plan allows. The kitchen pushes out to the northeast as a kadoya, a wing set at right angles to the main block. In front of the innermost zashiki is a butsuma, the room that holds the family's Buddhist altar, a placement local accounts describe as characteristic of the wealthier farmhouses of the Chūgoku region.

The roof is not the one the original carpenters raised. The house began under thatch, cut to an irimoya profile with hipped ends above gables. In Meiji 43 (1910) the thatch came off and Sekishū tiles went on over a simple gable, and the frame underneath had to be rebuilt to carry the new load. The carpenters stacked beams four tiers deep. The Agency's own description reaches for the word gōsō, meaning something closer to imposing than merely large.

What to Look at When You Get There

The tiles register first. Sekishū ware, fired along the Iwami coast, takes an iron glaze that reads as a deep red-brown under flat cloud and shifts towards orange when the sun drops. Roofs of this material give the villages of western Shimane their colour, and a house of this size is a good place to see it used at scale rather than in fragments.

Then look up inside. The four tiers of stacked beams are the reason the roof space is worth the climb, and they are a piece of Meiji carpentry rather than Edo, which makes the house a document of two periods instead of one.

The veranda runs along the south front and turns the western corner. Glass fills it now; a local account notes that wooden rain shutters once did the same work, closing the house down at night.

Four registered buildings stand on this plot, not one. Directly behind the main house is the Sedo-no-kura, the rear storehouse, and to the east stands the Shita-no-kura. At the entrance is a small gate of Shōwa 5 (1930), a mere 2.1 metres across the opening, tiled like everything else. Reading the four together, as a working farmstead rather than as separate entries in a database, is the reason to come.

Access is arranged rather than assumed. The Ōnan Town Tourism Association lists the residence as open on prior contact and gives the Ibara Community Centre (0855-95-0301) as the point of enquiry, noting that the house is put to use for town events. Parking is available on site. No railway now serves this part of Shimane: the drive from the Mizuho interchange on the Hamada Expressway takes about thirty minutes, and a highway coach from Hiroshima Station reaches the town in about an hour and forty minutes. Neither the Agency record nor the tourism listing states a photography policy, so raise the question when you arrange the visit.