Sanada Family Residence

A Merchant Compound on the Old Sanyo Road

The Sanada Family Residence (眞田家住宅, Sanada-ke Jūtaku) is a merchant compound on the old Sanyo Road in Higashimachi, Mihara City, Hiroshima Prefecture, where a main house built between 1912 and 1918 and five further buildings, most of them completed in 1928, were listed together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties on 4 February 2021. The first character of the name is an older form of 真, so the family name also appears as 真田.

The Sanada were merchants for generations. In the modern era they dealt in tatami facing mats and medicinal ingredients, and the national Council for Cultural Affairs, recommending the buildings for registration, described the property as a large merchant house representative of the area. Mihara grew up as both a castle town and a port on the Seto Inland Sea, and the Sanyo Road, the main highway linking Kyoto with western Japan, ran straight through it. The Sanada house turns its face to that road.

What you see from the street is a two-storey main house finished in black plaster, and a small roofed gate at the eastern end of the north frontage. Behind them, around a garden, stand a reception wing, a guest house, a tea house and a storehouse. None of those rear buildings can be seen from the road. The six listings fall into two layers: a merchant's public front, and a private world for receiving guests.

The Building Year of 1928

Line up the six Sanada Family Residence buildings by date and one year stands out. The main house is the oldest, from the early Taishō era (1912 to 1918), and the earthen northern half of the storehouse goes back to the same period. The inner reception wing, the guest house, the tea house and the front gate were all built in 1928, and the storehouse was extended that year as well.

In other words, the family used a single building campaign in 1928 to add a full suite of reception buildings behind the street-front house: a single-storey run of formal rooms, a two-storey guest house mixing Western and Japanese interiors, and a six-mat tea house, all placed around one garden. The gate went up the same year and completed the ensemble.

Later changes are also on record. In 1963 the main house was remodelled and the inner reception wing enlarged. In 2002 the main house was worked on again and the front gate was moved. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database does not say why the gate was relocated.

How the Compound Is Laid Out

The Sanada Family Residence plot meets the old Sanyo Road along its north side. The main house fronts the street, with the gate opening toward its eastern end. Inside, according to the national listing, the house follows the townhouse pattern of an earth-floored passage along the west side and raised living rooms to the east, with verandas along the east and south looking onto the garden.

The garden lies south of the main house. To the southeast stands the single-storey inner reception wing, built as two linked blocks running east and west. The two-storey guest house sits south of the main house and west of that wing. A corridor runs north from the reception wing to the tea house, and another runs south to the storehouse, which occupies the southeast corner of the plot.

The upper floor of the guest house has a railed veranda wrapping its south and east sides, and the reception wing links its rooms with verandas on the north and south, so the buildings face one another across the garden. One point does not line up in the sources: the Council's 2020 summary says the storehouse and gate stand in a row facing the Sanyo Road, while the database entry places the storehouse in the southeast corner. We have not been able to check this on site.

Six Separate Listings

The six Sanada Family Residence buildings became Registered Tangible Cultural Properties (Buildings) on the same day, 4 February 2021, under consecutive registration numbers from 34-0284 (the main house) to 34-0289 (the gate). Five were registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country. The gate alone was registered under a different criterion, as a model of design: it is a Yakuimon, and its bracketing, Kaerumata and Osa-ranma transom are the details that earned it that status.

Japan's registration system lists buildings one by one, which is why a single compound ends up with six entries. Five belong to Sanshin Kogyo Co., Ltd.; the database gives no owner for the gate.

Visiting and Getting There

The Sanada Family Residence is private property managed by the owning company, and as of September 2026 we could find no public opening days or booking contact. A visit means looking at the main house and gate from the old Sanyo Road; the reception wing, guest house, tea house and storehouse are not visible from the street. Please stay off the property and treat the lane as the residential street it is.

The nearest station is JR Mihara, served by the Sanyo Shinkansen, the Sanyo Line and the Kure Line. The house lies roughly 500 meters east of the station in a straight line, about a 10-minute walk. The address is 416-1 Higashimachi 1-chome, Mihara City. There is no dedicated parking that we could find, so drivers should use one of the car parks around the station.