Kawanishi City Local Museum

About the Kawanishi City Local Museum

The Kawanishi City Local Museum (川西市郷土館, Kawanishi-shi Kyōdokan) is a municipal museum in Gezaicho, Kawanishi City, Hyogo Prefecture, whose 15 buildings of the Former Hirayasu Family Residence, built in 1918 and 1919, and 3 structures of the Former Hiraga Family Residence are Registered Tangible Cultural Properties of Japan. It opened in November 1988 in the house of the Hirayasu family, who made their living refining copper.

A note on the name: the characters 平安 are read Hirayasu here, as the furigana in the Agency for Cultural Affairs database confirms. They have nothing to do with the Heian era, and the English rendering "Former Heian Residence" that appears in some guides is a misreading. On site the two houses are known as the Kyū Hirayasu-tei and the Kyū Hiraga-tei.

Besides the Japanese-style Hirayasu house and the Western-style Hiraga house, the grounds hold the Musée L'Espoir art museum (1995), the Atelier Hiradori (2010) and the excavated remains of the Hirayasu smelter. The Kawanishi City Local Museum lets you compare two Taisho-era homes, one Japanese and one English in spirit, on the site of the mining industry that paid for the first of them.

The Hirayasu Family and the Tada Mines

The Kawanishi City Local Museum sits in Gezai Yashiki, a smelting quarter that grew up around the Tada silver and copper mines. The ore veins of the Tada mines ran across Kawanishi, Inagawa and Takarazuka and into the Osaka towns of Nose, Toyono, Minoh and Ikeda, and output peaked from the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi into the early Edo period.

The Hirayasu family, in the northern part of Gezai Yashiki, carried on refining copper after the Meiji Restoration. According to Kawanishi City, their Meiji-era smelter stood just north of today's Hiraga house; in the Taisho era they built a modernized works northeast of their own residence and ran it until around 1935. It was the last smelter of the Tada mines to operate.

Excavation and interviews show that the works had a blast furnace, a mabuki refining furnace, a blower house and a chimney. Even with mechanical blowers, the final refining was done in the mabuki furnace, a method used since the Edo period. The site of the Hirayasu smelter is preserved in place within the museum grounds.

How the Former Hirayasu Family Residence Is Laid Out

The Former Hirayasu Family Residence is arranged around an inner courtyard. Four storehouses, the detached annex and the bathhouse ring the courtyard, and along the outer eastern edge a further line of storehouses and barns runs north to south. Kawanishi City describes it as a large estate built in two layers.

The entrance wing stands on the south face of the main house, with the entrance gate beside it to the east. In the southwest, a tile-roofed board fence runs from the left side of the approach to the southwest corner of the reception rooms, while the nagayamon gate, the household's everyday entrance, sits toward the north end of the east side. The storehouses are named for their compass points: Tatsumi (southeast), Inui (northwest), North and West.

The 15 registered structures of the Former Hirayasu Family Residence all date from 1918 to 1919:

• Living quarters: main house (building area 217 m²), entrance wing (41 m²), annex (44 m²), bathhouse (31 m²)
• Gates and walls: entrance gate (a one-bay yakuimon), nagayamon gate (36 m²), roofed wall (48.2 m long)
• Storehouses: North (60 m²), Inui (29 m²), Tatsumi (27 m²), West (22 m²)
• Barns: Great Barn (40 m²), South Barn (22 m²), North Barn (15 m²), West Barn (9.4 m²)

Everything that made the estate work was registered, from the 217 m² main house down to a West Barn of under 10 m². Each building has its own page covering its structure and what to look for.

The Former Hiraga Family Residence

The Former Hiraga Family Residence was built in 1918 by Dr. Hiraga Yoshimi beside the Ina River in the Obe district of Kawanishi. In November 1990 it was moved and rebuilt on the grounds of the Kawanishi City Local Museum.

Hiraga Yoshimi, born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1857, was a chemist and University of Tokyo graduate who went on to hold many posts in Kansai business circles. Kawanishi City notes that he travelled to Europe and America seven times, and the house shows it. The Agency for Cultural Affairs credits the design to Matsumoto Tozo of Obayashi and the construction to Konoike, and describes a single-storey house modelled on the English country house.

Three Hiraga structures are registered: the main house (152 m²), the laboratory building (32 m²) and the gazebo. The laboratory housed the chemist's experiments and connects to the main house at upper level by a stepped bridge. A gazebo, gate, bridge and bust from the original estate were moved here as well.

Registration and Restoration at the Kawanishi City Local Museum

The main houses of the Hirayasu and Hiraga families were entered on the register on December 20, 1996, in the first round of registrations in the year the system began, as numbers 28-0004 and 28-0005. The remaining 14 Hirayasu structures and the Hiraga laboratory followed on May 7, 1997, and the Hiraga gazebo was added on March 29, 2019.

All were registered as structures that serve as a model of design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs calls the Hirayasu main house a fine example of a large Taisho-era residence that keeps traditional methods while changing them at key points. Hyogo Prefecture also lists the Hirayasu house as an important building for its landscape, and the Hiraga house is one of the prefecture's 100 selected modern homes.

The Hirayasu house closed on October 3, 2023 for about a year of seismic strengthening and repairs, carried out by Kongo Gumi, and reopened to visitors on October 12, 2024.

Visiting the Kawanishi City Local Museum

The Kawanishi City Local Museum is open from 10:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with last entry at 4:00 p.m. Since April 1, 2026 it opens Thursday to Sunday and closes Monday to Wednesday, except on national holidays, when it opens. It is also closed from December 28 to January 4.

Admission is 300 yen for visitors over 18 (200 yen in groups of 20 or more) and 150 yen for those 18 and under (100 yen in groups). Preschool children are free, as are elementary and junior high school students who live or study in Hyogo Prefecture, and residents of Kawanishi aged 65 and over pay half (checked October 2026).

By train, change to the Nose Electric Railway at Hankyu Kawanishi-Noseguchi or JR Kawanishi-Ikeda and get off at Yamashita; the museum is about 15 minutes on foot, and the city publishes a photo guide to the walk. By car it is about 10 minutes north of the Kawanishi interchange on the Shin-Meishin Expressway, and there is parking for 13 cars.